Andrew Clavin and Jenna Ellis dissect Trump’s media war, mocking polls and the New York Times’s frustration over his bypassing narratives while exposing leftist censorship—from edited Biden scandals to weaponized institutions like IRS audits. Ellis, Trump’s "secret president" and Liberty University legal advisor, argues governors like Cuomo violated the 10th Amendment by arbitrarily restricting churches but not businesses during COVID-19, while courts may now use pandemic rules to chip away at Roe v. Wade. The episode frames free speech as under siege, with media enforcing orthodoxy while Trump’s bluntness—flaws and all—exposes systemic hypocrisy. [Automatically generated summary]
Journalists and other wastes of God's precious gift of life have become concerned that Donald Trump's daily briefings may make him more popular.
Polls currently show presumptive Democrat candidate Joe Biden would defeat Trump if the election were held today in a country full of idiots voting in total darkness.
Trump, however, leads the polls in voter enthusiasm, although enthusiasm for Biden did tick up after he made a snowman out of rubber bands.
Commenting on the situation, Blithering Prevarication III, the editor-in-chief of the New York Times, a former newspaper, told his mother in his daily prayer to the image of her he drew on a doily with a Crayola, quote, Trump has craftily created a situation where the public can look at him directly rather than through the green fog of our descriptions of him.
This creates a clear and present danger that I will strangle on the bile of my own frustrated hatred, fall down a flight of stairs, and land on the dog, killing both him and my completely unearned reputation for honest journalism.
Clearly, this would be bad for the nation by making me look like a shrunken-souled moral dwarf who doesn't even own a dog anymore, unquote.
To combat the problem, journalists have made several suggestions.
For instance, when Trump gives his briefings, they may try putting their fingers in their ears and singing la la la in very loud voices in the hope that when they can't hear what Trump is saying, he ceases to exist.
They've also thought of rising from their chairs as one, dropping their pants and mooning Trump, although they're afraid they might be mistaken for Brian Stelter.
And they've thought of just lying on the floor on their sides, turning in circles and screaming, I hate you, although they've been doing that for three weeks and it hasn't worked so far.
Many journalists are so upset with the success of Trump's briefings, they almost wish Americans would stop dying so the briefings would stop.
Almost.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winding, also singing hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped tipsy-topsy, the world is zippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day, hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing!
Oh, hurrah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hoorah!
All right, a snowman out of rubber bands.
Who writes this stuff?
For some time, I've noticed that while I personally remain an absurdly jolly person, my perspective on the country and the world has grown kind of dark.
I noticed this as I was finishing the last book of Another Kingdom.
It occurred to me that while the book is clearly a story of faith and courage and hope, its view of human society is not what you would call particularly flattering.
At one point, I actually considered whether I wanted to rewrite the book to make the world look less overwhelmed with corruption.
And obviously, if you listen to the podcast, I decided no, the truth is always best.
The odd thing is that what bothers me about our current moment is not all the stuff I disagree with.
It's the widespread fear of speaking simple truths.
I can endure the rise of idiot socialism on the left, even the possible decay of our constitutional republic, history, be like that sometimes.
What has darkened my view is what I'll call the increasing police power of the empire of lies, the increasing willingness of powerful interests like corporations and politicians to shut down honest approaches to reality.
It doesn't bother me a bit that thinkers should explore different views of gender, for instance.
It bothers me enormously that you can lose your job for saying men and women are different.
It doesn't bother me that people have reinvented racism as identity politics and intersectionalism.
Tribalism is a human constant.
What bothers me is that the challenge, this flagrant leftist racism, can cost you your livelihood and your reputation.
It doesn't bother me that there are different views about gay people.
It sincerely bothers me that traditional views have been rewritten as some kind of raging hate, which they're clearly not.
All of this arises from leftist ideas, Marxist ideas, specifically the idea that our values, our morals, our consciences are false constructs created by powerful interests, and they have to be deconstructed and remade by the all-knowing left to ensure absolute human equality.
The result is censorship enforced by lawsuits, firings, social media and news media mobbing.
and the fear these sorts of practices create.
In the slave state of the Soviet Union, or as we now call it Bernie Land, there used to be something called double consciousness.
This was when a Soviet censor had to read forbidden material about the success of capitalism and the failure of socialism.
Then he had to censor that material to create a false narrative for the public, and then he had to go on believing the censored version that he himself had created, even though he knew the truth.
It was kind of induced mental illness.
Describing the world as it is is the first necessary step toward a joyful light and toward right and wrong, toward right moral action.
The postmodern left, by enforcing their lies about the human condition with seriously crippling penalties, are making describing the world as it is impossible, and they're imposing that Soviet double consciousness on all of us.
We increasingly live in an America and a West where only heroes and madmen are willing to describe the world honestly.
Let's hope we have enough heroes and madmen to make this change.
All right, once again, let me say a deep thank you to our sponsors who are sticking with us during this time.
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So what you want to do is breathe in slowly and out through your mouth and figure out how to spell Clavin.
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There are no E's in Clavin, but we will make it look as easy as possible.
The mailbag is tomorrow.
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Then you want to subscribe if you haven't subscribed already because you can't get in the mailbag without a subscription.
Then go to dailywire.com, hit the podcast button, hit the Andrew Clavin podcast, hit the mailbag symbol, and you can ask me anything you want.
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Will they change your life for the better is an entirely different question.
Dean BK's Unfathomable Answer00:15:22
We can't possibly comment on that.
So yesterday, Trump held one of his briefings and he just torched the press corps.
It was like watching a guy with a flamethrower.
Somebody put out a cartoon afterwards of just all the different press outlets on fire, charred black, and Trump saying, any other questions?
He played a video showing that they acted slower on the virus than he did.
Let's play a little bit of that.
It's cut eight.
People should be more concerned right now with the flu in this country.
A lot of people are concerned about the coronavirus because they're hearing a lot of news about it right now.
But the reality is comparing it to the flu, for example, it's not even close to being at that stage.
What if it is worse?
Is this a moment where maybe countries put politics aside, a little bit of pride aside?
And do we have U.S. officials?
Should U.S. professionals such as yourself get involved?
How worried should Americans be about coronavirus?
Coronavirus is not going to cause a major issue in the United States.
Well, we've asked them to accelerate whatever they're doing in terms of a vaccine.
We will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United States for the next 30 days.
To unleash the full power of the federal government in this effort today, I am officially declaring a national emergency.
A great big F you to the press, a video they're forced to sit there during the briefing and watch.
CNN is cutting away.
They run these afterwards.
They're running these kind of crybaby Chirons like Trump uses task force briefing to try and rewrite history to the truth.
Trump melts down in angry response to reports.
He ignored virus warnings, just unbelievable stuff.
That was Jim Acosta, you know.
And the thing is, the whole thing about the press is Trump is mean, he's crazy, he's angry.
But you know, the thing is, it's not about Trump.
The fact is, it takes a Trump to break through their walls of lies.
And that's what I'm talking about.
They don't know.
They don't entirely know that they are tools of the postmodern left.
They don't know that they've become oppressive.
They don't know that everything they say is a lie because they're all surrounded by people who agree with them.
But we know and people are afraid and it took a Trump to stop and fight back.
It's an amazing, amazing thing.
All right.
You know, we're going to talk more about that press conference because it really was, it really was a moment where you saw, oh, this is why people love this guy and it's why they hate him because you also said a couple of things that were kind of goofy and we understand that it's his goofiness.
It's the fact that he is living on planet Trump that makes him able to do this when other people are afraid.
They're afraid of losing their jobs.
They're afraid of losing their sponsors.
They're afraid of losing their friends.
They're afraid of losing their social media platform.
And they have created, it's the left, it's Jim Acosta and CNN and MSNBC and NBC that have created this fear.
And they don't know that they're the tools of a leftist philosophy that has been taught in universities.
They are just unknowing, unwitting tools because they're part of that philosophy, because everyone around them is part of that philosophy.
Everyone they know is part of that philosophy.
All the cool kids to their minds are part of that philosophy and they have become fine with it, fine with being the tool of that oppression.
And the fact that we're afraid is just a mark of how deplorable we are.
The fact that we're afraid of losing our job, well, if you weren't racist, if you weren't sexist, if you weren't all the things that the left has created, the ideas that the left has created as being the seven deadly sins, then you wouldn't have this problem.
Everything would be at peace.
But what they're really telling you is they are in control of reality.
Like the old show, The Outer Limits from the 60s, We're in Control of Your Television Set.
Don't touch that dial.
Well, Donald Trump has touched the dial and he's changed the channel and it drives them nuts.
And it took a guy like him to do it.
I mean, this is something I've been saying from the beginning after ever since his election.
I said, you know, the people knew what they were doing when they elected this guy.
They saw that he was out there.
They saw that he was different, that he was eccentric, that sometimes he said things that were not defensible.
I think a lot of us, even the people who like him, see that about him.
But it requires that to give us a voice against this incredibly massive power.
You know, yesterday we talked about Dean Bakay at the New York Times, a former newspaper, and the fact that he's basically saying they put out this story on Joe Biden, which was basically excusing him for the accusation that he had pushed a woman up against the wall and shoved his hand into her body.
They are saying, well, no, this didn't happen.
There's seven other women who say that he did similar things that they didn't like, though not as graphic and not as bad.
Clearly, a situation sort of like the Kavanaugh situation, except this lady who made the accusation told people about it at the time, remembered the details in ways that Christina Blasey Ford did not.
However, obviously, the Times went out and they just went after Kavanaugh with a pitchfork, where this they're doing everything they can to cover up.
So they obviously knew that they had blown themselves up and made themselves look like the corrupt, dishonest, leftist liars that they are.
They knew, you know, the thing is, when they don't want to be exposed to themselves, they don't care if you know because they don't care about you.
You're deplorable.
They care that they know.
They care that they can't, that that little fog of self-righteousness and virtue that the left has created for itself, when that parts, they get upset.
So they actually ran an interview with BK in the New York Times in which he was asked questions about, you know, why they did this, why they did this.
Like, for instance, the guy asked the question, I want to ask about some edits that were made after publication.
The deletion of the second half of the sentence, the Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, and then they deleted the words beyond the hugs, kisses, and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable.
Why did you do that?
Here is Dean BK's answer word for word.
Even though a lot of us, including me, had looked at it before the story went into the paper, I think that the campaign, meaning Joe Biden's campaign, I think that the campaign thought that the phrasing was awkward and made it look like there were other instances in which he had been accused of sexual misconduct, and that's not what the sentence was intended to say.
In other words, the sentence wasn't intended to tell the truth, but it suggested the truth.
Biden's campaign complained.
So dutifully, Dean BK and the New York Times edited for Biden's campaign.
How corrupt is that?
How insanely corrupt is it?
How corrupt is it that Dean BK doesn't know it's corrupt?
He's publishing this in his own newspaper, not because he's so honest he's admitting to corruption, but because he doesn't know he's corrupt.
He is immersed, completely immersed, in this leftist soup where our false consciousness has to be corrected in order to create the universal equality that we're all searching for.
It's an amazing, amazing phenomenon.
And what else is amazing is Chris Cuomo, who has been sick, he's had the coronavirus.
I hope he's getting better.
I think he is.
He went on his podcast and said that in this moment of facing illness and being sequestered, he came to terms with a lot of things, a lot of things that he's doing in his life, and he had this to say about his job.
Well, I don't like what I do professionally.
I've decided.
I like doing this show.
I like talking to you guys.
But I don't value indulging irrationality, hyper-partisanship.
I don't think it's worth my time anymore.
Why?
Because I don't want to spend my time trafficking in things that I think are ridiculous.
I don't want to spend my time on television talking to Democrats about things that I don't really believe they mean.
And I don't want to spend my time talking to Republicans about them parroting things that they feel they have to say.
The hell was that?
You know, this explains an anomaly that I have noticed.
I've pointed it out two or three times on the show.
The fact that a lot of times you're listening to Chris Cuomo and everybody calls him Fredo, the stupid brother, and you'd see him with Don Lemon and you think, this guy and Don Lemon are the two stupidest people on TV.
And then every now and again, Chris Cuomo will say something.
You go, wait a minute, that's a really good point.
That's a fair point.
That is an actual intelligent insight.
And it's obvious that he is chained to this corrupt system.
And when he got out of it, when he broke out of it and got sick, listen, he and I are not going to agree on anything.
That's fine.
I got no problem with that.
People disagree.
But I think that he went into that sick room and he suddenly thought, you know, I'm in this system that does nothing but churn out nonsense.
And it does.
It does nothing but churn a CNN.
There is nothing of worth on CNN.
And, you know, the thing about it is, listen, we all feel these boundaries.
I mean, I feel like there are things that, well, you know, I say them because I never shut up about anything.
But, you know, I know that every time I criticize Trump, I get hit by the Trumpians.
You know, I get hit if I criticize Trump by the Trumpians.
And if I say he's a great guy and he's doing a good job, I get hit, oh, I'm in a cult.
I'm in a cult.
You know, so you know that you're always against these things.
You always have these limits on what people will allow you to say.
Now, on this show, I say because I just don't care that much about what people are saying about me.
But I think this is an insight that he had.
So Trump hits these guys.
And let's play a little bit more of this video.
Let's play clip nine, where he's showing that basically he's done a good job, which I think is actually true.
As there were more cases and it was clear that it was spreading out of China where it originated, the president took this move that he was widely criticized for by Democrats and even some Republicans at the time, which was he halted a number of flights from China into the U.S.
The idea was to halt the spread of the disease, keep transmissions to a minimum.
He was accused of xenophobia.
He was accused of making a racist move.
At the end of the day, it was probably effective because it did actually take a pretty aggressive measure against the spread of the virus.
His team is on it.
They've been responsive late at night, early in the morning.
And they've thus far been doing everything that they can do.
And I want to say thank you.
You know, that the first woman in there was Maggie Haberman, whom I'm always hammering for her dishonesty and her bias, which is real.
But, you know, this is the thing.
That is a very, very different picture of Trump, obviously, than the media wants to portray.
So they say he's rewriting history.
He's just telling his side of the story, and he's doing it fearlessly, and he's doing it in their faces.
And that is what everybody loves to see.
And everybody loves to see it because everybody has been oppressed.
It is oppressive to have to lie.
It is oppressive to have to say, oh, men and women are the same, or women who think they're men or men, or, you know, black people are not responsible for themselves because of the history of oppression.
It's oppressive to have to lie like that all the time.
And people love watching him torch the people who enforce those lies.
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All right, so then Trump goes on and he says something dumb, uh, and it's just dumb.
I, you know, as always, with Fauci and Trump both, I've said this before.
I admire Fauci because when I listened to what he actually said, as opposed to what the press said he said or the headline said he said, he was always being very clear.
He's always saying things like, look, I don't want to make a judgment here because these computer models get readjusted all the time.
They're frequently wrong.
It's never at the worst case scenario.
It's not going to reach be as bad as this.
But right now, our computer model says 200,000 deaths.
Headline next day is, 200,000 to die, Fauci says, you know, and this is what they do to him.
And of course, to Trump, it's even worse.
It's unfathomable the way they take what he says out of context.
However, he was, you know, they're now talking about reopening for business.
We seem to have hit the peak.
It's good news.
The states are getting together and talking about it.
The states, remember, I've said this a million times.
All the people who are saying, oh, we're living in tyranny.
The states do have a lot of what's called plenary power in enforcing health regulations that the federal government is not supposed to have.
And so Trump says, I make the decision when the economy reopens.
I have absolute power.
There's Cup 3.
If a governor issued a state home and you say my authority, the president's authority.
Never mind.
Because it's not me.
This is when somebody's the president of the United States, the authority is total.
And that's the way it's got to be.
The authority is totally total.
It's total.
And the governors know that.
So if the governor's side of that, now you have a couple of bands of, could you rescind that order?
You have a couple of bands of Democrat governors, but they will agree to it.
They will agree to it.
But the authority of the president of the United States having to do with the subject we're talking about is total.
No idea what he's talking about there.
Obviously, there's no total power supposedly anywhere in the United States of America.
It certainly doesn't rest with the president and how the states decide to reopen their economies.
His decisions at the federal level will, of course, be important.
If Democrats try to drag their feet, there'll be enormous pressure on to get him.
But the thing about it is, none of us believes this.
I mean, you can love Trump till doomsday.
Nobody believes that what he just said is true.
It's not true.
He doesn't have absolute power about anything.
I mean, this is still America, America with the flu, but it's still America.
He doesn't have absolute power.
It's going to be the states who are going to have to make a lot of decisions.
You know, Gavin Newsom is going to have to decide when he wants to take off certain local orders that have been put out about mask wearing and things like this.
In Michigan, the governor is going to have to decide when she's going to take off her military uniform and the big Napoleon hat with a feather in it.
That's for her to decide.
She wants to walk around like that, goose-stepping across the balcony of the State House.
Why Trump Helps Free Speech00:08:43
That's something that Trump can't stop her from doing.
Obviously, he has tremendous power.
But the reason we don't care when Trump says dopey things is two big reasons, okay?
One is he has not done one single thing.
I cannot think, maybe I'm missing something.
I cannot think of one single thing that Donald Trump, President Donald Trump, has done that has hampered my freedom.
My constitutional freedom has not been hampered in one way that I can think of by President Donald Trump.
Whereas, whereas people firing people or hounding your sponsors or destroying your economic life and your livelihood because you said something that they disagree with and they have suddenly deemed it hateful, that does destroy your freedom.
Barack Obama, you know, using the IRS to shut down conservative voices during re-election, that does harm the process by which your freedom lives.
Donald Trump has done none of that.
So we know that Donald Trump says goofy stuff sometimes.
He goes off the top of his, you know, he talks off the top of his head and he loves to troll the press and sometimes he makes all I don't know anybody.
I don't know anybody who loves Trump so much that he is not sometimes made crazy by the things Trump says.
But he doesn't do things.
He doesn't do bad things where the press does.
The Democrats do.
The Democrats have done things again and again that have hampered our freedom, engineering that complete hoax about Russian collusion, impeaching the president over zippity-do-nothing, you know, holding up, distracting the nation, distracting the nation over absolutely nothing.
These are things that do hamper the right actions of government and do hamper our freedoms.
And Trump doesn't do those things.
And the second reason we don't mind is because the fact that Trump is a little bit nuts is why he has the courage to take them on.
The fact that he does not lose a minute's sleep worrying about whether they call him a racist, worrying about whether they call him a sexist.
He doesn't lose a minute's sleep over it.
That takes, you've got to have a link missing somewhere.
You've got to be just a little, you've got, you either have to be like me living on another mental planet, or you have to be like Trump who's living on this planet but just doesn't give a damn.
And I think that that's one of the reasons we, every now and again, he says something like that, and we shrug.
We shrug.
He's not hampering my freedom.
I don't care if he says that.
If he does anything about it, I will be the first person to acknowledge that he has stepped over the line.
But he doesn't.
The words come out of his mouth.
He doesn't do a thing.
Whereas, whereas they come after this thing, this false narrative they're always putting up, it's so amazing.
They love Fauci because he is a medical expert, so his predictions have been catastrophic, right?
He has to give Trump the bad news.
That's his job.
It's Trump's job to decide.
It's Trump's job to decide whether to listen to Fauci.
You can't blame Fauci for coming in and saying, look, the computer model says a gazillion people are going to die.
That's what he's working with.
That's what he has to do.
You know, the idea that somehow he's to blame for that, you can hear when you actually listen to him and not to reports about him.
You can hear that he speaks in a very careful way.
It's up to Trump to decide.
The fact that he went on TV and said, and I played it yesterday, and he didn't say, oh, Trump didn't start soon enough.
This whole argument, by the way, is an argument for babies.
Nobody gets these things right all the way.
I mean, this is an argument for children.
I don't even care about it.
But I just have to put it forward because it's this false narrative.
So he went out and he clarified that, no, it was not Trump who was holding back.
This is cut five.
The first and only time that Dr. Burks and I went in and formally made a recommendation to the president to actually have a, quote, shutdown in the sense of not really shutdown, but to really have strong mitigation.
We discussed it.
Obviously, there would be concern by some that, in fact, that might have some negative consequences.
Nonetheless, the president listened to the recommendation and went to the mitigation.
Okay, so Trump acted fast.
They hate this.
So Paula Reed from CBS, she goes after him.
You said there was pushback.
Where did that pushback come from?
No, it wasn't.
That was the wrong choice of words.
You know what it was when people discuss, not necessarily in front of the president, when people discuss, they say, well, you know, this is going to have maybe a harmful effect on this or on that.
So it was a poor choice of words.
There wasn't anybody saying, no, you shouldn't do that.
Are you doing this voluntarily or does it?
No, as you know, I'm doing it.
Everything I do is voluntarily.
Please.
Don't even imply that.
So suddenly they love this guy because he's giving the worst readings to Trump and they want the economy to shut down.
They want things to go badly so he looks bad.
They love him.
And then he says, you know, but Trump has acted really well.
Suddenly he has no integrity.
Suddenly he's not doing this voluntarily.
Trump is twisting his arm behind his back and forcing him to say it.
I mean, changed on a dime.
And that's the thing.
Now, Fauci's a big, powerful guy.
He can deal with that.
But not everybody can deal with that, right?
Especially if your employer is doing it to you.
If you have one opinion, you're a great guy.
If you have another opinion, you're fired.
You stink.
You're nothing.
You're scum.
You know, if you're going to host the Oscars, you're great.
You're wonderful.
You're a black comedian.
That's terrific.
Oh, wait.
You said something about gay people 20 years ago that they don't like.
You're out.
You can't have that job.
That's the world we're living in.
The press enforces that world.
The press is part of that world.
There's no, see, if the press were reporting on that world, if it were saying one side wants to censor everybody and make sure you get fired if you say things they don't like, and the other side, the other side says, no, we have to have free speech.
If they were reporting on that world, I wouldn't be blaming them like this.
But the fact is they are that world.
They're part of what makes that world go.
Twitter is part of what makes that world go.
Google, part of what makes that world go.
And that's why the, you know, that is why it takes this, what did, who was it?
Walter Russell Mead, who called this a wrecking ball presidency.
That's what they're trying to wreck.
That is what they're trying to wreck.
It has been going on really, you know, since the Civil Rights Act since civil rights became more important than freedom.
Civil rights are not more important than freedom because the first civil right is freedom.
And you can't have freedom if you can't say what you mean.
You can't have freedom if you can't associate with the people you want to associate with.
You can't have freedom if you can't express opinions that other people find hateful.
And this is something that has just gone by the boards.
The New York Times, one of the reasons there are former newspapers, they no longer support free speech.
They now talk about the right weaponizing free speech.
They talk about how free speech was great when we had it, when it was helping us, when it was helping the left.
But no, no, no, now it's helping the right.
Not so good anymore.
This is the thing that we've been battling.
This is the thing as I sit here in quarantine thinking about what I'd like to see change.
This is the most important thing.
Not the arguments, just the right to have the argument without getting your head chopped off by the left.
All right, we've got to stop there, but let me remind you for a moment, we're going to take a pause.
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Abortion vs. Essential Service00:12:22
There are no easy claims.
All right.
We have got the wonderful Jenna Ellis coming up right now.
So come on over to dailywire.com and subscribe and listen to the rest of the show.
All right.
Jenna Ellis is, of course, the secret president of the United States.
She pretends to be a constitutional law attorney, a senior legal advisor to the Trump campaign, as well as a fellow with the Falkirk Center at Liberty University.
Her book is The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution.
We love having Jenna on.
She always has important stuff to say about the Constitution and the law.
Jenna, are you there?
I am.
Great to join you.
It's great to join you.
It's been too long since we have seen you.
So are you sheltering in place somewhere?
Yes, I am.
I am near D.C.
And, you know, this is, I am so excited when all of this is over to come back out to L.A. and we'll have to do this in person again.
And I can actually see you and, you know, we can have a glass of wine or something.
That would be that.
I'm ready to get to that moment.
We are all definitely, definitely ready to get to that.
So let's start with this state versus feds.
I mean, obviously, Trump misspoke when he said he had absolute power to reopen everything.
There is a balance of power here.
How much, but I should mention, by the way, that Trump went on to say that he was going to work with the states and he was going to negotiate with the states and all this stuff.
But where does the power lie in a situation like this?
The states do have a lot of power, don't they?
Of course.
And, you know, it's hilarious that suddenly all of these governors, these Democrats who have been all for a centralized federal government and they've supported candidates like Bernie and Elizabeth Warren and all of these globalists are suddenly rediscovering the 10th Amendment.
Isn't that amazing?
So I think it's hilarious that Cuomo came out today and said, you know, we're going to sue we have a 10th Amendment that's explicit.
Well, that's only because, of course, they're misreading the context of what the president said.
And, you know, listen, everyone is in the press gallery is asking all of these gotcha questions and then they report on it forgetting entirely the context.
And so President Trump has done nothing outside of the margins of the U.S. Constitution, and he clearly understands the truth, which is that, of course, the federal government is there with a declaration of national emergency that unlocks resources like FEMA and other sorts of resources and support and the CDC recommendations to the states.
The 10th Amendment does provide the authority to the state governors and local leadership to determine how to implement them.
But the 10th Amendment doesn't just give them complete leeway.
And we've been talking about this a lot, Drew, with a lot of these just really remarkably unconstitutional instances of state governors going well beyond their authority to implement the federal guidelines and telling churches that they can't even have drive-up services, quarantining off what they consider non-essential items that you can buy in a Walmart and a Target.
I mean, this isn't America anymore.
So if I were Governor Cuomo and some of these others, I would be much more worried about constitutional challenges from citizens in my own state challenging these stay-at-home orders.
Interesting.
I mean, you make an excellent point, by the way, that the sudden love of federalism on the left is quite remarkable after wanting states to comply with basically who gets to use what bathroom in which elementary school by the president's decree.
On the question of overstepping in the states, there was a lot of talk about religious rights being abridged by people being told that they shouldn't gather in a church, in a closed church, close together.
But that's not really abridging religious rights, is it?
I mean, the instance you gave of people in a drive-in service was absurd.
But there is some logic behind keeping everybody out of any gathering, right?
Absolutely.
And that's where we've always seen since the Founding Fathers argued this in 1787 at the Constitutional Convention, the balance and the inherent tension between individual rights and freedoms, which are not absolute, and the government's limited power to regulate.
That's always been the tension.
And so for people who are saying, you can't abridge my rights, and this is absolute, well, they're wrong.
But then also the governors who are arbitrarily and capriciously just putting whatever whim they want in their law enforcement or some of these police officers that are actually telling pastors your rights have been suspended like a Mississippi instance, that's absolutely too far.
So the constitutional law has always been very clear and we still have principles of freedom and liberty and limited government that interact with any sort of instance that we have, including a pandemic.
And so if the government has a compelling state interest, which here it does, because a national health crisis, of course, is a compelling interest, then the government can enforce regulations narrowly tailored by the least restrictive means.
So what that means practically is that they can't tell a church or some small business the difference between what they determine is essential versus non-essential.
I think that's a really important constitutional question here because we've always had state police and regulatory power that implement uniform standards like food health safety or fire codes.
Those types of things don't discriminate whether you are a small business restaurant, whether you're a church or what type of service you provide.
It's just whether or not you can protect the people who are patronizing your business or service.
Here in a lot of these state orders with the difference between essential versus non-essential, the virus doesn't care whether you're standing six feet apart in social distancing in a grocery store versus a church.
As long as you are able to implement the regulations in a uniform way, that's constitutional.
But once state governors start saying you're essential and you're not, that is absolutely a bridge too far.
And I think that there are a lot of groups that are starting to see that and are starting to push back on these state orders.
And hopefully with now the conservative appointments that we've seen throughout the federal court system and hopefully as well within the states, we're going to see a lot of the courts pushing back on this and saying, no, that's a bridge too far.
That was incredibly clarifying, Jenna.
Thanks.
That was great.
You know, you wrote an article.
One of the things that's been deemed non-essential in some states and essential in others is, of course, abortion access.
And you wrote an article about this saying that the Supreme Court, I'm sorry, saying that the Fifth Circuit has correctly held that the Texas order that is making it more difficult to get an abortion is in fact the right way to go.
What do you think?
What do you think the answer is here in terms of is abortion, I mean, obviously, if you want an abortion, you've got to get it within a certain time period.
Does that make it an essential service?
Right.
And so what the Fifth Circuit correctly held is that an abortion is not an emergency medical procedure.
Abortions are always a medical intervention and an elective surgery that's specifically causing the death of the child.
And so even though there is a limited timeframe only because once the baby reaches nine months or thereabouts and is born, we have the law that then recognizes that child as a person and somehow miraculously attaches rights there.
But let's be honest about this.
Why is that the arbitrary standard?
So if we're taking this from the science, then at no stage should an abortion actually be legal because what's the difference between nine months, nine years, 90 years?
It's just the difference of where the baby is in age, the human being is in age, and where they're physically located, inside the womb or out.
So what the Fifth Circuit, though, correctly held is that an abortion is not an essential emergency service.
It's an elective procedure, just like a lot of other elective procedures that have been put on hold in the midst of a pandemic, because you have a scarce resource, which is the health care workers as well as the PPE equipment that are needed elsewhere.
And so it's not a total ban on abortion.
It's simply saying this is an elective service.
And so what Planned Parenthood has done now is appealed that to the Supreme Court.
And I think, Drew, it's going to be very fascinating to see if our originalist conservative majority is going to actually correctly hold that an abortion is a medical intervention rather than a necessary medical procedure.
And if they shift the posture and the definition of abortion to accurately reflect what it is, I think we're going to start seeing the tide turning.
And hopefully, eventually, Roe versus Wade and that whole standard repealed in this country because abortion absolutely is killing a child.
You know, I have to ask you a question.
You and I are on the exact same page on abortion.
So I'm actually playing almost literally the devil's advocate here, but the left frequently criticizes us and says by making these kind of glancing arguments like, oh, it's not an essential service.
What we're really trying to do is take away the right to an abortion.
And I feel the left is right about this.
That is what we're trying to do when we say, oh, you have to be able to get to a hospital.
We're really trying to stop them.
We're trying to stop them from killing the babies.
Is it wrong to do it in this piecemeal way?
Or should we go at it full tilt?
And would it be more honest to go at it full tilt?
Or is this the only kind of weaponry we have?
You know, I think that's a good question.
And the left has been so great at incrementalism, right?
And so if the conservative majority is incrementally shifting the law back to where it should be, I don't see a problem with that.
But I also don't think that this is just a textual argument or something that's a thin veneer because Roe versus Wade also, and Planned Parenthood versus Casey, all of these that have shaped abortion law in the United States, the left will still say what you just did, which is that a woman has a right to an abortion.
That's not true.
That has never been upheld in any court, including the United States Supreme Court.
What they found is that a woman has a right to privacy, which then allows her certain medical decision making in some instances that the federal government can't intervene.
So Roe versus Wade then had this balancing test of recognizing the government's compelling interest in preserving and protecting life that then they balanced with a woman's right to medical privacy and decision making.
Genuinely believe that if Roe Versus Wade in 1973 was before the court, that same exact case in 2020, with all of the ultrasound and the medical information that we now have that shows that life begins at conception, that shows a fetal heartbeat at five and six weeks, that case would not have come out in that way.
And so if we are incrementally rolling this back, whether it's the pandemic that evidences that, whether that's, you know, whatever the text or the fact pattern is that goes up before the court, it's okay to roll it back incrementally as well, because the government absolutely has a compelling interest in preserving and protecting life at all stages.
And that's something that no right to privacy or other kind of right should be able to infringe on on a woman having a so-called choice to kill.
a child.
Jenna, I knew there was a reason we missed you.
You're absolutely great.
That was really terrific and clarifying.
I really appreciate your coming on.
I hope you do it again soon and, as you say, I hope you're in California soon so we could do it in person.
Jenna Ellis, constitutional law attorney and senior legal advisor to the Trump campaign, as well as a fellow with the Falkirk Center at Liberty University.
Jenna, thank you so much.
Thanks so much.
Drew talk soon.
Great talking to you all.
Right, i'm out of time, I don't have time for a final reflection, but tomorrow is the mailbag, and so you will have all your problems solved.
Matt Wall Show Teaser00:01:42
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