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Feb. 29, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
53:53
THE DIRTY SECRET: Trump Is The 2024 Moderate
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So before we get to the big news of the day, I wanted to give you a quick update on the story that we reported earlier this week about DEI in medicine and surgery and many of the tapes that we showed you on this show with regard to Duke Medical School and people working at Duke talking about how diversity, equity, and inclusion should be top priorities as opposed to, you know, the merit of particular surgeons.
Well, Duke still has not responded to any of this.
We have a still-awaiting comment from the Duke Medical School Dean.
We do know that some of the tapes were then removed, that some of the tapes that were up and had been put up, presumably by an associated student group, that those tapes were taken down.
But we have not heard anything, after many requests for comment, from the leadership of Duke.
Members of Congress are calling for an investigation into everything that's happening at these medical schools, what's happening with regard to surgery.
And we know this is just the tip of the iceberg, by the way.
The prevalence of diversity, equity, and inclusion in every aspect of American life, including the most critical aspects, where the only thing you care about As you know, the competence of the person as opposed to their life experiences or the color of their skin.
We know that we've uncovered just the tip of the iceberg.
So, we now have a tip line.
If you have something we should look into, please send it our way ASAP.
Put my name in the subject line.
It'll get to my team immediately.
Tips.DailyWire.com.
We'll get our investigative team on that immediately.
Tips.DailyWire.com.
Okay, now on to the big news of the day.
So, the big news of the day is that Mitch McConnell has announced To serve Kentucky in the Senate has been the honor of my life.
To lead my Republican colleagues has been the highest privilege.
before the election. McConnell announced his decision in the well of the Senate,
and here's what he had to say.
To serve Kentucky in the Senate has been the honor of my life.
To lead my Republican colleagues has been the highest privilege.
But one of life's most underappreciated talents is to know when it's time to move on to life's next chapter.
So I stand before you today, Mr. President, and my colleagues to say this will be my last term as Republican leader of the Senate.
Okay, so the question, of course, is who replaces him, but the blowback on this has been kind of extraordinary on the right.
People who are shouting about the evils of Mitch McConnell.
Now, Mitch McConnell is one of the most effective Machiavellian political operators of my lifetime.
I don't like a lot of the things that he passed, but to pretend that Mitch McConnell was not an effective operator is just false.
The reason that there is a 6-3 Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court of the United States is Mitch McConnell.
It's not Donald Trump.
It's Mitch McConnell.
Because Mitch McConnell is the person who actively said, we will not allow Merrick Garland to be appointed to the court.
And then, of course, Trump got elected.
This isn't to deprive Trump of all the credit.
Trump gets a lot of the credit.
But it was Mitch McConnell who made the decision that he was going to hold open that seat until after the election.
And it was Mitch McConnell who made the decision that he was going to hold Democrats' feet to the fire to their own rules.
It was Democrats who in 2013 decided that they were going to use the nuclear option to ram through Barack Obama's judicial nominees.
And it was Mitch McConnell warning them in 2013, if you do this, it'll come right back around and it'll hit you.
He was right.
Here's a younger Mitch McConnell, 2013.
The majority leader promised.
He promised.
Over.
And over again, that he wouldn't break the rules of the Senate in order to change them.
If you want to play games, set yet another precedent that you'll no doubt come to regret.
Say to my friends on the other side of the aisle, you'll regret this, and you may regret it a lot sooner than you think.
Hey, so Mitch McConnell was incredibly competent at his job.
And again, this does go to what jobs are in the Senate, what they are in the House.
There has been this mistaken assumption that the Senate Majority Leader or the House Speaker is the person who sets the Republican agenda.
That that person is a spokesperson for conservatism and that if they don't hold true to conservative principle in every single thing that they do without compromise, then they are somehow betraying the cause.
That is not the job of the House Speaker or the Senate Majority Leader.
That is generally the job of a president.
Maybe the job of the head of the RNC, but the point of the House Majority Leader or the House Speaker or the Senate Majority Leader, anybody who's in a position to actually count votes, they actually have several jobs.
So Mitch McConnell's job that he was very competent at was actually trying to pick people running for the Senate because he controlled how monies were dispersed to various senatorial candidates.
And Mitch McConnell, it turns out, was much better at it than Donald Trump was.
I mean, just as a point of fact, Mitch McConnell led Republicans to a very, very sizable Senate majority.
And over the last couple of election cycles, selection of primary candidates that went against what Mitch McConnell was recommending did not end well for Republicans.
That was job one of the Senate Majority Leader.
Job two of the Senate Majority Leader is to raise a lot of money, which Mitch McConnell did.
And job three, which is really job one, is to decide the rules and procedures by which legislation moves through the Senate and pick exactly how that legislation gets made.
That means counting votes.
It means backscratching.
It means ugly politics.
Underside.
The seamy side of politics.
The stuff that nobody likes and nobody wants to see.
If you are a popular Senate Majority Leader, it is likely because you are bad at the job.
I mean with the general public.
Because popular Senate Majority Leaders are people who do have to make these Machiavellian decisions legitimately all the time.
And that's how the sausage gets made.
And the sausage getting made is really ugly.
But you have a choice.
Either the sausage gets made, or it doesn't get made.
And the reason that's relevant is because when it comes to replacing Mitch McConnell, the question becomes, who exactly is going to replace him?
Is it going to be somebody who considers himself a philosophical purist?
Or is it going to be somebody who wants to make the sausage?
Because the reality is that philosophical purism ends with minority status in the Senate of the United States.
Just as it is very likely at this point that philosophical purism in the House may lead to a Republican minority in the House.
It turns out that Americans just want the sausage.
They don't want to see how it gets made.
They're very not interested in the Machiavellian manipulations.
They just want the thing done.
And that's true of any job that we delegate power to in our lives.
You don't care how the plumber fixes the drain.
You just care that the drain gets fixed.
And if he comes to you and he's like, but I am, on a principled matter, I am not fixing the drain in this particular, I didn't hire you to do that.
I hired you to fix the drain.
And when it comes to what the Senate is there for, we can have arguments and we do all day long on this show about what legislation is good.
Should you vote for it?
Should you not?
But if you neglect the part of the job that is the core of the job, counting votes, Manipulations, backscratching the ugly part of politics.
And what you're going to end up with is somebody who says pretty words and does not achieve the things you need them to achieve and then get your party booted from majority status in the Senate of the United States.
Purism is a wonderfully easy way of appealing to the public without actually benefiting your party in any serious way long term.
Again, that's not to hold people's feet to the fire.
That's our job, right?
We're outside of government.
In the end, it's the voters who are going to vote these people in.
And it's the job of people like me to be purists in order to suggest what I think is the principle and then to explain how far our politicians are straying from the principle.
But it is in fact the job of people like Mitch McConnell to try to get the most of the loaf that they can.
And Mitch McConnell, I think overall, got a lot of that loaf.
And again, that is with me being very critical of his stances on things like immigration and the border.
If Mitch McConnell is replaced with somebody who is far less interested in making the sausage or who is going to refuse to make the sausage at all in the name of political purism, then Republicans will just end up with no power.
That's the reality.
You can like it, you can dislike it, but that happens to be the reality.
It's more on this in just one moment.
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So, there are three candidates who are largely seen as the possible leaders right now to replace McConnell.
One is the Senate Minority Whip, John Thune.
Who is from South Dakota.
He is sort of on the the center left of the Republican caucus, John Thune.
If you look at, for example, his heritage action score, so heritage action scores are sort of a decent proxy measure for how conservative a member votes.
So, for example, the most conservative members of the Senate.
People who get very high heritage scores would be people like Senator Cruz, right?
Senator Cruz has an 89% heritage action score.
Senator Rand Paul has a 96% heritage action score.
However, if you look at like Susan Collins, Susan Collins has a heritage action score of 10%.
Which makes sense, right?
They're trying to grade people on that spectrum.
So Mitch McConnell, for what it is worth, had a heritage action score about 43%.
It's about kind of like halfway in the middle of the Republican caucus.
And the reality is, that's not like the worst place for the Senate Majority Leader to be because you do have to unify your caucus.
I know it's an uncomfortable political truth that every party is a spectrum of views and that it is the job of the Majority Leader in the Senate and the House Speaker to actually cobble together that coalition in order to move things that you want moved and get most of the loaf.
Or again, you can sit there and do nothing.
McConnell sat kind of dead center of the Republican Party, positionally speaking.
So he has like a 43% heritage action score.
McConnell's heritage action score over his lifetime is 59%.
The average Senate Republican has a heritage action score of 65%.
So he's really dead center of the Republican caucus.
The people who would theoretically replace him, and this is the problem with somebody that Rand Paul has been suggested, for example, as a possible Senate Majority Leader.
Almost impossible to see how he gets the job.
Also impossible to see how he cobbles together a coalition.
Now, it may be that Senator Paul says, I don't want to make the sausage.
There is a principled argument for not making the sausage.
It just ends with Republicans and minority status.
Again, I tend to agree with a lot of that from Rand Paul or from Senator Cruz.
That the job of the Senate is not to pass legislation.
The American public tend to disagree with that overall.
And they don't tend to like Congresses where the sausage doesn't get made.
In any case, the three candidates who are up for the job are Senator Thune.
Senator Thune has a Heritage Lifetime Action score of like 62%.
Again, the average Senate Republican is about 65%.
So again, he's sort of dead center of the Republican caucus.
He's being portrayed as a wild leftist, Senator Thune, which of course is not true.
That's because he's at odds with Donald Trump.
Trump took a swipe at him in 2022, suggesting he was going to try to primary Thune because Thune wasn't sufficiently supportive of him in 2020 and didn't go along with the election stolen kind of stuff.
And then Trump got half-hearted about it.
And Thune won his reelect in a walk.
So there are a lot of people on sort of the right side of the Republican Party who don't like Dune because they think he's too moderate, that he follows directly in the path of McConnell.
The thing about Thune is that he does have a lot of training.
I mean, he worked under McConnell for years in how to make the sausage.
John Barrasso is another possible candidate.
He's significantly older than John Thune.
He is the Senate GOP conference chair from Wyoming.
He has a strong relationship with Trump.
He was actually the second senator in America to endorse Trump.
He has a Heritage Lifetime Action Score of 72%, so he's slightly more conservative.
than the overall Republican in the Senate.
So from a conservative perspective, Barrasso might be your guy.
Barrasso seems like somebody who knows how the sausage is made, and also happens to be more conservative overall than McConnell, and has a warm relationship with Trump.
So he seems like the obvious pick.
The only downside is he's 71 years old.
Now, I understand that in modern American politics, that makes you a spring chicken, but still, he's 71 years old.
Senator John Cornyn has been suggested from Texas, Again, he's not quite as much at odds with Trump as, say, John Thune is.
There's been discontent with Cornyn because Cornyn has supported some of the more bipartisan packages in the past.
He has a Heritage Action Lifetime score of 64%.
Again, most of these people are pretty close to the Senate Republican average.
The calls for, you know, the suggestion.
So Matt Gaetz says, oh, we want a big victory because McConnell is stepping up.
McConnell's 82 years old and he's having freezes.
And we played it on the show.
He literally frees up for minutes at a time.
I mean, it is kind of amazing when you think about the fact that Nancy Pelosi is 82 years old and she said, I don't want to be House Minority Leader anymore.
I'm too old.
And then you have Mitch McConnell, who's 82 years old.
He's like, I don't want to be the Senate GOP leader anymore.
I'm too old.
And then you have Joe Biden who's like, I'm doing just fine.
He's going to be 82 years old when he is inaugurated, if he wins, next January.
And he'll be starting his second term, which means four more years of that.
That shows how out of touch he is.
Is this likely to be a transformative moment for the Republican Party?
Well, it depends on who is picked.
The Republican Party does have a choice.
They can pick somebody who is competent at the job of Senate Majority Leader and gets most of the loaf when Republicans have a majority and make smart decisions.
And does the job.
And again, the job is not to be a person who just says things.
It's to actually get things done, pick good Senate candidates.
That means picking purple candidates in purple states, by the way.
Which again, doesn't please the base all the time.
Or you can pick somebody who's a purist, gets very little done, and you end up in the minority.
Those are the choices before Republicans.
It'll be interesting to see which way Republicans go.
We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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Okay, all of this is sort of fascinating with the backdrop of Trump.
So one of the things that's been happening with regard to the Senate race to replace McConnell is that Trump has been invoked a lot.
And what you see from people is like, oh, we're so glad we got rid of McConnell because now we can put somebody who's more Trumpy in place.
And one of the big mysteries about Donald Trump is what is more Trumpy?
What does that what does that even mean?
This has been a question about Donald Trump since 2015.
What does it mean to be more Trumpy?
So I've always suggested that there are sort of two sides of Trump that we have to assess and we have to assess them separately because they actually do not correlate.
One is rhetorical Trump and one is policy Trump.
And what you see with regard to policy, Trump, is a bunch of people who try to craft a Trumpism around what is actually just a set of political impulses by Trump that are generally moderated by his staff.
So what you saw is, for example, you'll see isolationists claim that Trump is an isolationist.
He is not.
There is not much to suggest in his actual policy record.
That he is an isolationist, for example.
There are people who suggest that Donald Trump is super socially conservative.
There's nothing in his policy record to suggest that Donald Trump is super socially conservative.
And so when people say, oh, we got rid of McConnell, that cuck, moderate, and now we're gonna go more Trump.
It's like, okay, but what are we talking about in terms of policy?
Rhetorical Trump, the difference between McConnell and Trump is much more rhetorical than it is policy-oriented.
And this is true for Trump and literally everybody else.
Trump's rhetoric is completely out of the box.
He's a stand-up comedian who ran for the presidency and won.
And he's great at it, right?
I mean, he's hilarious, he's entertaining, right?
All those things are true.
Rhetorical Trump is not policy Trump, which is actually one of the reasons, folks, why Donald Trump has a really good shot of winning re-elect.
Why?
Because if you look at where Donald Trump is positionally, if you put aside the rhetoric, if you put aside the crazy, if you look at where Donald Trump is positionally, he is significantly closer to the middle of American politics than Joe Biden is.
If American politics, traditionally speaking, has been run to the extremes during the primary, run to the center during the general, Donald Trump almost perfectly fulfills that.
Except he actually hasn't even been running to the right in the primary.
He just ran as himself because he has so much faith among the Republican electorate that he's been able to say heretical things that no other candidate would be able to get away with.
So going into the general, as Joe Biden moves to his extreme left in this benighted attempt to garner the love of his radical base as we talked about yesterday, he's abandoning the middle of the playing field.
The reality is that in terms of policy, Aside from border policy, which is a major distinction, Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell look very, very similar.
And in fact, there are areas where Donald Trump is to the left of Mitch McConnell, particularly on pro-life issues.
The reason that matters is if you're looking electorally, the reason, again, Donald Trump has a very good shot of winning a reelect is because he does not follow the Republican Party orthodoxy.
One of the great ironies is the people who are claiming we need uncut, pure 100% grade A Trump.
And what they mean by that is that we want to go like full pro-life, full SOCON, full isolationist.
That's not actually what he does.
What he actually is, is the moderate in this race.
This is a dirty secret.
Dirty secret is when it comes to independence, Donald Trump is much closer positionally to independence than Joe Biden is.
And it's all affect.
So much of this is affect.
It's that Donald Trump is very militant in his affect.
But in terms of where he is on the positions, that dude is a middle-of-the-road Republican.
When I say middle-of-the-road, I would say that on policy.
Again, leaving aside the border where he is quite conservative.
Donald Trump, in many ways, is closer to Susan Collins than he is to Rand Paul.
And that is not a rip on him, that's just an observation about reality.
It's one of the reasons, again, why I think that as a general-elect candidate, he's appearing much stronger than I think people thought he would.
Let's put it this way, if he had Ron DeSantis' position and his own disposition, if he mirrored Ron DeSantis on abortion, pro-life all the way to birth, and from inception, if he mirrored that position and he had the affect, he would not be a viable general elect candidate.
But he doesn't.
So right now I want to go through the positions of Donald Trump.
Because what I want to show you is that because Joe Biden abandoned the middle, Donald Trump is about to seize it.
This is the biggest story in presidential politics that no one is covering.
Is that positionally speaking, Joe Biden abandoning independence has led to a huge swath of people in the middle taking a look at Donald Trump.
By the way, you can see this happening broadly writ in sort of more celebrity circles.
A bunch of people who certainly are not on the right suddenly taking a second look at Trump and going, I'd vote for that guy.
Joe Rogan is not a right winger.
Joe Rogan will likely vote for Donald Trump over Joe Biden.
That's just a reality.
I know Joe.
That's very likely to happen.
And I think he said it publicly.
Elon Musk will vote for Trump over Joe Biden.
Elon Musk is not a right winger.
I know Elon Musk, okay?
This is true for a huge swath of people who consider themselves moderate left.
Elon once tweeted out this very famous meme.
of the political spectrum and what it shows is that the person on the basically is an x
it's an x-axis and originally the x-axis shows the person on the right here and the person on
the left here and the person in the middle here and then it shows the person on the left moving
way the hell out here which means that the person in the middle is now closer to the person on the
right relatively speaking okay that's what's happened in American politics.
Donald Trump's positions right now are almost identical with the positions of Bill Clinton in 1992.
Donald Trump, ironically, looks more like a New Deal Democrat circa 1940 than Joe Biden does.
Joe Biden looks like a wokester who goes to Colombia.
It's amazing.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Okay, so let's go through some of these numbers.
So, I took a look at the latest Harvard-Harris poll, which examined What were the biggest issues that Americans think are facing them?
The number one issue is inflation.
Joe Biden is underwater by 18 points on inflation.
He has 37% approval and 55% disapproval.
And there is a reason for that.
That is because Joe Biden's position on inflation has been, I'm going to spend more money and more money and more money.
And don't worry about the inflation, it's fine.
And Donald Trump's position has been, you shouldn't spend that much money, it's bad to spend that much money, and you shouldn't inflate the currency.
So, for example, here was Joe Biden, this is early on in his administration, this is July of 2021, saying that inflation is transitory.
We also know that as our economy has come roaring back, we've seen some price increases.
Some folks have raised worries that this could be a sign of persistent inflation.
But that's not our view.
Our experts believe, and the data shows, that most of the price increases we've seen were expected and expected to be temporary.
Reality is, you can't flip the global economic light back on and not expect this to happen.
That was Joe Biden's perspective on inflation.
Does that sound close to the middle to you?
Or does Donald Trump sound closer to the middle?
This is from December of last year.
Under my leadership, inflation was non-existent.
we had gasoline at $1.87 a gallon.
After three years of Bidenomics, they call it Bidenomics from hell,
the average monthly mortgage payment has gone from $1,700.
But you can't get the money, so it doesn't matter.
under my administration to three thousand three hundred and twenty two dollars today.
But you can't get the money.
So it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
Again, what he's saying here is quite moderate.
It's particularly moderate because he says, I won't create mass inflation.
Also, I'm not going to cut your entitlements.
Trump has taken the moderate position on entitlements.
So who's closer to the middle there?
Joe Biden or Donald Trump?
Take immigration.
Joe Biden is currently 23 points underwater on immigration.
34% approval, 57% disapproval.
And 12% of Americans say this is their top issue, by the way, making it the third biggest issue after the economy and inflation, right?
Those are kind of the same issue.
So, here is Alejandro Mayorkas, February 11th, saying that the Biden administration bears no responsibility for the border and it's all Republicans' fault.
Does this seem like a moderate position to you?
Or does it seem like a very left-wing position to you?
No doubt there is gridlock on Congress, but do you bear responsibility for what is happening at the border, what the president himself has called a crisis?
It certainly is a crisis, and we don't bear responsibility for a broken system, and we're doing a tremendous amount within that broken system.
But fundamentally, fundamentally, Congress is the only one who can fix it.
Okay, no one believes that.
No one believes that.
That is a very left-wing position.
And by the way, the left-wing position on immigration is being articulated all the time.
Obviously, when it comes to presidential politics, what happens with other politicians impacts how people think of the presidential candidate.
And you can have a random Senate candidate in Missouri affect the presidential election depending on what he says.
Yesterday, the mayor of Athens, Georgia was asked about the murder of a young woman at the University of Georgia campus in Athens.
And instead of blaming the open border because an illegal immigrant killed this woman, The mayor of Athens tried to blame Trump.
This is not going to hunt.
While 2019 was not that long ago, you might remember the dynamic we were living in, in the late teens in this country, where you had the president of the United States speaking in the most vile terms about people who were foreign born.
And you had that notion metastasizing in places like Charlottesville.
This is an invasion!
Okay, um, that's insane.
So it's Charlottesville was responsible for an illegal immigrant killing an American woman?
No.
But people broadly perceive this to be the position of the Democratic Party.
Does that seem more moderate?
Or does Trump seem more moderate?
This is January of this year talking about the open border.
And victory cannot come soon enough.
Under crooked Joe Biden, our country is dying.
Our country is dying.
Our borders open and gushing, it's a big gushing wound, letting drugs, crime, and millions upon millions of illegal aliens pour into our country like we've never seen before.
Nothing like this has ever happened to our country before.
Leftists perceive this as extreme rhetoric because, again, of Trump's affect.
He is much closer to the median position on immigration than Joe Biden is.
Or say, jobs and the economy.
We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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So Joe Biden's approval on jobs and the economy is five points underwater.
43% approve, 48% disapprove.
As of October 2023, Gallup did a poll.
They found 54% of Americans believe the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses.
Just 43% believe the government should do more to solve our country's problems, which means Donald Trump is closer to the median voter than Joe Biden is.
We're going to play two clips here.
One is of Joe Biden touting Bidenomics, and one is of Donald Trump talking about Bidenomics.
Which one sounds closer to the median here?
So I came into office determined to change the economic direction of this country.
To move from trickle-down economics to what everyone on Wall Street Journal and Financial Times began to call Bidenomics.
I didn't come up with a name.
I really didn't.
I now claim it, but they're the ones who used it first.
But I think it's a plan that I'm happy to call Bidenomics.
And guess what?
Bidenomics is working.
Bidenomics is about the future.
Bidenomics is just another way of saying, restore the American dream.
Because it worked before.
It's rooted in what we've always worked best at in this country.
Investing in America.
Investing in Americans.
Because when we invest in our people, we strengthen the middle class.
We see the economy grow.
That benefits all Americans.
That's the American dream.
Okay.
Does anyone... Okay, here is Donald Trump ripping into Bidenomics.
Again, which one sounds more like the median voter here?
During this holiday season, families all across America are struggling under the brutal weight of Bidenomics.
You know, Bidenomics means a lot of bad things.
This year alone, The typical American family is $7,500 poorer because Crooked Joe's lobalist blunders and greedy betrayals have really hurt us badly.
Today, a $2,000 monthly mortgage payment gets you a house worth less than $295,000.
Under the Trump administration, the same number would get you a house that today would be worth $460,000.
That's a big difference.
As long as Crooked Joe Biden is in the White House, The American dream is dead.
It's dead.
You don't hear about the American dream anymore.
People want to survive.
Again, which one sounds closer to the middle?
How about climate change?
So according to Pew Research, from August 2023, only 31% of Americans are interested in phasing out fossil fuels.
That is the stated position of the Biden administration.
They took a 31% position.
Every single issue, Joe Biden and his team have decided to take the 30% position, which is insane.
That is insane politics.
Here, December 2023, John Kerry, climate envoy John Kerry, saying that we have to phase out fossil fuels.
Good luck with that, dude.
Now, remember what I just said.
The science says we have to reduce the emissions.
It doesn't prescribe some particular discipline that has to be done.
It says reduce the emissions.
And so we believe that that means if you're going to reduce the emissions and you're actually going to hit the target of net zero by 2050, you have to do some phasing out.
There's no other way to get to that target.
So we have said very clearly that you've got to have largely a phase-out of fossil fuels in our energy systems by 2050, focusing carbon capture technologies on the hardest to evade sectors
like steel and cement and aluminum and concrete and so forth.
Now it's going to be a mix folks of things that get us to success here.
31% of Americans agree with John Kerry and want to phase out fossil fuels. Meanwhile, Donald Trump January 22nd,
he's like, you know what we're gonna drill. You know what Americans like? Cheap gas, it turns out.
So we're to come together we're going to
Drill baby drill right away Drill baby drill.
Okay, again, that is the moderate position.
How about national security?
Joe Biden, six points underwater, 42 to 48.
Now the left will suggest the reason that Joe Biden is underwater is because he's not left-wing enough.
That is actually not true.
The reason that Joe Biden is underwater is because he has a vague concept of how foreign policy ought to work.
He speaks in platitudes with no actual end points, and then he commits American resources to those platitudes.
So for example, you remember October, 2023, Joe Biden made a speech about, it was supposed to be about Israel, which had just been hit with the worst terror attack in its existence.
And instead, he decided to link that together with Ukraine and then talk about democracy more broadly being at war.
When you start to talk platitudes in foreign policy, you get yourself into trouble real fast.
It turns out the American people, they're not real fond of the platitudes.
You know what they like?
They like winning and they like not being bothered.
That's what Americans mostly like.
They like when our allies win and when they are not bothered.
These are the things that Americans like.
Joe Biden doesn't understand that.
So he bothers them and doesn't win.
You know, the assault on Israel echoes nearly 20 months of war, tragedy, and brutality inflicted on the people of Ukraine, people that were very badly hurt since Putin launched his all-out invasion.
We've not forgotten the mass graves, the bodies found bearing signs of torture, rape used as a weapon by the Russians, and thousands and thousands of Ukrainian children forcibly taken into Russia, stolen from their parents.
It's sick.
Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common.
They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy.
Completely annihilate it.
Meanwhile, here's Donald Trump ripping on Joe Biden's foreign policy and saying, like, none of this would happen if you actually had a clear and coherent foreign policy, which is don't screw with America or our allies or we'll bust you in the mouth and then we'll win and then we'll be left alone.
Here is Donald Trump.
Again, this is much more akin to how most Americans feel about foreign policy.
October 2023.
Making America great again will begin with making America strong again and making America safe again.
Under my leadership, the world was peaceful and calm because America was respected.
The President was respected.
I dealt with the strongest people in the world.
They were smart.
They were streetwise.
They respected me.
I respected them.
They had different viewpoints.
That's certainly true.
But they were Afraid of America.
Today, they laugh at our country.
They laugh with crooked Joe Biden.
You have chaos, bloodshed, war, terror and death.
Look what's happening today.
Because the occupant of the White House is a laughingstock.
All over the world, America's enemies cannot believe how lucky they got.
They got real lucky.
Every monster, villain, dictator and terrorist.
And there are plenty of them.
I know most of them.
I got to know a lot of them.
He's not wrong.
He's not wrong.
That's how most Americans think about foreign policy.
never have it better than they do with Crooked Joe, who in many cases receive money from
those countries.
I wonder what that's all about.
He's not wrong.
He's not wrong that most Americans think about foreign policy.
American foreign policy is a weird mix of Wilsonian idealism and some classical Teddy
Roosevelt speak softly and carry a big stick, real politic.
And Americans tend to like the latter more than the former in this area.
And they they should.
And in second, I'm going to get you more of the fact.
It's just a fact that in this race, Donald Trump is the moderate and Joe Biden is the
We'll get to that momentarily first.
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Okay.
Meanwhile, when it comes to every issue, we're going through all of them.
Joe Biden is on the left.
Donald Trump is in the center.
He's not on the right.
That is because the left went crazy.
On education, Joe Biden has an approval rating that is plus two, but that's because he's 43-41.
That is a very low approval rating on education for Democrats.
Typically, the way that you gauge educational approval is how much money you're willing to spend.
Joe Biden spends a lot of money on this stuff.
The problem is, he is also a wokester.
So for example, here was Joe Biden talking about the evil book bans in the state of Florida.
Those book bans, by the way, most Americans understand, are things like genderqueer, being left in school libraries for eight-year-olds to find and look at the porn inside.
Joe Biden defending this sort of stuff is not a good look in the educational sphere.
We can't fully prevent people from being radicalized to hate and violence, but we must address the relentless exploitation of the Internet to recruit and mobilize violent extremists.
And that's going to be hard.
It conflicts, in many cases, with the First Amendment.
We've got a lot to do.
That's why I issued the country's first-ever national strategy on countering domestic terrorism, and I signed landmark hate crime legislation that we passed.
And we have to continue to act, though.
Now is the time for all Americans to speak up when history is being erased, books are being banned.
Did you ever think we'd have this conversation here at this time?
Diversity is being attacked.
As I said earlier, we're one of the most diverse countries in the history of the world.
Diversity is a strength of our nation, a cornerstone of our democracy.
Most people see right through that platitude, and what they see is Joe Biden backing critical race theory and gender theory in the classroom.
Which is why, when Donald Trump says in May 2023 that he's going to cut funds for schools teaching CRT, most Americans agree with this.
This is a middle-of-the-road position.
Contrary to what the legacy media would tell you, this is a middle-of-the-road position.
No one wants their kids going to school where they learn that they are inferior because they are white, for example.
That they bear historic guilt because of their race.
I will immediately sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school that's pushing critical race theory, transgenderism, and any other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children, their children.
Meanwhile, by the way, on crime, again, this is a major issue for most Americans.
Joe Biden has an approval rating of 37%.
50% disapprove.
Why?
Because Joe Biden's perspective on crime has been deeply embedded in this critical race theory equity nonsense.
The idea being that if a disproportionate number of black people end up in prison for crime, that is not because a disproportionate number of black people are committing crimes, it's because the system is systemically racist.
Which means you have to crack down on police departments for their supposedly systemic racism.
Here was Joe Biden, right off the bat, January 2021, signing an order on racial equity to fight systemic racism.
And the simple truth is our soul will be troubled as long as systemic racism is allowed to persist.
We can't eliminate it.
It's not going to be overnight.
We can't eliminate everything.
But it's corrosive.
It's destructive.
And it's costly.
It cost every American, not just who felt the sting of racial injustice, We aren't just a nation morally deprived because of systemic racism.
We're also less prosperous.
We're less successful.
We're less secure.
So we must change.
And I know it's going to take time.
But I know we can do it.
And I firmly believe the nation is ready to change.
But government has to change as well.
We need to make equity and justice part of what we do every day.
Today, tomorrow, and every day.
Okay, if that's... You know, this nonsense that he's speaking right here comes up directly against the fact that people want criminals in prison.
Donald Trump, November 2023, saying, here's what we should do.
We should execute drug dealers.
Now the legs of me are like, oh my god, that's terrible.
How could he say such a thing?
You know what most Americans are totally fine with?
Executing drug dealers.
You know why?
Because 100,000 people a year in this country are dying of fentanyl overdoses.
And a lot of that is because the fentanyl is poison.
We're making an episode of Divided States of Biden on this right now.
You know, the fact of the matter is that many of the people who are dying of fentanyl overdoses are not buying fentanyl and then injecting it into themselves.
They are buying other drugs, like Adderall pills that are laced with fentanyl.
When Trump says give dealers the death penalty, I'm on board.
Here was Trump November 2023.
You know, when I call these people smart, the press always says, he said he was smart.
I'm supposed to say they're not intelligent people.
President Xi in China controls 1.4 billion people with an iron hand.
No drug problems.
You know why they have no drug problems?
Death penalty for the drug dealers.
Death penalty, right?
You want to solve your drug problem?
You have to institute a meaningful death penalty for drug dealers.
Not wrong, on abortion, right?
All the positions that we've discussed so far are ones that I think most mainstream conservatives agree with, and they happen to be moderate positions.
On abortion, Donald Trump disagrees with mainstream conservatives on abortion.
And yet, he's able to get away with it.
This is like the best example of Donald Trump being the guy who's seizing the middle ground.
So, Joe Biden actually, believe it or not, on abortion, has an approval rating that is 5% underwater.
38 to 43.
What do the polls say about what Americans are fine with in terms of abortion restrictions?
48%, a plurality of Americans, support a 16-week ban on abortion.
Which, by the way, is super late.
And most European countries are at 12 weeks.
But, a 16-week ban on abortion.
Only 36% are opposed to a piece of legislation that would ban abortion 16 weeks and beyond.
That happens to be the position that Donald Trump is currently exploring.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden has taken the position abortion until birth funded by taxpayers.
In 2019, you'll recall that Joe Biden reversed himself.
He had spent his entire career saying taxpayers should not have to fund abortion because you don't agree with somebody else getting an abortion.
Why are you paying for it?
Then in 2019, under pressure from his left flank, he denounced the Hyde Amendment.
We now see so many Republican governors denying health care to millions of the most poorest and most vulnerable Americans by refusing even Medicaid expansion.
I can't justify leaving millions of women without access to the care they need and the ability to exercise their constitutionally protected right.
If I believe health care is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone's zip code.
So taxpayer-funded abortion up until birth is the Democratic Party position under Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, the actual Donald Trump position on abortion does not match with my own.
You'll recall that in September 2023, Donald Trump ripped into Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida for a six-week abortion ban.
So he has taken the absolutely milquetoast, middle-of-the-road position on abortion.
People criticize Nikki Haley for being middle-of-the-road on abortion.
Trump is just as middle-of-the-road when it comes to public policy.
Here he was in 2023, ripping on an actual abortion ban in the state of Florida.
If a federal ban landed on your desk, if you were re-elected, would you sign it at 15 weeks?
Are you talking about a complete ban?
A ban at 15 weeks.
Well, people are starting to think of 15 weeks.
That seems to be a number that people are talking about right now.
Would you sign that?
I would sit down with both sides, and I'd negotiate something, and we'll end up with peace on that issue for the first time in 52 years.
I'm not going to say I would or I wouldn't.
I mean, DeSantis is willing to sign a five-week and six-week ban.
Would you support that?
You think that goes too far?
I think what he did is a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.
But we'll come up with a number.
But at the same time, Democrats won't be able to go out in six months, seven months, eight months and allow an abortion.
So, again, how do you demonize that position as radically right-wing?
Trump is actually taking one of the Democrats' most potent issues in the aftermath of the repeal of Roe vs. Wade, or the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, he's actually taking it off the table for them because he's a moderate on the issue.
On foreign policy, by the way, I know there are a lot of people who are big Trump fans who think that he wants to cut off aid to Ukraine.
He has never said that.
He's never actually articulated that.
What he has said is that, in fact, he's actually said the opposite.
He said he would increase aid to Ukraine sufficient to pressure Putin to come to the table and make a deal.
The difference between him and Biden is that he wants Putin to make a deal, whereas Biden has provided no off-ramp in Ukraine.
And again, that is the middle-of-the-road position.
According to polling data from Harvard-Harris, 25% of Americans favor increasing military aid to Ukraine.
28% favor decreasing military aid.
29% favor maintaining military aid.
So the real question is whether you consider more military aid to Ukraine, maintaining military aid or increasing military aid.
But 53% of Americans are favorable on NATO as opposed to 22% unfavorable.
Now, again, many of the people who are trying to craft a sort of isolationist Trumpism are ignoring his actual positions that he's taken on these issues.
When Donald Trump says that he wants members of NATO to pay their fair share, he is not calling for the dissolution of NATO.
In many ways, he's calling for NATO to be strengthened.
I know that everyone's attempting to misread his joke about, I'm gonna invite everybody to invade NATO countries if they don't... That's a pressure tactic, folks.
It doesn't actually mean that he's going to tell Russia to go invade Moldova.
When Joe Biden says, again, vague words about Ukraine, people don't believe him.
Here was Joe Biden in June 2023 saying, we'll stay as long as it takes.
Most Americans are not into we'll stay as long as it takes because it doesn't mean anything and we know that they're lying.
On commitments to Ukraine, long-term security, long-term security to deter future aggression after this war ends is a goal.
And we're advancing this goal by providing them the support Ukraine needs now on the battlefield and helping them strengthen their military over the long term.
The fact of the matter is that I believe we'll have the funding necessary to support Ukraine as long as it takes.
And I believe that we're gonna that that support will be real, even though there are you hear some voices today on Capitol Hill about whether or not we should continue to support Ukraine and for how long we should support them.
The fact of the matter is, I asked people a picture.
What would happen if we were not supporting Ukraine?
Do we think Russia would stop and keep?
Do you think that's all there would be happening?
I think not.
And I think the vast majority of my colleagues, even the critics, think that would not be the case as well.
Trump's take is that this is platitudes and empty words and unclear policy.
Here was Trump.
This is like last week, folks.
This is not two years ago.
Here is Donald Trump last week talking about Ukraine and sounding fairly conservative on Ukraine.
So Putin is not A fan of mine, actually.
You remember when they used to say, oh, Trump, you know, they had a body language person on CNN fake news.
And they had me and Putin together.
And they said to the expert, well, who's the dominant force?
And the expert said, as you know, I've analyzed it.
I've spent a lot of time doing it.
And I don't think you're going to like the answer.
But President Trump is the dominant force said that.
I don't know if it's true.
I don't know.
Remember, we both walked on.
But I got along good with him, but he doesn't want to have me.
He wants to have Biden because he's going to be given everything he wants, including Ukraine.
That's a gift.
He's got a gift.
He's going to have his dream of getting Ukraine because of Biden.
The whole thing is just crazy.
Biden has given him the only president in the last five that hasn't given Russia anything is a president known as Donald J. Trump.
You know that.
I don't have to go over the list.
But Biden, Biden is going to give him Ukraine.
The way it's looking to me, it's terrible.
OK, that is Trump outflanking Biden from the right on Ukraine.
That's him being more hawkish than Biden on Ukraine.
When it comes to Israel, same sort of deal.
So Joe Biden right now is taking the minority position on Israel and Hamas.
The vast majority of Americans, like 82% of Americans, support Israel over Hamas.
And in fact, according to the latest Harvard-Harris poll, 67% of Americans believe that there should only be a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas after the release of the hostages and Hamas is removed from power.
Biden is taking the position there should be an unconditional ceasefire, or at least that's what he is pushing right now.
And Biden is critiquing Israel.
That is not the mainstream, moderate, middle-of-the-road position in the United States.
It is not.
Thank God, this is a good country.
Okay, here is Joe Biden saying this weekend that Israel is risking its own legitimacy.
This is not the middle of the road.
Americans do not agree with this.
You believe maybe there's a future for a two-state solution, but from where I'm sitting, it does seem like there doesn't seem to be any appetite for that right now.
Do you see what is, because again, we see this horrible, every day we see this horrible images out of Gaza.
And is there a path forward?
Is there a safe future for the people who live there?
There is a path forward, with difficulty, but here's the path forward.
Look, first of all, there are, the hostages being held must be released.
And if we've got a, at least a principle agreement, there'll be a ceasefire while that takes place.
Ramadan's coming up and there's been an agreement by the Israelis that they would not engage in activities during Ramadan as well, in order to give us time to get all the hostages out.
That gives us time to begin to move in directions that a lot of Arab countries are prepared to move in.
But it's a process.
And look, Israel has had the overwhelming support of the vast majority of nations.
If it keeps this up without this incredibly conservative government they have, and Ben-Gavir and others, I've known every major foreign policy leader in Israel since Golda Meir.
They're going to lose support from around the world.
And that is not an Israel- I mean, he's wrong on the merits, but this also happens to be a wild, left-wing, Dearborn, Michigan position.
That is not the middle-of-the-road position in the United States.
You know what sounds more reasonable?
Donald Trump saying that he will strip student visas from foreigners who come here and hate Jews.
That seems like a pretty- Like, most Americans kind of agree with that.
We don't want foreigners here who don't like Jews.
It's a pretty- Should that be controversial?
I'd be shocked if it is.
Here is Donald Trump.
Under the Trump administration, we will revoke the student visas of radical anti-American and anti-Semitic foreigners at our colleges and universities.
And we will send them straight back home.
They go back home.
Enjoy your life.
That is the middle of the road position.
OK, all of this is to say that the only argument that the Biden administration, the Biden campaign have left is that Donald Trump is a bad orange man.
That's it.
They don't have any positional strengths.
They don't.
Even on the traditional Democratic strengths, like abortion, which has benefited them since the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, Donald Trump has taken the bat out of their hands because he is middle of the road on that issue.
Every other issue The Democrats have moved so far to the left that Donald Trump owns the middle of the playing field, which means that Donald Trump's strategy at this point should just be to say that over and over and over.
If he focuses in on his positions and Joe Biden's failures, he is going to be the president.
Ironically, not because Trumpism is some wild, extreme mega force, but because Donald Trump himself, politically, positionally, is a middle-to-left Republican.
That's the reality.
He wants to maintain entitlements.
He wants a 16-week abortion ban?
He is somewhat interventionist on foreign policy?
All of these positions are the mainstream American positions, which means that positionally, Joe Biden has boxed himself right out.
And there's another problem for Joe Biden too.
The other problem for Joe Biden is that people perceive Joe Biden as corrupt.
That same Harvard Harris Caps poll shows 50% of Americans thinks Joe Biden benefited from Hunter Biden's gallivanting around the world to pick up sacks of cash.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show continues right now.
We will be joined on the line by Gabe Kaminsky of the Washington Examiner.
He's uncovered A kind of shocking story about foreign aid in the United States and where it is going.
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