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March 18, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:05
“BLOODBATH!” The Fake News Strikes Again
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Donald Trump's best friends are in the legacy media.
I don't mean that Donald Trump is friends with people in the legacy media.
I mean, they are totally helping him.
Members of the legacy media have been playing this incredibly stupid game since 2015.
And the reason they play this game with Trump is because they play it all the time with other Republican politicians.
The game goes like this.
Donald Trump says something.
That uses a bit of inflammatory language in a completely non-inflammatory context.
And the media then proceed to cut out the inflammatory language from the non-inflammatory context and then blow it up.
Now, they've been doing this with Republicans since literally forever.
For as long as I've been alive, they've been doing this with Republicans.
The weird thing about doing it with Trump is Trump says wild things fairly frequently.
They don't even have to do it with Trump.
But by doing this, what they end up doing is essentially showing the American public
that they are willing to say or do anything about Donald Trump.
Today's latest example comes courtesy of the entire legacy media that decided to jump on a clip
of Donald Trump at a rally over the weekend.
So Donald Trump was doing a political rally over the weekend.
Again, the media are in a sheer state of panic about the 2024 race.
They should be.
According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Donald Trump is currently almost two points up in the national average.
He is currently leading in every single battleground state.
According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Joe Biden is in deep trouble.
And so they are looking for some sort of headline that is going to gin up the Democratic base.
And so they have to find something that says that Donald Trump is a severe danger to the Republic, that he is going to overthrow the Republic, that there is going to be blood in the streets.
After all, this is the case that Joe Biden has been making since 2020.
The case since 2020 has been that Donald Trump isn't just a problem, he is a threat to the very nature of the Republic.
When Joe Biden got up at Independence Hall and gave the worst speech I can remember, standing in front of a blood-red Independence Hall, suggesting that his political opponents were going to overthrow the democracy.
This is the line that the entire media have been told to repeat over and over and over for the duration of this election cycle.
And so they decided that over the weekend, they had found the golden ticket.
They had found the clip of Donald Trump promising violence in the streets.
There'll be blood in the streets tonight!
The whole thing.
Here is the full clip of Donald Trump talking.
Here he is talking about the economic plans of Democrats with regard to industrial industries in Michigan.
Here's the full clip.
Mexico has taken over a period of 30 years, 34% of the automobile manufacturing business in our country.
Think of it.
Went to Mexico.
China now is building a couple of massive plants where they're going to build the cars in Mexico and think they think that they're going to sell those cars into the United States with no tax at the border.
Let me tell you something to China.
If you're listening, President Xi, and you and I are friends, but he understands the way I deal.
Those big monster car manufacturing plants that you're building in Mexico right now, and you think you're going to get that, you're going to not hire Americans, and you're going to sell the cars to us.
Now, we're going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you're not going to be able to sell those cars.
If I get elected, Now, if I don't get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath for the whole... That's going to be the least of it.
It's going to be a bloodbath for the country.
That'll be the least of it.
But they're not going to sell those cars.
Okay, he's literally talking about his plan to tariff Chinese imports.
That's his plan, right?
He's talking about tariffing Chinese cars imported via Mexico into the United States.
And he says that if I get elected, it'll be good for the economy.
And if I don't, then there will be a bloodbath.
Now, that's the sort of language that occurs constantly in American politics.
In fact, here's a montage of Democrats using the word bloodbath in a variety of contexts, talking about political bloodbaths and economic bloodbaths and all the rest.
No one assumes what they mean is that there will be actual murder in the streets with the blood flowing freely into the gutters or something like this.
Here is the media over and over and over saying bloodbath.
Headlines calling it a, quote, bloodbath.
A bloodbath?
Not only is it going to be a bloodbath, but after they leave New Hampshire, it's a bloodbath on her home turf?
That's really tough.
Trump has left a lot of corpses in his wake.
I mean, we can count the bodies.
As part of the, quote, MAGA drive to take over Maricopa County.
And the headline refers to it as an impending bloodbath.
Columnist Charles Blow has a new piece for the New York Times entitled, A Biden Bloodbath.
It's been a bloodbath.
They're shaping up to be a bloodbath.
that they 100% are fearing a slaughter.
In fact, the word bloodbath and massacre come up frequently.
The Republican Party will be destroyed.
It's gonna be a bloodbath.
There's gonna be a bloodbath one way or the other.
Bloodbath for Bernie Sanders.
It's been a bloodbath.
They're shaping up to be a bloodbath.
Head off a bloodbath and next year's crucial midterm.
Off-year elections are often a bloodbath.
This week's bloodbath for Democrats.
A bloodbath at the ballot box.
There could be a Republican bloodbath.
Talk about a bloodbath.
There's a bloodbath.
I have to talk about you.
It's gonna be a bloodbath all day long.
It's in for a bloodbath.
Hasn't been a bloodbath on the way down.
Donald Trump bloodbath.
Be a bloodbath.
Okay, thanks to Grabian for that montage.
Just going to point out again, the word bloodbath happens a lot in American politics because all it means is a slaughter.
We use violent language a lot because it's evocative, but it doesn't mean that somebody's about to get killed or there's going to be a civil war or anything like that.
And as Trump's spokesperson, Caroline Levitt, said over the weekend, obviously Trump was talking about economic bloodbath.
Economic bloodbath.
She said that, right?
Biden's policies will create an economic bloodbath for the auto industry and auto workers.
That's what Trump's campaign spokesperson said on Saturday.
And of course, we played you the entire clip.
So what did the media do?
They took the two sentences where Donald Trump says, if I'm not elected, there will be a bloodbath.
And they took that out of context, and then they proceeded to claim that what Donald Trump was saying is that if he was not elected, that there would be a full-scale insurrectionist civil war in the United States with bodies in the streets.
It's going to look like Haiti.
Donald Trump is going to start calling himself barbecue.
He's going to start chomping on body parts, like the whole thing.
The media beclown themselves every day.
Here is, for example, Nancy Pelosi playing this game.
This is just ridiculous.
We just have to win this election because he's even predicting a bloodbath.
What does that mean?
He's going to exact a bloodbath?
There's something wrong here.
How respectful I am of the American people and their goodness, but how much more do they have to see from him to understand that this isn't what our country is about?
Wow.
Because otherwise there's going to be a bloodbath.
We'll get some more on this momentarily.
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Hey, Jen Psaki, former press secretary for Joe Biden, who went to that revolving door that goes right to MSNBC.
That's the way that it works.
You leave the Biden administration, you go to MSNBC, another Democrat gets elected, you leave MSNBC, you go back to the Biden administration.
That's the way that it works.
Here is Jen Psaki doing the work here.
The full context is that this is much bigger than one single speech.
This embrace of political violence, this dehumanizing language.
This is what Donald Trump has been preaching for years.
In January, he warned that there will be, quote, bedlam in this country if his criminal prosecution derailed his campaign.
In 2020, he reportedly asked his defense secretary about shooting people who were protesting the death of George Floyd, saying, can't you just shoot them?
Just shoot them in the legs or something.
And of course, his very words inspired violence on January 6, 2021, when he told a crowd of his supporters to walk down to the Capitol and fight like hell because, quote, you'll never take back our country with weakness.
Trust me, I could go on and on and on.
We all know by now that Trump's allusions to political violence are not merely rhetorical.
His supporters take them literally.
That's part of the big problem here.
And he knows that too.
So no, we did not miss the full context.
This was not some meandering off-message comment.
This is his message.
Okay, so his message was not about economic policy like it showed you in the full context.
It's that he used the word bloodbath just like everybody in political media uses the word bloodbath.
But it doesn't matter because the media are jumping on this, of course.
And so you have the New York Times headline.
Trump says some migrants are not people and predicts a bloodbath if he loses.
By the way, as for that former comment that some migrants are not people, now let me play you the other clip that the media are taking out of context.
They're suggesting that Donald Trump is dehumanizing illegal immigrants.
He's saying they're not human beings.
He's using genocidal rhetoric with regard to illegal immigrants.
That is the claim.
Who is he actually talking about when he says, I wouldn't even call them people?
Let's find out.
If I had prisons that were teaming with MS-13 and all sorts of people that they've got to take care of for the next 50 years, right?
Young people that are in jail for years, if you call them people.
I don't know if you call them people.
In some cases, they're not people, in my opinion.
But I'm not allowed to say that because the radical left says that's a terrible thing to say.
They say you have to vote against him because did you hear what he said about humanity?
I've seen the humanity and these humanity, these are bad.
These are animals.
So that apparently is really... He's talking about MS-13!
He's talking about actual criminals.
And he is saying that people who do animalistic things are animals.
Is that evocative language?
Sure.
Are people who rape people and murder people not people?
Are they animals or monsters?
You can make a moral argument about that, but is that some sort of horrifying language that he's applying to all illegal immigrants?
That's not what he's saying.
And again, this is always the game.
This is always the game with Trump, is that they take a comment and then they spin it up to its greatest possible illusion while ignoring all possible context.
You know who it helps?
Donald Trump, because everybody starts ignoring you because you're the boy who cried wolf.
Then if Trump says something that really is egregious, then there's no place to go because you already turned it up to 11.
There's no place to go from here.
Here's a New Yorker writer named Susan Glasser, who's turning up to 11 on the bloodbath comment.
Here we go.
We obviously heard what he said last night.
Yeah, I mean, look, Donald Trump, it seems to me it's very hard.
Eight years into this, we still struggle with how to cover him as journalists.
But in a way, the unhinged, rambling rants that you see from the former president of the United States are baked in.
And I think in a way, we are all desensitized and ignored To the extraordinary, remarkable, and very, at times, un-American and threatening things that the former president is saying.
I'm not saying it's easy to understand how to cover it, but I think we have to cover it when the former president, who's already incited violence among his followers, says that there's going to be a bloodbath, what, after the election, if he does not win.
He is telling us what he is going to do.
Well, that is, wow.
I, too, am scared.
The Babylon Bee had a great headline along these lines.
Quote, media reports Trump threatened nuclear war after he says this guacamole is the bomb.
Yeah, that's about where we are in terms of political media.
We'll get some more on this in just one second.
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But this is how desperate they are to step from.
We have now reached the point.
It is March, by the way.
This shows you that Joe Biden is losing this race.
The desperation has set in, like full scale set in.
And so we have an article today in Politico that is arguing that we basically need to outlaw jokes.
Jokes are bad now because Trump uses this thing called comedy and humor and because he uses comedy and humor and he is, in fact, a Hitlerian fascist.
Jokes have been deemed bad.
It's a piece by a person named Michael Cruz, a senior staff writer at Politico, titled In On The Joke, the comedic trick Trump uses to normalize his behavior.
His supporters love it.
Critics call it a sign of his autocratic tendencies.
Yeah, jokes, scary things.
I've been indicted more times than Alphonse Capone, Donald Trump said from the stage in Winthrop Coliseum in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
It's true, he said.
It's not.
But what mattered the most here was that he was, late last month, uncorking an especially lively version of what has become a routine rally riff, and one that never fails to send ripples of giggles through the crowds he commands.
My parents are looking down.
They're saying, I never thought this could happen to my son.
He's been indicted, he said, hands out, head up, reveling in the hoots on cue.
The audio track of the traveling Trump carnival is by now reliable to the point of ritualistic.
Lee Greenwood to start, the odd QAnon co-opted sort of liturgical dirge to close, the apocalyptic assessment of the condition of the nation that prompts to harass the press in jeers and swears from the throngs in between.
I could shut my eyes to know precisely where I was.
For me, though, there's one sound that comes to stick out more than any of the many others.
It's the laughter.
Oh no!
You mean Donald Trump's a funny person?
First of all, this has been Donald Trump's political superpower since he stepped onto the scene.
Donald Trump is a stand-up comedian.
He's always been a stand-up comedian.
It's a point that comedian Shane Gillis has made over and over and over, is that in debates, people walk on stage with Trump thinking they're going to argue policy, and Donald Trump's like, your toupee looks terrible.
You're ugly.
There's no way to fight with that.
Donald Trump's superpower is that he is, in fact, an intensely funny human being.
Hate him, like him.
He's the funniest person who's ever been president.
Like, without a doubt.
But that means that the problem is humor.
I'm sorry, we've got to kill humor.
We've got to take humor out to the backyard with an axe.
Blunt side of the axe to the back of the head of humor.
Jokes must be killed.
They must be dismembered and buried in a cornfield in Iowa in order to stop Trump.
No more jokes!
The jokes have to stop.
By the way, it is amazing how basically since the era of Barack Obama, the left has decided that jokes are bad.
So remember when Barack Obama was president, the entire comedic world declared that he was just not funny.
You could not make jokes about Barack Obama.
He was more like dad, as Chris Rock said.
You just can't make jokes about him.
He's like the father of the country.
Now, of course, Barack Obama is one of the funniest human beings ever to be president, also, but in a completely different way.
The guy was so arrogant in his belief that he was a world-changing figure that he would go out there and intone the most sonorous tones, the most absurd platitudes, and we would all pretend that they were deep, and the media would just fawn over him and carry around drool cups.
It was all ridiculous and absurd.
And meanwhile, he's there in the White House doing selfie stick time.
He was a silly figure, Barack Obama.
I know we were all supposed to treat him with great respect, but he was silly.
I don't have respect for politicians, generally speaking, because they're all silly.
But Barack Obama was particularly silly.
But the comedic community decided you could not tell jokes about him, because that was bad.
It was bad.
Jokes were bad.
You can tell jokes about Republicans, but jokes were bad.
Now it turns out that Republicans can do jokes, because Trump is actually a funny human.
And that means jokes themselves, from the right, or from all jokes, bad.
No good.
Stop it.
That apparently is the perspective of the reporter for Politico.
Donald Trump's critics, along with experts in rhetoric and nationalists and populist movements and leaders, say it helps him turn his opponents into not just enemies, but jokes.
They say it helps him recast his own liabilities at laughing matters, and he sensitizes his supporters to his most outrageous comments and proposals.
The undermining of institutions, the abandonment of allies, mass deportations, and all but outright invitations for Russian invasions and so on.
They say the mirth masks the menace.
They are not wrong.
Mmm, yes.
This is how autocrats work, says Jen Merciesa, the author of Demagogues for President, the rhetorical genius of Donald Trump.
Practically every joke is an in-group and out-group joke, and laughing at the joke is a sign of loyalty, Merciesa explained.
Now, again, I'd like to point out here that that has also been true of the left for a very long time.
As the joke goes online, the late night shows are now late night group therapy for libs.
They're no longer funny anymore to anybody who's not on the far left.
But jokes have to be outlawed.
By the way, it's not just jokes that have to be outlawed.
Free speech has to be stopped.
Entire article in the New York Times titled, How Trump's Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation.
Their claims of censorship have successfully stymied the effort to filter election lies online.
Oh my God, those terrible Trump people and their First Amendment activity.
That's just terrible.
They are suggesting That platforms should be platforms and should not, in fact, be censored by international groups under the auspices of left-wing politicians who are using their power in order to crack down on dissenting points of view.
Those terrible, terrible free speech people.
Free speech is bad because Trump might use it.
In the wake of the riot on Capitol Hill on January 6th, a groundswell built in Washington to rein in the onslaught of lies that had fueled the assault on the peaceful transfer of power.
Social media companies suspended Donald J. Trump, then the president, and many of his allies from the platforms they'd used to spread misinformation about his defeat and whip up the attempt to overturn it.
The Biden administration, Democrats in Congress, even some Republicans sought to do more to hold the companies accountable.
Academic researchers wrestled with how to strengthen efforts to monitor false posts.
Mr. Trump and his allies embarked instead on a counter-offensive, a coordinated effort to block what they viewed as a dangerous effort to censor conservatives.
They have unquestionably prevailed, waged in the courts, in Congress, and in the seething precincts of the internet.
Ooh, so much seething.
That effort has eviscerated attempts to shield elections from disinformation in the social media era.
It tapped into, and then critics say twisted, the fierce debate over free speech and the government's role in policing content.
Projects that were once bipartisan, including one started by the Trump administration, have been recast as deep state conspiracies to rig elections.
Facing legal and political blowback, the Biden administration has largely abandoned moods that might be construed as stifling political speech.
Well, we wouldn't want that to happen.
I mean, obviously Joe Biden and company, they have to be given the power to stifle political speech, obviously.
So yeah, among the things that need to be abolished in order to stop Trump, obviously, humor and speech.
By the way, you're the baddies.
If that's your perspective, jokes need to be stopped, and also free speech needs to be stopped on platforms.
You're the ones telling us that democracy is under threat if Donald Trump is elected, and in order to stop that, we need to stop humor, and we need to stop speech.
I think the problem might be you.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Okay, now none of this is to avoid the point that Donald Trump is a peculiar human.
We have been playing a game since 2015 that we're going to bring back for the campaign because it just is the reality.
Called Good Trump, Bad Trump.
A Good Trump, Bad Trump is because Donald Trump says lots of stuff.
As I've said before, on his epitaph, it will read, Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States, maybe also 47th President of the United States, he said a lot of bleep.
Because, that is Trump!
Trump says a lot of things.
He doesn't think about all the things he says, he just kind of says them and they come out his face hole.
And that's what happens.
And some of those things are very good, and some of those things are very bad.
And that's just the way that it works.
And so, Donald Trump was busy over the weekend saying many things.
Some of them were quite good, and some of them were quite bad.
What is amazing to me, however, is that many of the things that he says, that are actually the worst things that he says, are things that the media completely ignore because they hate Republicans so much.
Like, it's pretty wild.
So, first, let us play.
We're back into the game.
It's an election cycle.
Good Trump, bad Trump.
Good Trump, bad Trump.
Which one will begin today?
Okay, so, we are going to begin with some bad Trump, okay?
Because we just did some okay Trump, and then we'll get some good Trump, okay?
So, we'll start with some bad Trump.
Okay, here was Donald Trump over the weekend attacking Ron DeSantis.
For no reason, by the way.
Ron DeSantis already bowed out of the race.
Ron DeSantis already endorsed Donald Trump for president.
But Donald Trump has an unfortunate habit, which is that once someone already surrenders to him, he then puts his boot on that person's neck and pushes.
For no reason, really.
And so, it's not enough that DeSantis lost to him, conceded the election early, endorsed him, and maintains his position as the best governor in the country in my home state of Florida.
Donald Trump went after him with peculiar language yesterday.
Here we are.
We campaigned for a year, and I obliterate my competition.
And they said, sir, please don't talk about these people that way.
They're Republicans.
I said, I don't give a ****.
They're terrible.
I said, I don't care.
My highly paid advisor, sir, you shouldn't talk to them about that.
One of the people said they said, are you going to run against the president?
He said, I have no comment.
To me, that meant he's running.
So I hit him hard.
I hit him low.
I hit him.
I just like we did to ISIS.
We hit him hard.
We hit him low.
We hit him high.
We hit him in the middle.
We hit him from on top.
And we even came under the ground.
We hit this guy so hard, by the time he announced, nobody knew what the hell happened.
They said, what happened to him?
He's a shell of the man.
Okay, so this is the joking, right?
And is it good joking?
Like, I don't think it's good joking.
Because again, what is the point of this?
Like, if you're thinking forward to the election, what Donald Trump needs is for the base to consolidate around him.
He needs everybody to show up and vote for him.
There are a lot of people We're big DeSantis fans.
DeSantis actually won a fairly significant percentage in Iowa.
And in the national polling, DeSantis was polling, in the Republican primaries, somewhere between 15 and 20 percent.
Alienating those voters is a dumb move.
But Trump can't stop himself, and so he's joking about it.
We hit him high, we hit him low.
The joking voice.
We hit him high, we hit him low.
And the idea here is that invoking we hit him like we hit ISIS, It's like a bad song from pop star Never Stop Never Stopping.
And if you know the reference, you know what I'm talking about here.
Okay, so that was some bad Trump.
Other bad Trump over the weekend.
Again, these are the things that the media ignored that, by the way.
Why did they ignore that?
Because they hate DeSantis as much as they hate Trump.
Like, they really hate DeSantis.
So that wasn't the thing they picked on.
What they picked on was a false narrative about bloodbaths or whatever.
Okay, here was another thing Trump said over the weekend.
He's been calling the people who are jailed because of their activities on January 6th, hostages.
They're not hostages.
They're not.
So he suggested that over the weekend.
It's not correct, obviously.
People are criminally convicted.
You can say that the criminal convictions are unjust because you believe, for example, that there should be equivalent criminal convictions of, say, the rioters of 2020, the Black Lives Matter rioters, and you'd be correct.
But they are not hostages.
Hostages implies that if Donald Trump makes a concession, they will be freed.
Like, you hold a hostage in order to achieve some sort of political purpose and then you free the hostages.
Hamas is currently holding hostages in order to force stall, for example, an Israeli attack against them.
That's the entire goal of holding a ho- So again, that sort of language?
Bad.
Other bad Trump stuff, like over the weekend he suggested that the January 6th committee should go to jail.
Okay, now.
The case that he is making here is that the January 6th panel withheld evidence, including a denial from the Trump driver.
They selectively presented evidence to the American public.
That is really bad.
And I think that the January 6th committee did a terrible job.
She should go to jail.
Again, this is Trump's colorful language.
OK, so that's some bad Trump.
But again, the same Trump that is supposedly bad is also good.
So now it's time.
For some countervailing good Trump.
Again, he's all the things.
Donald Trump is good.
He's bad.
He's like all the things.
Okay, so here is Donald Trump over the weekend burying Jimmy Kimmel.
Like, this is good.
He fights the culture war and, you know, Republicans love it and they kind of should because Jimmy Kimmel is a jackass.
What is up with you and Jimmy Kimmel?
Okay, now, see if you can guess which former president just posted that on Twitter.
Anyone?
No?
Well, thank you, President Trump.
Because during the Academy Awards you posted, has there ever been a worse host than Jimmy Kimmel at the Oscars?
Less than an average person trying too hard.
And he then read that on the air and then took a crack at you.
And what else did I say?
I said some other pretty good things.
Okay.
Like, that's good.
He should.
He should slap at Jimmy Kimmel.
George Slopidopoulos, right?
No, look, look, Jimmy Kimmel is every night, he hits me, I guess.
His ratings are terrible.
He's not a talented guy.
I hear he hits me all the time.
So I figured I'd hit him because I thought he was a lousy host.
Okay, like, that's good.
He should, he should slap a Jimmy Kimmel.
Jimmy Kimmel's terrible.
We'll get some more on this in just one second.
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Other things that Trump said, here's a good thing he said on policy over the weekend.
That was dramatically misinterpreted by the media.
So Joe Biden has been telling Israel not to go into Rafa.
Joe Biden has been telling Israel that they somehow need to leave Hamas in place,
which is absurd and ridiculous. We'll get to it in a little bit.
Here was Donald Trump saying what Israel actually should do.
He happens to be right about this.
In light of those comments by Senator Schumer, what would be your message if you were to talk to Bibi and
Yahoo?
Well, I think you have to finish it up and do it quickly and get back to the world of peace.
We need peace in the world.
Okay, he is not saying there that Israel should not go into Rafah.
He literally says, finish it up and do it quickly, which by the way, is the best advice to the Israeli government.
If you want the war to be over quickly, it should be over quickly.
And by the way, for PR purposes, the reality is that Israel's big mistake, if it's made a mistake in the war that it's currently fighting against Hamas, is it should have gone hard and should have gone fast because the American attention span is only about five minutes.
And so if you go fast, even if it's more brutal, Americans are willing to take that.
If it drags on longer, Americans are not.
I mean, it's just an unfortunate reality of foreign policy.
Americans are very time-bound.
So if Israel wants public support, they should move quickly.
They shouldn't be dithering around with Joe Biden.
In any case, Donald Trump is right about that.
That is good Trump.
For his part, again, all of the panic that's setting in is because they've tried everything on Trump.
What is left to try on him?
There's only one thing that could drop between now and the election that would maybe affect the outcome of this election in any serious way, aside from whatever possible unknown unknowns are out there.
And that is the possibility of a criminal conviction.
What the polls show is that Trump leaves Biden.
If he is criminally convicted between now and the election, then some voters say they will switch over to Biden.
Now, it depends to me on what that criminal conviction looks like.
Presumably, when people say criminally convicted, they think that means that he goes to jail.
Yes, if Donald Trump is literally sitting in a jail cell on election day, that's going to damage him in the polling.
Aside from that, what are the other things that could happen?
Well, the truth is, most of the other bad things that could happen cannot happen to Trump.
He's not the current president of the United States, and he is a known quantity.
Most of the bad things that have yet to happen can happen to Joe Biden.
As I said last week, The most plausible reality to happen between now and the election cycle is some sign of serious health crisis for Joe Biden.
Joe Biden remains a confused elderly man.
Here's video of him over the weekend, literally not knowing how to get out of the rain.
I mean, this is just... he is not with us.
He's shaking somebody's hand, he gets under the umbrella, and then he looks around like
where am I supposed to go?
What's happening?
Should I walk out into the crowd?
Should I?
I'm just going to stand here, not knowing quite where to go.
And then he has to be physically guided by his security.
Where should I go?
There's literally only one place to go, Joe.
It's raining outside and there's a door right there.
Ain't no more doors.
That's the only door.
But that's our president.
Meanwhile, by the way, report from the New York Post.
President Biden's newest shoes have opened up renewed debate about his health and physical condition, with some speculating they were designed to prevent the president from falling.
Apparently, his handlers are forcing him to wear a new pair of lifestyle sneakers because he trips so much.
Observers have likened the shoes to boat anchors and piers.
Apparently, they are lifestyle sneakers made by the shoe brand Hoka, Inside Edition notes that the shoes are quote designed for maximum comfort and support while walking or hiking.
Here we go!
Many observers couldn't help but notice his footwear.
Are those sneakers?
Yep, they're so-called lifestyle sneakers made by Hoka, designed for maximum comfort and support while walking or hiking.
And here they are, the Joe Biden sneaker.
They're made by Hoka.
These are called the Hoka Transport, and as you can see, they look quite comfortable.
They have a wide sole, no doubt great for stability, and the president does have a history of stumbling.
Yeah, that would be it.
So he's basically wearing snowshoes around at this point so that he can glide over the grass or something.
Yes, things are going badly for the president of the United States, and that is why we have to outlaw jokes and also free speech.
That is the most important thing for us to do at this point.
Meanwhile, under Joe Biden, the foreign policy of the United States is falling apart.
So in a story that's not being covered as much as it should be, according to the Wall Street Journal, Niger has made a decision to end its counterterrorism alliance with Washington.
That came after senior U.S.
officials accused the country's ruling junta of secretly exploring a deal to allow Iran access to its uranium reserves, according to both Nigerian and U.S.
officials.
So U.S.
had a cooperative program with Niger.
Niger, of course, is the source of a lot of uranium.
Iran is seeking a bomb, and so they've been attempting to get uranium, apparently, from Niger.
And now, Niger has said that they do not want American counterterrorism operatives in the country at all
to monitor what is going on.
Yet another foreign policy win for the Biden administration.
By the way, last week, they signed another $10 billion waiver
so that money could flow into Iran, which is currently fostering terrorism,
not only around the Middle East, but also in Africa, because Iran is one of the world's worst players.
The decision to end military cooperation with the United States was announced Saturday night by a spokesperson for the Nigerian junta.
It deals a serious blow to the Biden administration's efforts to contain a sprawling Islamist insurgency in the Sahel, a semi-arid region south of the Sahara.
It could affect a $110 million base that was built by the United States and is used to fly surveillance drones over West Africa.
It could also possibly force the withdrawal of more than 600 American troops still stationed in Niger.
Now, again, the reason that we have troops in Niger is because they provide enormous counterintelligence resources.
We have troops stationed all over the world, by the way.
We have tons of troops all over in Southeast Asia.
We have troops in Europe.
We have troops all over the place.
American officials have been working to salvage their relationship with Niger since the country's military ousted President Mohammed Bizaoum in a July coup, triggering restrictions on military aid under American law.
The junta has been tightening its ties with Russia and two other neighbors that are ruled by people aligned with the Russians.
In recent months, U.S.
and other Western officials say they'd obtained intelligence indicating that the junta was considering a deal with Iran That would give Tehran access to some of Niger's vast uranium reserves.
The U.S.
concern was that discussions on such an agreement proceeded in January, when Niger's junta-appointed prime minister met with President Ibrahim Raisi and other senior Iranian officials in Tehran.
Apparently, these had reached a very advanced stage.
But because the Biden administration is committed to the idea that Iran is actually not a nefarious world actor, they don't want conflict.
What's wrong with Iran?
We should continue signing them checks.
They're actually, once again, pitting American taxpayers against American taxpayers.
We are sending money to Iran, and then we are also spending money on placing troops in places like Niger to prevent Iran from getting nuclear material.
Everything is going great under the Biden administration.
The concerns came to a head over the past week.
Mollie Fee, U.S.
Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, traveled for talks with the junta on the two countries' future relations and what the State Department said would be discussions on Niger's return to a democratic path.
Fee was accompanied by another senior Defense Department official.
During the meetings, Fee raised Washington's alarm with officials in Niger about that agreement with Iran and criticized the lack of process in returning Niger to an elected government.
And raise U.S.
concerns about the imminent arrival of Russian military trainers and equipment.
But the problem, of course, is that the Biden administration refuses to apply either carrots or sticks.
It's like, what if we just lecture you about democracy and offer you nothing, and then also tacitly threaten you, but we don't actually, we're not actually going to do anything.
I wonder why that program isn't winning.
Speaking of which, Vladimir Putin has now extended his rule after another predetermined vote in Russia.
So things are going well over there.
According to the New York Times, state television showed Putin addressing supporters at his election headquarters and breaking his silence on the death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, telling reporters it was, quote, an unfortunate incident.
Apparently, preliminary results showed that Putin had garnered 88% of the vote.
Now, again, those are the kinds of numbers that don't exist in real life.
They exist in places where democracy is effectively just a cover for an authoritarian regime.
So Putin has now solidified his grasp on Russia, obviously.
Joe Biden shouting about democracy actually doesn't accomplish anything.
So things are going really well.
But if the United States is going to place pressure on a democracy, obviously they're going to place pressure on the place that has had five elections in the last four years, Israel.
That's what happened last week when Chuck Schumer took to the floor of the Senate to explain that Israel needed another election.
Now, Israel has a governmental system.
It is, in fact, a parliamentary democracy.
Israel holds elections literally all the time.
They, right now, have a governing coalition because they won the last election.
At some point, presumably, that governing coalition will fall apart.
There has not been a full term in which a prime minister served four years in the Israeli elections for several decades.
Usually, these coalition governments hold for two, maybe three years, and then they fall apart and there's a new election.
But the administration has been putting pressure on Israel.
Why is the administration trying to oust Bibi?
Because they're promoting a lie.
The lie is that there is not widespread public support in Israel for going into Rafah.
Over the weekend, the Biden administration made its Discontent with Israel finishing off Hamas in Rafah, that's the last major city that Israel has to control in Gaza in order to end Hamas's rule in Gaza.
The Biden administration is doing its best to forestall that, apparently.
John Kirby, who to this point has been pretty pro-Israel, kind of reversed himself on Sunday.
He suggested that the United States would not support an operation in Rafah, which means you leave Hamas in place.
I mean, that's what it means.
As you mentioned, the Israeli war cabinet approved its plan for Rafah.
You said you haven't seen it.
But President Biden at one point said that was a red line for him and then kind of walked that back.
He said it's a red line.
It's not a red line.
What is it?
It's no different.
If they go in the same way they've been going in in other places, if they don't move those refugees, and I don't know where they'd move them.
Well, again, I don't want to get ahead of where we are.
They haven't moved into Rafah.
I would just reiterate what the president has said many times.
We would not support such an operation unless or until they've got a credible, executable plan to take care of the 1.5 million refugees that have been pushed into Rafah because of operations in Khan Yunis to the north and Gaza City even further to the north.
Okay, so first of all, Israel is in fact creating that plan.
Apparently they're going to shift that population back up north towards central Gaza.
They're not just going to go in with 1.5 million people still there.
They're going to do the same thing they did in Khan Yunis.
It's the same thing they did in Gaza City.
They're going to create humanitarian corridors and all the rest.
But this is the Biden administration attempting to create daylight.
And meanwhile, the media doing their lapdog best to try and prop up this insane position from the administration.
Again, the war cabinet in Israel is a unity government.
It includes the person most likely to win an election if an election were held today, and Al-Bibi Netanyahu, Benny Gantz.
But here is Dana Bash doing the work of the administration.
She was quizzing Netanyahu on, will there be a new election next year?
Will you commit to an election?
As though Bibi is an authoritarian leader and has the capacity to simply cancel elections.
He does not.
That is not how the system works.
Any more than the president of the United States can simply cancel elections.
Israel is a fully functioning democracy.
They have elections way more often than any other democracy.
And here is Dana Bash pretending that Bibi is some sort of Putin-esque figure.
There were other polls in Israel, three major Israeli television stations that said what Israelis also support are early elections.
That's what I really want to focus on here.
Is Senator Schumer not calling to sort of topple the government, but specifically says when the war winds down, will you commit to calling new elections?
That's my question.
Will you?
Dana, two-thirds, first of all, what you said is wrong.
The vast majority of Israelis oppose early elections until the war doesn't end.
We've just had many polls on that.
Look, a lot of the polls are, you know, are twisted.
Channel 12 says 64% of Israelis support early elections.
But all polls show that's not true.
No, I'm afraid that they asked them the question, do you support it during the war, and they said no.
But that's not what Schumer is calling for.
He's calling for new elections when the war winds down.
Well, we'll see when we win the war, and until we win the war, I think Israelis understand that if we were to have elections now, before the war is won, resoundingly won, we would have at least six months of national paralysis, which means we would lose the war.
We're fighting these barbarians that are not merely threatening the survival of the world, but threatening everything that we hold dear together.
This is so insane.
This is so insane.
Notice how Dash, even in this clip, shifts her position.
She goes from, will you commit to new elections right now?
And he's like, no.
And she says, well, the polls say you should.
That's not true.
65% of Israelis say there should be new elections after the war is over.
So he's right about that.
And she's lying.
Then she shifts because she realizes she's made a mistake.
And she says, will you commit to new elections after that?
That's not how it works.
You call new elections in a parliamentary democracy when your coalition falls apart, or alternatively, when the Prime Minister decides to dissolve the government and create new elections.
If you're going to cite polls as to how the government should be currently constituted, Joe Biden is no longer president.
The majority of the American people do not like Joe Biden.
A plurality of the American people favor Donald Trump.
That's not how elections work.
That's not an election.
It's a poll.
But again, this is all playing defense for the Biden administration's incompetent, feckless policy with regard to Israel and Hamas.
The reality is that both America and Israel would be much better off if Israel wiped Hamas off the face of the earth.
Which, by the way, is what Israel is going to pursue, because any government that does not pursue that is going to immediately be thrown out of office, as everyone knows.
Meanwhile, the controversy continues over whether TikTok will have to dissolve, or whether TikTok will in fact sell its Chinese stake to some American or European-owned conglomerate.
According to the Washington Post, a foresale of TikTok within 180 days, as House passed legislation requires, would be one of the thorniest, most complicated transactions in corporate history, posing financial, technical, and geopolitical challenges experts say could render a sale impractical and increase the likelihood that the app will actually be banned nationwide.
Again, this is going to go to the Senate.
It will be unclear what happens in the Senate.
It apparently faces a slow walk in the Senate.
Senate is slowing this thing down, according to the Washington Post.
Some senators fear slower negotiations could allow TikTok's furious lobbying blitz to neutralize the push in the upper chamber.
TikTok has unleashed a sprawling attempt to thwart the bill.
Now, again, what is very clear here is that China will not sell its share in TikTok.
ByteDance, which is the front company for China, they're not going to sell it, and they're not going to allow their algorithm to be sold.
Why?
Because it's a Chinese weapon.
That's the whole point.
The entire argument with regard to TikTok is pretty obvious.
This is a Chinese op.
As a Chinese op, their algorithm is part of the op.
Their control is part of the op.
They're not just going to give that up for a few billion dollars.
It's the Chinese government.
They have a massive economy.
There's no reason they would do that.
They would rather kill TikTok and create political fissures in the West than allow their proprietary algorithmic excellence to be distributed in the West.
They don't want any of that.
And so it is, in fact, quite likely at this point that if this thing passes, the Senate TikTok will be dissolved.
And you know what?
Good.
Good!
Better that we don't have a PSYOP running on American soil than that we do have a PSYOP running on American soil.
That's not a CIA theory.
That's not because of the Jews.
That's because TikTok has been, for a very long time, a Chinese app, and because it is not just a Chinese app, it gathers data on Americans.
Everyone's known this.
There have been bans on TikTok throughout Europe since like 2019, 2020.
Donald Trump signed a ban on federal devices using TikTok in 2020.
It is completely banned in certain countries like India.
Again, there's a reason for that.
It is not good that America's enemies should have this much influence over Americans.
That would be a very, very bad thing.
And that's what the bill says.
Representative Mike Gallagher, who leads a subcommittee in Congress that faces itself against Chinese aggression.
Here's Representative Gallagher explaining what could happen with a forced sale.
Do you actually believe a forced sale will happen before November?
It absolutely could.
It would be in the financial interest of ByteDance's investors to effectuate a for sale.
I think the user experience on the app would improve and you wouldn't have this concern over being propagandized.
The opaque algorithm influencing what information you see, that would go away.
So I imagine it would actually increase in value.
And I think all the more reason why we have to tackle this now.
The closer we get to an election, the risk just gets greater and greater.
You mentioned that unclassified DNI report.
Every single intelligence community official that testified before the Intelligence Committee last week suggested under its current ownership structure, TikTok is a threat to national security, which is why we are trying to force TikTok to separate from ByteDance and by extension from the Chinese Communist Party.
Okay, so he's right about all of that.
Meanwhile, Kara Swisher, the terrible columnist at the New York Times, who's wrong about nearly everything, she says, don't worry, TikTok isn't going away.
It's going to be fine.
TikTok is going to survive.
I get the First Amendment arguments and everything else, but TikTok's not going away, kids.
This is the thing that TikTok's using a little bit that is, I think, disingenuous in that it's not going away.
Someone's either going to buy it or they're going to be allowed to continue to operate with some guardrails, which is happening now with Project Texas, which I won't go into details, but there's got to be some way to monitor this particular service more than the others.
She happens to be correct about that.
All the panic over TikTok.
Oh my God, it's a censorship regime from the American government.
That's not what this is.
Read the bill.
Literally read it.
It specifically cites four countries and four countries only whose foreign ownership and or control of a social media company is not allowed in the United States.
Those countries would be Russia, China, Iran, North Korea.
That's it.
Ain't no more countries.
Again, the notion that if An American-owned entity violates the precepts of the federal government.
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