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Feb. 2, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:34
Biden Calls Trump A “Sick F***”
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So Joe Biden believes he is going to win the 2024 election based on one simple idea.
Donald Trump is a sick f***.
Okay, this is literally what he says behind closed doors according to Politico.
And the language here is not mine.
The language here is Joe Biden's.
According to Politico, President Biden has a reputation for salty language behind closed doors, but it nearly slipped out in public during his speech at Valley Forge last month to mark the third anniversary of the January 6th insurrection.
Animated and angry, he derided Donald Trump and his followers for drawing glee from political violence.
He apparently came very close to saying, what a sick bleep.
But in private, he does not actually stop short.
The president has described Trump to longtime friends and close aides as a sick f*** who delights in others' misfortunes, according to three people who have heard the president use the profane description.
According to one of the people who has spoken with the president, Biden recently said of Trump that he was a So this apparently is the way that Joe Biden thinks of Donald Trump.
And because of that, Joe Biden simply cannot believe that Donald Trump is actually poised to win the 2024 election.
Now, here's the reality.
By the polling data, Donald Trump is poised to win the 2024 election.
If you just look at the Trump versus Biden polling right now, what you will see is that Donald Trump actually has a lead.
Donald Trump has a lead over Joe Biden.
Every poll, except for one in the last couple months, has Trump up pretty solidly.
The latest poll comes from CNN, and it has Donald Trump up 49-45 over Joe Biden.
If Donald Trump wins the popular vote for the first time since a Republican won the popular vote in 2004, he's going to win the election.
It's that simple.
He came close to winning the election, even losing the popular vote, by 7 million votes.
He is also leading big in states that he lost last time, particularly in states like Georgia.
The latest polling from Georgia has Donald Trump up 8% over Joe Biden.
And Donald Trump is running dead, even in Wisconsin.
Donald Trump is running well ahead, apparently, in Michigan.
Not only that, Joe Biden is failing as a mental force.
He's spent.
He has spent.
And he has begun to buy into the fibs that he's been telling for years, to the point where he just repeats the mad nauseam.
Nobody feels like he's in control of the world situation.
Nobody feels like he's in control of himself.
It's a real problem for him.
So, for example, two days ago, He called up the family of an army specialist who had just been killed by Iranian proxy forces in Jordan.
And in the middle of this call to the parents, he attempted to do this routine that he's been doing for a long time where he demonstrates sympathy, not by actually sympathizing, but by talking about his own experiences, which, by the way, is actually not how you do sympathy.
Typically speaking, I mean, unfortunately, I've been to a lot of Shiva households, right?
People have died and you go and you visit the grieving family members.
And when people are grieving, the last thing they want to hear is about your grief experience.
It's not something they particularly want to hear about because they're in their own grief experience.
In any case, Joe Biden does that routinely, but he doesn't just do that.
He also, when he is talking to the families of service members who've been killed, he lies to them.
He lies to them about his son, Beau.
He's been doing this for years at this point, to the point where it's no longer excusable.
In this particular phone call, which was taped by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he suggests that his son Beau died in Iraq, which of course is not true.
Beau Biden tragically died of brain cancer years after returning from Iraq.
But Joe Biden has been telling this fib for so long that he may believe it at this point.
Here he was.
I know, you know, everybody, I know there's nothing anybody can say or do to ease the pain.
I've been there.
Yes, sir.
We understand.
The parents overcome with emotion when the president reveals how their daughter will be honored.
We're promoting her posthumously to sergeant.
Oh, wow.
That is the best news I've heard today.
Thank you so much.
You don't know how much that means to us.
Well, I tell you what, it means a lot to me.
My son's been here in Iraq until I lost him.
And I, you know, 1%, 1% of all these kids are the ones that take care of 99% of us.
Bye.
you Okay, that story about Bo is not true.
He keeps telling it over and over and over.
And Joe Biden is a prevaricator, and he lies a lot.
But the fact is that it may be that he believes it at this point.
Whatever the symptoms of his mental decline, they are not going to bode well for his re-elect efforts.
Again, when you look at the state-by-state polling, Donald Trump is well ahead in what used to be a swing state of Ohio.
He's up by 11 points in Ohio right now.
He is up, as I say, solidly in Georgia.
He is running dead even according to a new Fox News poll in Wisconsin.
It's hard to see, frankly, how Joe Biden recovers his standing among various groups in the United States.
A new CNN poll shows that Joe Biden's job approval rating is standing at 38%.
38% was 62% disapproving.
He's underwater with everyone.
18 to 34 year olds, he's underwater.
percent disapproving. He's underwater with everyone.
18 to 34 year olds. He's underwater.
He's a 35 percent approval rating among people who are 18 to 34.
Among white voters, he's at 34 percent approval rating.
Even among people of color, 45% approval rating.
These are terrible numbers for Joe Biden.
So his conundrum is, how can he possibly win this election?
Now, his strategy in 2020 was changed by one simple fact, and that is the change in the voting rules.
As I've discussed ad nauseum, the fact is that voter turnout in 2020 was leagues higher, leagues higher than it had been any time in the recent past.
The voter turnout in that election was extraordinary.
You saw a jump in election turnout of at least almost 10%.
It was a 67% voter turnout in 2020.
That was the highest level that the United States had experienced in terms of voter turnout since 1900, basically.
I mean, that's an insane voter turnout.
Why?
Because they changed all the rules.
Because all the rules changed when it came to voter turnout.
Because suddenly, you're gonna vote three months in advance.
And Joe Biden was gonna deploy the entire Democratic Party apparatus to arrive at your door, pick up your ballot, and mail it in for you.
And the entire state apparatus in swing states like Pennsylvania was going to change so that you could vote early and vote by mail.
Again, 60% of Democratic voters in 2020 voted by mail.
Only about 35% or 30% of Republican voters in 2020 voted by mail.
And yet Joe Biden still only squeaked by.
That was a close election.
You can run up the score in places like California and New York because people hate Trump in terms of the popular vote.
But in terms of the actual Electoral College vote, This election in 2020 was decided by an extraordinarily low number of votes.
You're talking about like 12,000 votes in Georgia.
You're talking about maybe 11,000 votes in Arizona.
You're talking about something like 40,000 votes in Wisconsin.
80,000 votes in Pennsylvania.
These are not big numbers.
I mean, by any stretch of the imagination, these are not big numbers.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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So could Donald Trump reverse that trend?
Not only could he, it seems like he probably will.
And the reason I say that is because Joe Biden is not going to duplicate the voter turnout numbers of 2020.
And let's just be clear about this.
Presidents win narrow elections and then lose votes between election One and election two tend not to win re-election.
The only president who has lost votes in the modern era from his original election to his re-elect effort is Barack Obama and still won.
That's the only one.
If you lose votes between your first election and your second election, typically you lose.
And that is probably what's going to happen with Joe Biden given the trends.
That is particularly true because Joe Biden has decided that he is basically going to abandon blue-collar white voters.
The Democratic Party has been taken over since 2012 by this vision, and it's defined both parties, actually.
We've talked about it a lot on the show.
There's a vision that was promoted by the media and by the Obama campaign in 2012, and that vision was an everlasting Democratic majority forever, and it was going to be demographically based.
The idea was there was a rising minority coalition that would eventually become a demographic majority in the United States, and they would never lose another election.
You could abandon white voters increasingly, and you could build a coalition on the basis of minority voters and college-educated white ladies.
That was the coalition that Barack Obama rode to victory in 2012 despite being a deeply unpopular president at the time.
But that relies on really heavy turnout from groups that very often do not turn out at those rates.
Everybody read 2012 as a new trend line year.
Instead, it turns out that 2012 is exceptional in terms of voter turnout for a wide variety of groups because Barack Obama was a singular political character.
But that can't be duplicated by Hillary Clinton.
Or by Joe Biden.
Again, the only reason Joe Biden won in 2020 is because all the rules of voting changed and people, marginal voters, low propensity voters, people who would not show up to the polling place if it were a normal election, simply filled out their ballots and were sending it in because of COVID.
That's all that happened in 2020.
I'm just going to go through some of the stats here because it demonstrates what exactly Joe Biden is hoping for, why he's unlikely to achieve it, and also it explains his current political strategy, which is not to swivel back toward the middle to try and win those White voters in the suburbs to win white voters in rural areas.
That was supposed to be Joe Biden's pitch, by the way, is that he was supposed to have a rural white appeal that other candidates in the Democratic Party simply did not have.
And instead, he seems to be duplicating the 2012 Obama campaign.
But he's not Barack Obama, and he's not going to get the changes in rules they got in 2020.
So he seems to be increasingly trying to cater to, again, this new vision of what the Democratic Party base should be.
Right now, the important thing to understand is that non-white voters represent about 40% of all Democratic voters.
That's a huge number.
40% of all Democratic voters.
Okay, now, the only reason that matters is because if the priority for the Democratic Party is get that group of voters to turn out at very high rates, that means that you're going to have to pander, presumably, to that group of voters.
And that group of voters tends to have views on many issues that are left of where Joe Biden traditionally has been.
The same thing happens if you shoot the youth vote.
49% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters are under the age of 50, compared with just 42% of Republicans.
Furthermore, 19% of Democratic voters are under the age of 30, compared with 13% of Republicans.
So the areas where Democrats really outpoll Republicans, minority voters, and young people.
The problem for Democrats is that those two groups of voters, historically speaking, have incredibly variable rates of turnout.
So the white turnout rate, in terms of voter turnout, tends not to vacillate all that much.
It tends to be fairly stable.
But, depending on who the candidate is, for these various groups, it can wildly shift.
So, for example, here's black voter turnout in the United States by year, since 2000.
In 2000, there was 53% black voter turnout.
In 2004, it was 56%.
In 2008, it was a whopping 61%.
black voter turnout. In 2004 it was 56%. In 2008 it was a whopping 61%. And in 2012, that was the
year that Barack Obama was able to swing an election he probably should have lost. It was 62%.
And that was particularly located in swing states like Ohio.
Barack Obama won Ohio because of the heavy black voter turnout in Ohio.
Like, disproportionate to share of the populace.
Then, something happened.
In 2016, the number reverted back toward historical trends.
The 56% of black voters who voted in 2016 looked a lot like the 56% of black voters who voted in 2004.
Voter turnout went down.
Hillary Clinton probably lost the election because of that.
And so, in 2020, there's a heavy effort to get out the black vote.
But the good news was that it wasn't that much effort to get out votes in 2020.
It was actually quite easy to get out votes in 2020.
By the way, that also explains why the Democratic Party was pandering so hard to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Because the idea was if you pander really hard to BLM, then they will act as a voter turnout machine in favor of Joe Biden.
That's why everybody went soft on the riots in the middle of the summer in 2020 in the Democratic Party.
And again, voter turnout did rise again.
59% black voter turnout in 2020, which looks more like the Barack Obama 61% voter turnout for black Americans in 2008 than it does like the 2016 numbers for Hillary Clinton.
Now, here is the question.
Do you think black voters are going to turn out the way that they did in 2020 for Joe Biden in 2024?
Doesn't look like that, does it?
His black voter turnout number, I mean, right now among people of color, Joe Biden is polling at 45%.
These are not good numbers for Joe Biden.
That is his job approval rating.
And not only that, there's no personal allegiance in any way, shape or form from people of color in the United States toward old white man Joe Biden.
That is not a thing.
So is that voter turnout number likely to go down or is it likely to go up?
The answer is, it's very likely to go down in the 2024 election.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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And that's not the only problem for Joe Biden.
The youth vote is something that he heavily counted on, like really heavily counted on in 2020.
Now the youth vote in the United States, people 18 to 29, Those votes really heavily vacillate based on election cycle.
So let's go historically here.
What the youth voter turnout rates are historically in the United States 18 to 29.
Every election cycle you hear the youth are finally going to turn out.
This is the year where we mobilize the youths and the youths are going to swing us to victory.
Rock the vote and all of this kind of nonsense.
Okay, so here is the youth voter turnout by year.
In 2000, 40% of people aged 18 to 29 voted who were eligible to vote.
2004, that number jumped to 49%.
It was 51% in 2008, right, for Barack Obama, which was the year that every young person voted because man, oh man, it was transformative and all this stuff.
That dropped to 45% in 2012, which is one of the reasons why Barack Obama won fewer absolute votes in 2012 than he did in 2008.
In 2016, it went down even from there.
It was back down to 44%.
And so, young voters were not turning out for Barack Obama, too, and they didn't turn out for Hillary Clinton.
But, the voter turnout rate for young voters in the 2020 election was 55%.
55%.
That is a massive spike.
A spike from 44% of young eligible voters in 2016 to 55% of young eligible voters in 2020.
in 2016 to 55% of young eligible voters in 2020.
Now, the last time any, the last time young voters turned out that way
was, wait for it, 1972.
In 1972, 55% of young voters turned out.
They turned out for George McGovern who promptly lost 49 states to Richard Nixon.
So, young voters aren't obviously where the mentality of most Americans is, right?
The mentality of most Americans is not the same as mentality of young voters.
But Joe Biden is looking at these stats and he realizes the things he needs.
Heavy minority turnout, heavy youth turnout.
Is he going to be able to duplicate anything like 2020?
He's thinking not.
But his team, instead of saying, okay, well, we need to like scrap the strategy, we need to blow up the strategy, we need to look at the numbers, and we need to instead focus on winning suburban white ladies, right, which is what they actually need to do, focus on winning suburban white women, blue-collar workers in Rust Belt states.
That's where Joe Biden really should be putting his effort, right?
He should right now stop looking at the Barack Obama 2012 model, and he should start looking at the Bill Clinton 1992-1996 model.
Which is why you would imagine, if they're smart, later in the summer what you'll see from the Democratic Party is they're going to shift toward industrial policy, welfare policy, and abortion.
And that'll be the mainstay of the campaign if they get wise.
If they're not wise, then Joe Biden is going to continue to pander to the most left-wing parts of his base.
Because he's looking at these numbers the same as you and I are looking at them right now.
And he's seeing lower voter turnout among young minorities, lower Voter turnout among youth and minorities, rather.
He's he's seeing that.
And so what can he do?
Well, he can sure pander.
He can sure pander.
And that is why there's all of this heartburn over, for example, Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza.
It's why the Democratic Party seems signaling unable to sound off on the on the southern border, despite the fact that that is a burgeoning, huge problem, not burgeoning, a real, real time, huge problem for the United States.
Now the problem for Joe Biden, of course, is that if you pander to your left-wing base, you're also alienating that center that you need.
So Joe Biden is really hoping that the only way that he can hold that coalition together is just to hate Trump.
Trump's a jerk, Trump's a... This is why, as I've said, Donald Trump's election strategy is very simple.
He should go to the basement and he should stay there.
Joe Biden has an unwieldy coalition that is very unlikely to stick together.
Joe Biden is not going to get the levels of voter turnout that he got in 2020, absent COVID, absent BLM, absent the ability to go after the sitting president, Donald Trump.
Donald Trump should go to the basement and he should stay there.
And he will win if he does those things.
Because the only thing in the end that Joe Biden thinks he can win on really is not even the policy.
He thinks we can hold together this coalition by hook or by crook with gum and sticky tape.
If he can do that, And if he can just point at Trump and call him a sick f**k, then that'll win him the election.
That is a difficult proposition.
Joe Biden is not in a winning position in this election cycle.
Now the problem for the Democratic Party is that neither would anyone else be.
Because if Joe Biden were to be replaced on the ticket, the question would be, by whom?
And why wouldn't that person face the exact same electoral challenges as Joe Biden is currently facing?
If you put Kamala Harris in place, she's way worse.
She's not going to get heavier black voters turnout.
And not only that, she's gonna alienate everybody.
She has super high unfavorable ratings.
If it were somebody like Gavin Newsom, they have a serious problem.
Michelle Obama apparently doesn't want it.
So, they're stuck with Biden.
And again, as his presidency gets worse, and as the symptoms of that presidency become worse, he's gonna actually, weirdly enough, be forced more and more to the radical left in the hope, in the desperate hope that he can get the voter turnout on his side up, that he can get people Who are 40% propensity to vote to 50% propensity to vote by pandering to them.
Which is why, again, we've been saying for a long time, where is the political genius in not closing the border?
Just close the border.
There's more on this in just one second.
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If Joe Biden closed the border, the issue would be off the table for Donald Trump.
But Joe Biden can do it.
And that's a real problem because people are seeing the tape.
For example, there is a tape that has now emerged of an illegal immigrant.
This is one of the illegal immigrants who attacked a police officer.
His name is Johan Boada and he was released from police custody after assaulting a police officer.
And here's video of this person as he smirks at reporters leaving the Midtown South Precinct.
Here's what it looked like.
There he is flipping off the uh...
I don't speak English.
Walking.
Smiling.
Español?
I don't understand what you're saying.
You speak English?
No.
You speak Spanish?
Spanish.
You speak Spanish?
No.
You speak Spanish?
No.
You speak Spanish?
No.
You speak Spanish?
No.
You speak Spanish?
No.
You speak Spanish?
No.
And there he is, flipping off the media.
Okay, so, even Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, is looking at this and saying, we need deportation of criminal migrants, right?
I mean, it's pretty simple stuff.
Who exactly is against deporting illegal immigrants who are not here legally and who are committing crimes?
Here's Eric Adams, the mayor of New York.
And those migrants who are here because they want to be part of the American dream, we say yes to that.
But those who are breaking our laws, we need to re-examine the laws that don't allow us to deport them because they're doing violent acts.
We cannot create an atmosphere where you're going to bring violence in our city.
But the overwhelming number of migrants and asylum seekers are waiting to have work authorization or their determination, and we need to be clear on that.
Okay, so even Democrats are starting to say this is too much.
Okay, but the Democratic Party as a whole cannot abandon what they think is the minority voting base and the youth voting base, which presumably is why there was a vote yesterday in Congress to deport illegal immigrants who commit DUI.
This seems like a pretty easy one.
You're here illegally, and then you're driving drunk.
Deporting just seems like a pretty easy solution.
Well, the measure passed.
It passed 274 to 150.
All 150 votes against deporting illegal immigrants with a DUI were Democrat.
All of them.
In fact, that represents a majority of the Democratic caucus.
Only 59 Democrats joined Republicans in voting to deport illegal immigrants who were caught DUI.
The bill would make people charged with the DUI and are in the U.S.
illegally automatically eligible for deportation and permanently inadmissible.
As Fox News reports, just last month, an undocumented migrant from El Salvador who had been deported four separate times was accused of killing a mom and a son in a car crash that police said involved alcohol.
So what exactly is the democratic logic here?
Why exactly wouldn't They vote to deport people who commit DUIs and are here illegally?
Why don't we let the chair of the Progressive Democratic Caucus, Progressive Congressional Caucus in the Democratic Caucus, Pramila Jayapal, why don't we let her explain?
But my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have made it clear that they're not interested in sensible solutions, just in sensationalism.
This bill is another example of that.
And I hope my colleagues will stop referring to people as illegals.
People are human beings.
They have different statuses.
Some are undocumented.
If you want to say some are illegal, but let's not call human beings illegal.
Tired of that language.
I urge my colleagues to reject this bill and I yield back the balance of my time.
OK, this is what the Democratic Party is now pandering to, which is incredible.
I mean, that's just such a signal failure by them.
They can even say we want more legal immigration into the country.
But saying you don't want to deport people with DUIs, that is political malpractice.
And yet a majority of the Democrats in the House voted against a bill to deport people who are here illegally and have a DUI.
That's insane.
That's totally insane.
By the way, this is also the reason why Republicans are having trouble getting on board with any bill that allows more executive discretion with regard to the border.
They don't want to be held responsible for Joe Biden interpreting that bill in the most absurd possible way to keep that border open.
There's a lot of infighting in the Republican caucus right now about a border bill that's going to be brought up for a test vote apparently today.
It's unclear what exactly is in the bill, and we keep hearing from different Republicans in Congress that you can't rip on the bill until you know what's in it.
Well, how about you can't ask me to support the bill until I know what's in it?
Because it seems to me that the status quo, which is that Joe Biden should close the border given the authority he currently has, is perfectly sufficient for Joe Biden to close the border.
The executive branch refusing to do its job is not going to be cured by the legislative branch.
Passing more authority for the president so that he cannot do his job.
That's not going to be the cure.
So unless the legislative branch is forcing the executive branch to actually enforce the law, a new bill is not necessarily going to change anything.
So we'll have to see what exactly is in that bill.
But the bottom line here is that Joe Biden is pandering because Joe Biden feels he needs to pander in order to win reelection.
And the same thing is happening with regard to the Middle East.
So two separate stories yesterday that are both insane.
So one story is that Joe Biden desperately, desperately wants to make sure that there is not a broader war in the Middle East while he is running.
Joe Biden is willing to appease Iran up to the neck so long as Iran doesn't escalate into something resembling more full-scale war.
He's basically now playing the same game that Barack Obama, in serious re-elect trouble in 2012, played with Dmitry Medvedev, who was then the stand-in president for Vladimir Putin in Russia.
You'll recall that Barack Obama sat with Medvedev, and he said, I'll have much more flexibility after the election, which was basically him begging Medvedev, tell Putin not to do anything aggressive until after the election.
And after the election, if he does something aggressive, I'll probably cave to him.
Which, by the way, is precisely what happened.
You'll recall that Barack Obama was reelected in 2012, he was inaugurated in 2013, and in 2014, Russia invaded Crimea and the Donbass.
In Ukraine.
And took it.
And Barack Obama did basically nothing.
And you'll remember that in 2015, Barack Obama drew a red line in Syria and then promptly backed off the red line and handed Syria as essentially a protectorate of Russia.
So it worked out beautifully for everyone.
Barack Obama wins re-election, Russia gets exactly what it wants.
Well, the same thing is now happening with Iran.
So according to Politico, intelligence officials have calculated that Tehran does not have full control over its proxy groups in the Middle East, including those responsible for attacking and killing U.S.
troops in recent weeks, according to two U.S.
officials familiar with the matter.
So let's just get this straight.
We know that Iran is giving the weaponry and the advisory council and members of the IRGC are working hand-in-glove with Hezbollah, Hamas, various groups like the Quds Force, In Iraq and Syria, the Houthis in Yemen, the Iranians are coordinating with all of them.
The Iranians are giving them their weaponry.
The Iranians are giving them their money.
But the intelligence officials are trying to create, they're trying to tunnel a way out of this terrible bind that Biden has put himself in, where his appeasement-oriented Middle Eastern policy has emboldened the Iranians to push on every single front.
So Joe Biden doesn't actually want to take harsh action against the Iranians that would shut them up because he's afraid That then that will maybe spin into something broader or he's afraid mostly that his own base is going to get mad at him.
It really isn't.
He's not.
Joe Biden is not afraid of a full scale war with Iran because Iran is not going to go to full scale war with the United States unless they wish to live underground.
And I mean by that, not live underground, be dead.
They don't want that war.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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What Joe Biden really is seeking to avoid is blowback from his own party, from the radicals in his own party.
Joe Biden is afraid of losing Michigan.
It's that simple.
He's afraid of losing Michigan.
There are a lot of Muslim voters in Michigan.
Muslim voters in Michigan are very unified in their hatred for Israel by polling data.
Muslims in Michigan are very much in favor of an appeasement-oriented, by polling data, an appeasement-oriented policy towards states like Iran in the Middle East.
And therefore, Joe Biden is trying to find a way to appease.
So now, he's basically weaponizing his intel officials to say that Iran is not responsible for things that Iran is clearly responsible for.
Basically, Joe Biden's White House is now a PR agency for Iran.
Again, that's not any sort of shock.
Barack Obama did the same thing.
After he signed the Iran nuclear deal, then it became incumbent on the United States to pretend that that was actually a good deal.
And so the Obama administration started to make noise about how Iran was now moderate.
Iran was now good, even as they pursued spreading terror all over the region.
Well, now Joe Biden is in the same bind.
Well, Iran spreads terror over the region.
Well, Iran is shutting down shipping in the Red Sea.
Well, Iran is incentivizing Houthi attacks on shipping, and Hezbollah attacks on the north of Israel, and Hamas rocket attacks, attacks on American troops in Jordan.
Well, Iran is doing all of that.
Joe Biden's intel officials are like, well, Iran, do they have anything?
I don't know.
Maybe Iran doesn't have anything to do with this.
Maybe it's all a big coinkydink.
Who knows?
Yeah, probably they're not in control.
That is a way for Joe Biden to escape having to take the harsh action that would be necessary to protect American lives.
If you don't want forward operating bases for American troops in Jordan, make the case.
But if you're going to leave them there and then American soldiers die, you do not get to claim that the power behind the killing was not actually the power behind the killing as a way of cowarding out, which is what Joe Biden is doing right now.
According to Politico, the Quds Force, an elite branch of the IRGC, is responsible for sending weapons and military advisors, as well as intelligence, to support militias in Iraq and Syria, as well as the Houthis in Yemen.
The groups have varying ambitions and agendas, which sometimes overlap, but Tehran does not appear to have complete authority over their operational decision making.
While the disclosure means it might be particularly hard to predict what actions the groups will take, it could lower the chances of the U.S.
getting pulled into a direct confrontation with Iran.
Again, this is their way of escaping.
So we're just going to pretend that the thing isn't happening.
We're going to pretend that Iran isn't responsible for all of this so as to avoid escalation with Iran because Joe Biden does not want to alienate Muslim voters in Michigan.
Again, that is what he is doing.
How do we know that's what he's doing?
Because that's what today is all about.
So he is visiting Michigan today.
He visited Michigan on Thursday.
He met with members of the UAW.
Top Michigan Democrats have pressed Biden for months to spend more time campaigning in their state, according to the Washington Post, but officials have been worried about his visit being overshadowed or interrupted by demonstrators.
So, Biden went to Michigan.
He went to Michigan, he met with the UAW.
He did not meet with Arab-American voters, but don't worry, he's gonna be sending his surrogates to say the quiet part out loud.
According to Corinne Jean-Pierre, the White House Press Secretary, she told reporters on Thursday, senior Biden officials will travel to Michigan this month, quote, to hear directly from community leaders on a range of issues that are important to them and their families, including the conflict of Israel and Gaza.
Last week, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Biden's campaign manager, traveled to Michigan, where she planned to meet with Arab-American elected officials and community leaders.
Some refused to meet with her.
Again, Biden is trying to reach out specifically to Michigan Democrats because he is worried that he is going to lose Michigan and then lose the election.
Entire article in Politico about this.
President Joe Biden's attempt to lock down many of the young climate-minded voters who supported him in the last election is running aground over the war between Israel and Hamas.
Biden promised to be the climate president when he won the White House four years ago, but that message is in danger of being drowned out as many of those youthful environmentalists voice their frustration with Biden's refusal to demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
So again, this all comes... So you would say, as a normal person watching politics, okay, who cares?
Young people don't turn out to vote all that much anyway.
Why don't you just redirect your campaign energy toward more fertile grounds?
But the answer is, Joe Biden can't.
He's too unpopular.
And so he now has to cater to all the crazies.
That is the reason why he has been saying things like, I understand your passion while you're shouting anti-Semitic slogans at me.
I get it.
That's why he is doing that.
Not only that, He and his team have been fairly overtly reaching out to various groups in Michigan that are connected directly with pro-Hamas forces.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, Chuck Ross reporting, the Biden campaign, in a bid to shore up the president's waning support among the Arab Muslim voters, dispatched campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, last week to meet with an Arab American activist who has praised Hamas and refers to the president as, quote, genocide Joe.
Rodriguez met Friday with Arab-American news publisher Osama Siblani in Dearborn, Michigan.
Siblani, who carries significant influence in Michigan's Arab community, has an extensive history of praising terrorist groups.
In 2022, he urged Arabs at a rally with Rashida Tlaib to fight Israel with, quote, stones and guns and praise the fedayeen.
Those would be Islamic terrorists.
He has referred to Hamas and Hezbollah as freedom fighters.
The outreach comes as Siblani and other activists have called to boycott the Biden-Harris ticket over the administration's opposition to a ceasefire in the Hamas war.
Sablani told the AP his meeting with Rodriguez went very well.
And not a big shock right there because again, Joe Biden is trying now to cater specifically to this radical voting base, which by catering to the radical voting base, by the way, you're making conflict and death in the Middle East significantly more likely.
If you shape American foreign policy based on the needs of radical Muslim voters in Michigan who don't like you because you won't stop Israel from defending itself?
That's likely to make for some pretty bad policy.
One of those bad policies we'll discuss in just one second.
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Okay, meanwhile.
Alrighty, well as we've been talking about Joe Biden's policy across the Middle East, absolute garbage.
It's what's facilitated all of this from October 7th and beyond.
Well now, in an attempt to demonstrate that he is a both sides kind of guy, he's unleashed an executive order that is supposedly targeting violent settler extremists.
Okay, so let's be clear.
If you commit a criminal act against Palestinians in the West Bank, say you beat up a Palestinian in the West Bank, you will be arrested by the Israeli military.
That is under Israeli military governance.
If you burn down places in the West Bank, and you're a Jew, you will be arrested by the Israeli military governance.
There is, in fact, a legal structure for you in that particular area.
But what the Biden administration has been trying to do ever since October 7th is try to establish a false moral equivalence between Israeli settlers, meaning people who live east of the so-called Green Line in Judea and Samaria, the historic heartland of what used to be the Kingdom of Israel.
And they're trying to establish a basic equivalence between those people and terrorists in the West Bank and terrorists in the Gaza Strip.
Many of the statistics that you are seeing about supposed settler violence are falsified or not true.
Not only that, what the Biden administration is doing right here is making sure, in an executive order, that there is a very fuzzy line between actual criminal activity, which everyone should oppose, and Israeli state policy, which includes allowing people to, for example, build an additional bathroom in a frat.
Now, the Biden administration has not taken a formal position on what exactly Israel should legally be allowed to build on in areas that Israel currently has military presence in.
There's never been any sort of agreement between Israel and the Palestinians on which parts of the territory in Judea and Samaria are supposed to be left for a Palestinian state that has never been finalized.
It was separated under the Oslo Accords into areas A, B, and C. Areas A were given over to the Palestinian Authority to govern.
That would be like Jenin, Nablus, many of the big Arab cities.
Area B was supposed to be mixed security control and Area C was supposed to be sort of for further discussion.
But larger parts of Area C, because there were for further discussion, have been areas of major Jewish settlement.
About 600,000 Jews who live in Judea and Samaria.
Well, Joe Biden is attempting to now effectively suggest moral equivalence between settlers writ large.
That's what he is doing with this executive order.
And he is opening the door to the most radical members of his coalition to essentially set up a boycott of Israel over disputed territories.
And these are disputed territories.
Historically speaking, many centers of Jewish settlement have been in these areas prior to the existence of the state of Israel.
The entire Gush Etzion region, for example, would be a good example.
And then it was obliterated during the 48 war by the Arab armies.
And then post 67, again, a lot of those areas have been built back up by Jewish areas.
In any case, Biden signed an executive order on Thursday declaring a national emergency.
Not sure why it's a national emergency, exactly.
Allowing him to implement new measures to combat settler violence, including sanctions concurrently announced against four Israeli extremists who carried out acts of violence in the West Bank.
This is according to the Times of Israel.
Biden said in the order of the situation in the West Bank, in particular, high levels of extremist settler violence, forced displacement of people in villages and property destruction has reached intolerable levels and constitutes a serious threat to peace, security and stability.
So basically, this is Joe Biden saying that when terrorists attack Jews, it's because there are some crazy settlers.
And we're talking about like a small number of people who commit crimes and are then arrested and go to Israeli jail.
That is what he is saying.
Again, it is important to note here that an extraordinary level of violence exists against settlers in this area by Palestinians.
A huge number of killings have happened over the past three years in these areas.
People driving on highways and Palestinian Arab terrorists just shooting them, just murdering them.
That sort of thing happens, unfortunately, fairly regularly.
In fact, there are signs off the highway.
If you go to Judea and Samaria, there are signs off the highway, big red signs, and they say, if you are a Jew, or if you hold an Israeli passport, and you drive into these areas, we cannot protect you.
You may be killed.
If you're a Palestinian, and you drive to, like, the junction in Gush Etzion, you're fine.
You go for a cup of coffee.
If you're a Jew, and you essentially, you make a mistake, and you drive into the wrong areas of the West Bank, you're dead.
It's just that simple.
But that, of course, is not the view of Joe Biden, who again brings everything back to the centrality of Israeli policy.
This is one of the great lies that you see on both the far left and on the far right when it comes to foreign policy for any Western state, and that is no one has agency except for the Western state.
It's stupid.
No one has their own interests.
Nobody has their own priorities.
It's all just reaction to Western activity.
So when there's a terrorist attack against Jews on the border of Gaza, which again is not the West Bank.
When that happens, that's probably because Israel did something.
In the same way that everything, when it comes to the United States, for both the far left and the far right isolationists, is blowback.
Everything is blowback all the time.
Or, alternatively, Palestinians, 75% of Palestinians, in the West Bank, believe that Israel should be obliterated.
80% approve of the October 7th attacks.
And so what Joe Biden is doing here, again, is the predicate to the possibility of much larger action against Israeli ability to live in historic Jewish land.
And that is, in fact, historic Jewish land.
Trying to pretend that areas mentioned in the Bible are somehow historic Palestinian land is very, very weird.
In any case, the sort of message here is pretty clear.
Israeli officials had already told the Times of Israel last month the security echelon had taken a number of steps to clamp down on the phenomenon of individual settlers committing violence.
One of the things that you've also seen is the Israeli army will clear what is effectively like a tent village.
And then that will be declared settler violence.
The Ten Village doesn't have a legal right to be there.
And so much of this could be dispelled by simply one drive on Route 60 through Israel, but nobody bothers to do that if you're in the media, so you literally don't know what the hell you're talking about.
But that's effectively what is happening right here.
Joe Biden, this is all a ploy to win votes in Michigan.
That's all this is.
And that, again, is because Joe Biden is in a seriously weak position.
Now, Joe Biden is hoping that he's going to be able to recover And that is going to come on the back of new economic reports.
So, the latest economic reports are now out.
And there was a jobs blowout in January, which is good.
Obviously, good for the country.
Nonfarm payrolls expanded by $353,000 for the month.
That is about double what the Dow Jones estimate was going to be.
The unemployment rate remains at 3.7%, which is near historic lows.
Job growth was widespread in January, led by professional and business services with 74,000.
Again, that is based on perception of inflation basically being curbed at this point.
According to George Matteo, chief investment officer at Key Private Bank, he says, make no mistake, it was a blowout jobs report.
It will vindicate the recent posturing by the Fed, which effectively ruled out an interest rate cut in March.
Moreover, strong job gains combined with faster than expected wage gains may suggest an additional delay in rate cuts for 2024.
So if the economy holds up, Then, presumably, the Federal Reserve is not going to rush to cut rates, which might reinvigorate inflation.
The question for the Fed is going to be, when do they start cutting rates again?
So a lot of the speculation has been that they're going to cut rates directly before the election.
In an attempt to jog the economy, to boost Biden's re-elect, they're going to do that.
Obviously, if job growth continues to move at this pace, then they're not going to have to do any of that.
And I am still skeptical of the state of the American economy.
I still think that there's another shoe that's going to have to drop here.
You might just argue that basically prices and wages have now readjusted to the new normal.
That inflation meant there was more money in the economy.
The inflation boosted the prices, but people were still spending, and so that boosts the wage growth eventually, and eventually it reaches a new equilibrium.
You can make that case, presumably.
There's still massive unsustainable debt packages that are going to come due for the United States.
So as I've said before, I've been saying this actually for several years, I don't actually think that what you're going to see in the United States is like a deep, long-lasting depression.
I think what you're going to see is a long-lasting economic stagnation into the future as we sort of reach that new normal of wages and prices.
Instead, the regulatory impact of what Joe Biden has been doing in a wide variety of industries is going to come home.
And what you're going to see is lower growth rates, basically Obama-level growth rates, probably for the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile, the federal government continues to just spend money out the wazoo.
So there was a bipartisan bill that got passed over the course of the last week that most people are ignoring.
It's just, you know, like another $78 billion.
Who cares?
Just throwing money out there.
Why the hell not?
Good piece by Kimberly Strassel over at the Wall Street Journal talking about it.
She's proving again that Congress is incapable of anything beyond redistributing other people's money.
357 representatives passed another $78 billion spending bill.
Don't go looking for reform or spending discipline or any of the usual GOP catchwords in this blob.
The beating heart of Wednesday's package is two longtime Democratic priorities.
Increasing the size of the child tax credit and its availability to parents who don't even pay income tax.
So basically, this would be a redistribution of wealth to largely single moms.
would kind of be the idea.
Democrats built this Trojan horse in 1997 when Bill Clinton won a $500 child tax credit.
Their goal since then has been to increase its side and expand eligibility,
making it the basis for a future universal basic income.
Republicans went from understanding the perfidy of government handouts
to hoping they catch a bit of credit for said income redistribution.
That is the basic idea here.
And again, that's not totally wrong.
I mean, the fact is that the child tax credit, if you send money to people, people have more money.
On the other hand, if you disincentivize work, you are not actually allowing people to rise from poverty because what you actually require to rise from poverty in a permanent way is not dependency on government.
What you actually require is an income trajectory.
There have been a bunch of studies about the child tax credit.
Many of them conflict with one another.
There is one estimate from the University of Chicago, reported by the Cato Institute, that takes behavioral effects into account, meaning people dropping out of the workforce because the child tax credit is available or working fewer hours or whatever.
What they found is that a larger child tax credit without income requirements would lead 1.5 million workers to stop working.
83% of those would be the sole owner in the household.
Which again, those would be single moms.
And that effect of expanding the CTC would reduce overall child poverty by 22% and would not reduce deep poverty 50% of the poverty line.
That same study estimated that any reductions in poverty from a larger child tax credit targeted at families without market income would come at a fiscal cost almost double that of other stamps like food stamps.
So again, one of those things that looks good on paper but isn't particularly useful in practice.
Alrighty folks, coming up, we are going to be talking about an attempt to censure Representative Ilhan Omar, who, I mean, I gotta say, she's been saying a lot of stuff recently about how she wants to serve Somalia, which is a strange thing.
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