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Nov. 8, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show
46:19
Ep. 248 - The Great Purple Puddle

The Blue Wave ebbs to a purple puddle. We analyze why House Republicans’ loss may be President Trump’s gain. Then, Bayto gets Beat-o, Pres. Trump gives a Broadway-caliber press conference, and the Girl Scouts sue the Boy Scouts. Date: 11-07-2018 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The blue wave ebbs to a purple puddle.
As Democrats take control of the House, Republicans increase their majority in the Senate, and Republicans edge out Democrats on key governorships.
We will analyze why House Republicans' loss may be President Trump's gain.
Then, Beto gets Beto and uses his concession speech to audition for a spot on Pod Save America.
Most important of all, President Trump gives a Broadway-caliber press conference, and the show goes on as Attorney General Jeff Sessions resigns.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
You know, I was pretty nervous last night.
We were on camera doing election coverage for about six hours or something.
It felt like we were on forever.
And I thought, you know, there's going to be nothing in the news tomorrow.
We've covered everything right now.
But leave it to President Show Business, President Covfefe, to give us some incredible news just breaking now.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, embattled for many months now in a feud with President Trump, We're good to go.
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I'm a little bit hungover today.
Not because we drank so much, but we were just talking for hours and hours with all that smoke, with all that, we weren't eating very much, and all of that covfefe.
There was initially a flood of leftist tears that affected the Senate.
Then we were, I wouldn't call it right-wing tears, because actually the Democrats won the A relatively modest number of seats.
It wasn't the blue wave.
Even Democrats are admitting it wasn't a blue wave.
But still, they got back control of the House.
So there was all of these emotions all over the place.
And the real question is...
How should conservatives feel about all of this?
We didn't get to guzzle those leftist tears.
I'd be much more hungover if we guzzled those leftist tears last night.
But how do we feel?
I think, one, the turnout was insane last night.
The turnout was record high.
I was hearing it from people all day long, and the numbers seemed to back it up.
So you had record high turnout.
I mean, tens of millions of more voters than were expected from previous midterm elections.
That is a big win for Republicans.
That owes to Republican candidates and to President Trump, who in many ways nationalized the election.
In the off year, when your party is in the White House, your turnout is generally relatively low because you're happy, things are going fine.
It's the other side which is motivated to turnout.
So we expected very high Democrat turnout and we saw Tea Party levels of enthusiasm among Democrats.
We also saw very high enthusiasm among Republicans.
That's a big win for Republicans, that we could motivate the Republican base in an off year election, that was a big win.
They didn't take it by a lot.
A blue wave would have been if they took it by 50 seats, even maybe 45 seats, or 55, or 60, or 63.
Barack Obama lost 63 seats in his first midterm election.
Bill Clinton lost 54 seats in his first midterm election.
The Democrats, it looks like they picked up anywhere from 28.
28 is what's, I think, been officially called right now.
But it looks like they picked up about 34 seats, somewhere around there.
Okay, how disheartened should we be about the Democrats taking the House?
I don't really care.
I don't really care.
I would have loved it if Republicans had held the House because it would have shown, it would have bucked the historical trend so much.
It would have been such a mandate for this administration to govern that it would have been irresistible.
We would have loved it.
But practically speaking, because the Democrats took the House, who cares?
Who cares?
What were Republicans doing with the House anyway?
We got tax reform.
That's good.
Anything else?
We didn't get entitlement reform.
We didn't really get a spending decrease.
What did we really get out of it?
What were they doing?
In part, Jeremy Boring, the God King, was talking about this last night.
In part, this is because for the last 10 years, we've been running against earmarks.
Pork barrel spending.
The kind of spending where one congressman says, alright, I'll vote for...
The spending in your district, if you vote for a bill that has spending in my district, and then we both get to bring home the bacon for our constituents and we'll get re-elected.
And this was the way that politics worked in this country for a long time, and it incentivized legislators to vote on legislation.
So Jeremy Boring now is saying, bring back the bacon, bring back the earmarks, and he makes a very good case for it, which is that if you don't have pork barrel spending, nobody has any incentive to vote on anything.
So you're just, all you can do is grandstand and then go back and obstruct and then go raise money in your district.
And you're not actually legislating.
That's what we've seen.
You know, the Republicans won the House of Representatives in 2010.
There was this amazing Tea Party election, took back the House.
What did we get for it?
Because then Republicans took back the Senate in 2014.
As a matter of legislative accomplishments, what did we get?
We were told when we took back the House that we had to take back the Senate to get anything.
When we took back the Senate, we were told we had to win the White House to get anything.
When we took the White House, what did we get?
We got tax reform.
That was great.
We almost got Obamacare repeal, except John McCain voted it down.
John McCain ruined our chances at that.
May he rest in peace.
So, what did we really get?
We were promised as early as 2010 that we're going to reform entitlements, the biggest driver of our debt and deficit.
The young guns.
Paul Ryan's going to do it.
Did we get that?
No, we didn't.
Not for lack of trying on Paul Ryan's part, but we didn't.
So, now that we've lost the House...
What's the legislative loss?
They won't make the tax cuts permanent, but nothing is permanent in politics.
And we won't get entitlement reform, which we weren't going to get anyway.
Okay.
We kept the Senate.
We actually gained seats in the Senate.
What does that mean?
It means that the judges are going to keep rolling in.
President Trump has done a great job, and Cocaine Mitch has done a great job of getting judges appointed, federal judges, and obviously on the Supreme Court.
That means we'll get more of that.
That is probably going to be the legacy of this first term.
And if that is the legacy, that's pretty good.
If the legacy is executive orders, deregulation out of the White House, and all of these federal judges, that's a win.
Great.
I'll take it.
The big question by losing the House that is now going to be asked is, can President Trump still win if he loses?
That sounds like a contradiction in terms.
But he's just lost something.
He lost the House.
Historically, it seems inevitable that he lost the House.
In many ways, they lost it by less than they should have.
Okay, blah, blah, blah, whatever.
They lost the House.
President Trump's charm, so much of his charm, is that he wins.
He wins, wins, wins all the time.
He never loses.
And that's held true.
This guy has been talking about running for president since the 80s, but he never did.
He didn't quite do it until he knew he could win.
Until he saw his opening, he took it, and he won.
He beat out an extraordinarily qualified Republican field.
Knocked him down one by one, 16, 17 candidates.
Then he took down the House of Clinton.
So he's got all this win-win-win.
Now that he's lost a little something, can he maintain that charm?
Can he maintain that air of invincibility, the Teflon Don?
I suspect he can.
I suspect he can because of how he handled himself in this press conference.
And frankly, I think that losing the House will give great political benefit to Donald Trump.
Holding the House would have given great political benefit in the sense that it would have been such a mandate to govern.
But now President Trump has an adversary.
And we'll get to why that matters in a second.
So what's the good news?
GOP extends its Senate majority.
And the GOP picked up key governorships.
So this means, look, the map in 2018 was pretty good for Republicans in the Senate.
It's not going to be so good for Republicans in 2020.
The Republicans are going to have a lot more seats that they have to defend, unlike this time when Democrats had a lot of seats that they have to defend.
But now that we're looking at a gain of three, maybe four seats in the Senate, it's going to be a lot harder for Democrats to take back the Senate in 2020, which means that if House Democrats want to impeach President Trump, like they've been yammering on about for the last three months, they can impeach him.
That's fine.
But there is statistically a 0% chance that they convict him and remove him from office.
We also picked up some key governorships, some really big ones, in states that we were told we're going to flip and we're going to go for Democrats.
The reason that this matters is, one, because of redistricting.
It means that Republicans will have at least a seat at the table in redistricting when that comes up and make sure that Democrats don't gerrymander things, you know, out of control, gerrymander themselves into a House majority.
And...
But the big pickup was in Florida.
So just some of the major upsets, some of the key GOP wins here.
Mike Braun beats Joe Donnelly in Indiana.
Polling told us Donnelly was going to win.
What happened?
Major upset.
Mike Braun beats Democrat Joe Donnelly in Missouri.
Democrat Claire McCaskill lost to Republican Josh Hawley.
I always suspected that Hawley was going to beat McCaskill, and I actually thought that Braun was going to beat Donnelly too, but really nice to see that confirmed.
And then we get to Florida, the big win of the night, the guzzling of leftist tears.
We'll talk about that in one second.
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So the big, big upset was in Florida.
Ron DeSantis, Republican Ron DeSantis, beats Democrat socialist crony crook Andrew Gillum.
Democrats were already talking about Gillum as a possible 2020 presidential candidate.
And a real crook and a cynical, awful politician who baselessly smeared his Republican opponent as a racist, played the race card constantly, just an awful fella, and he got beat.
Ha ha ha, ha ha ha.
Delicious.
Also in Florida, another big win.
Looks like a big win.
The race has been called for Republican Rick Scott, the former governor of Florida.
It looks as though Republican Rick Scott beat Democrat Bill Nelson.
Nelson is calling for a recount.
Why?
because Democrats cannot concede races ever.
They just can't do it.
Al Gore can't do it.
Hillary Clinton can't do it.
Bill Nelson can't do it.
They just whine and moan and complain, and they're going to keep digging and recounting those ballots until they find enough dead and illegal voters to force them into office because they're sore losers, and they don't treat politics with any dignity whatsoever.
Now, just north of Florida, in Georgia, you had the race between Republican Brian Kemp and Democrat Stacey Abrams.
Stacey Abrams, another awful candidate, empty-headed candidate, who said that her coalition was going to be made up in part of illegal aliens, that her voting coalition was going to be people who should not vote, for whom it is a crime to vote.
And you had Oprah go down there and campaign on behalf of Stacey Abrams.
That was the final couple weeks' push.
You've got to get Stacey Abrams through.
What happens?
Brian Kemp wins.
Brian Kemp beats Stacey Abrams.
And guess what happens?
Stacey Abrams won't concede.
Why?
Because Democrats are sore losers.
So they're going to dig up some more dead and illegal votes.
Stacey Abrams already promised that.
She already said, my coalition includes illegal voters.
So maybe they'll try to find some more illegal voters to push Stacey Abrams through.
What she's really hoping for is a runoff.
So because it was so close...
And because there are other candidates on the ballot, she's going to hope for a runoff election.
We'll see if it gets to that.
Because we don't have a final vote count, we cannot call that yet.
And if there is, I hope Ryan Kent beats her again.
I hope we go right through, and I hope that ballot security measures are in place, because you've got a whole Democrat Party, and especially Stacey Abrams, openly talking about illegal aliens voting.
So those are, I think, the most important races.
Why do those races matter?
There were other great wins in Ohio for Republicans.
Unfortunately, Wisconsin governor fell to Democrats.
Scott Walker, I think, has just been in there too long.
He's fought very hard.
He's been a very good governor, excellent governor in Wisconsin.
But eventually, people get sick of you, and they throw you out, and that's what happened to Scott Walker.
And the big win in Florida.
Why do these matter?
Because these are very important states for the presidential election.
You know, Florida is constantly...
Having votes decided by about 200 votes or 50 votes, even between great candidates like Ron DeSantis and just awful, terrible people like Andrew Gillum, it's still a question of 1,000 votes or 5,000 votes or 200 votes.
I mean, this has just been the case since the 2000 presidential election, at least.
So to win those swing states looking forward at 2020, that's really important.
One, because it shows us the direction of how people are voting.
And because, you know, by nationalizing this, President Trump made it about him.
So it's not just about the Republican and Democrat parties, which is important.
We want to see how people break down there.
But he made it about him so that we see what happens when he is on the ballot next time.
I think those are all great signs.
Then, I mean, those are the most important races.
My favorite race.
You know my favorite.
It wasn't in Florida.
It wasn't in Ohio or Indiana.
It was in the great state of Texas where Senator Ted Cruz beat out Mr.
Beta Male himself.
Beta, Beto, Francis, Robert Francis, Bobby Frank O'Rourke.
He beat him out.
And I'll let Beto speak for himself.
In his concession speech, he turned the left-wing white guy up to, like, 12.
It was already at about 9.5 and he just turned it all the way up to 12 by whining profanities.
Beto, take it away.
In every single part of Texas, all of you showing the country how you do this.
I'm so f***ing proud of you guys.
Yeah!
I'm so effing proud.
I'm so...
You guys, you guys, seriously, you guys.
I'm a serious person.
I'm a really serious person and a statesman.
I'm such an effing statesman.
I'm such an effing...
He's just doing that thing that the Pod Save America guys do.
He's just the grown up Pod Save America guy and admittedly fairly attractive, very effeminate man who uses vulgarity and profanity to substitute in for coherent points that he's incapable of making.
He is Pod Save America with about 15 years on it.
He's probably auditioning for a spot on Pod Save America now because he's unemployed.
Although he really swindled national Democrats.
How many millions of dollars did this guy raise?
Even as of a month ago, he'd raised $40 million.
I think the total was something like $70 million.
And he barely spent any of it.
And he wasn't giving it to other candidates either.
So he's probably looking forward to running for president in 2020.
And in the meantime, maybe he'll go on Pod Save America and whine and use profanity and not make any decent arguments.
They're calling this a moral victory, the Democrats.
You knew they were going to do this.
Because Beto, he's not just the Pod Save America guys in the future.
He's also what John Ossoff was a few years ago.
Do you remember John Ossoff?
He was that Democrat who was running in, what was it, in Georgia?
And they poured money into his race.
They said, we're going to flip this seat.
We're going to John Ossoff.
He looked like Beto.
He was just like a skinny, whiny, effeminate white male.
And they said, he's the one.
He's going to win.
And then he loses.
And they say, well, you know, sometimes losing is really winning.
No, it's not.
It's losing.
It's always losing.
Losing is losing.
The winners go and legislate and the losers go home.
To quote cocaine Mitch McConnell.
That's exactly what happened here.
That said, this doesn't bode well for Texas.
He only lost by three or four points, I think, in Texas.
This guy's a whiny, left-wing, just awful, unspeakably repulsive candidate to me.
But he's apparently very attractive to Democrats, and there are a lot more Democrats in Texas.
Every single day this is happening because California is emptying out and because our border's not secure, so people are flooding in there who statistically are much more likely to vote for Democrats.
Now...
Let's temper our fears a little bit here.
Ted Cruz is a flawed candidate.
I like Ted Cruz a lot.
I've done TV commercials for Ted Cruz.
I voted for Ted Cruz.
He's a flawed candidate.
He's flawed because he got really bruised in the presidential primary with Donald Trump.
He then didn't support the Republican nominee at the convention, which really turned off a lot of people.
He then did support the Republican nominee, so it turned off all the people who were happy that he didn't support him at the convention.
He is just in a tough spot, and he's an extraordinarily intelligent guy.
He's maybe the most intelligent person in the U.S. Senate, but he's not as good at that pavement retail politics as Beto O'Rourke is, so Beto had an advantage there and a big money advantage.
Beto obviously had a lot of money from National Democrats coming in.
So, okay, that's fine.
Let's say, though, that Cruz, instead of beating him by three or four points, let's say he beat him by ten points.
In Texas, that's still pretty scary.
And I think perhaps they should stop building the wall along the southern border and just build a wall completely around the state of Texas so that it stops getting infiltrated by Democrats.
Because that is a little bit of a worrying trend.
But look, guys, to quote the economist John Maynard Keynes, In the long run, we're all dead, so we can always worry about things tomorrow.
This is, I think, a lot of when Ben and I disagree on politics.
It's mostly attitudinal, which is, hey, we won.
We're here today.
Come on.
That's pretty good.
And Ben will say, yeah, but in 50 years, the sun is going to explode and we'll all die.
All right.
Yeah, I guess.
That's true.
But today is a good day.
The other thing I want to point out with Beto, because they made this such a national point for Democrats, is imagine if he went by his actual name.
Imagine if Beto O'Rourke didn't pretend to be a Mexican.
He's not Mexican.
He's not even 1,024th Mexican.
He's a white guy.
His name is Bob.
His name is Robert Francis O'Rourke.
And I know we've been joking about Beto and Beto and Beta and Robert Francis, you know.
Imagine if he actually had to go by his name, Robert O'Rourke.
Ted Cruz versus Robert O'Rourke.
Would any Democrat care about him?
Even though I know he's like a little cutie pie and he wore dresses in his prog rock band in the 90s or whatever.
I know, I get that.
But would they actually care about him?
No, they wouldn't.
It shows that racial obsession of Democrats that a 100% whitest guy on the face of the earth can just pretend to be a Mexican and he will get national Democrat support.
That is pretty bizarre.
He'll get tens of millions of dollars from out-of-state Democrats.
That is pretty bizarre.
And when we pointed it out that he's a fake Mexican, that he's lying about his race by using that name, they didn't seem to care.
They didn't care.
One, because...
I think Democrats are shallow thinkers when it comes to these races, and they're shallow when it comes to race.
It's just the appearance of the thing.
If you're a man who then wears a dress and says you're a woman, they say you're a woman.
If you're a white guy who slaps on the name Beto, next time he's going to go by Juan Lopez.
Juan Lopez O'Rourke.
You slap on a Mexican name, then you're a Mexican.
And this actually does have a philosophical grounding to it.
It actually comes from the flaws of feminism, leftism, intersectionality, intersectionalism.
There actually are philosophical, just a rotten core to this.
We're going to get to that a little bit later when we talk about the Girl Scouts suing the Boy Scouts.
But that is the rotten philosophical foundation of the modern left that this guy...
I mean, he's actually a good example because he used to wear dresses back when he was a young man playing in prog rock bands.
But talk about shallowness.
In the future, whenever I run for Senate from the state of Texas, I want it to be on the record right now.
I am going to go as Miguel Juan Lopez Francisco Knowles.
So get that, and I want you to start calling me that, because then when I run, I'll say, oh, my friends have been calling me that for years.
What a cynical jerk.
He lost.
Ha ha ha.
Ha ha ha.
Mmm.
Delicious.
Now, um...
We have to talk about Jeff Sessions.
This is breaking news.
Jeff Sessions has resigned.
They didn't wait very long on that one.
We've been wondering if he was going to resign for months and months.
President Trump has been really hard on him ever since AG Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation.
He said, it's improper for me to be the point person on the Russia investigation because I was on the campaign, you know, and so there's a special counsel appointed.
He reports to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Donald Trump has been hammering Jeff Sessions for this.
I had always hoped that it was just a show.
I had always hoped that they were just putting on a show.
Oh yeah, Trump hates Jeff Sessions and they're going to fight it out.
But they really liked each other.
Because Jeff Sessions is a great guy.
He's done a very good job at other aspects as Attorney General at the DOJ. And he was one of Trump's earliest supporters.
I think he was the earliest major supporter for Donald Trump.
And it just seems that actually it was a pretty bad relationship.
Trump was pretty mean to the guy.
In his resignation letter, he said that he was resigning at the request of the president.
So he's out.
Now they're going to fill that and Democrats are going to crow about how President Trump is obstructing justice with the Mueller investigation.
It remains to be seen what happens with regard to Mueller.
This doesn't directly affect that at all.
However, Jeff Sessions is out.
We should point out he's done a very good job in many other ways.
He's gotten very tough on drugs amidst this awful opioid crisis, one of the worst epidemics in American history.
And he's gotten really tough on drugs, reversed a lot of stupid Obama-era policies.
He's gotten a lot tougher on illegal immigration.
He's actually enforcing laws now, laws that have not been enforced since the 1990s.
He's getting back there and enforcing the law.
That's really important.
You know, he's just tightened up the ship.
He's made what was a very lawless DOJ under Barack Obama, a corrupt, a crooked, lawless DOJ. He's made it much more law and order centric.
And actually, his recusal As frustrating as it is for Republicans and conservatives, it does show that change.
Because Loretta Lynch wouldn't have recused herself from nothing.
The Obama DOJ, Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch was so corrupt, so targeted President Obama's political opponents.
And Jeff Sessions came in and he said, we're not going to do that.
We are going to hold ourselves to a higher standard.
I give him credit for it.
I think he did a really good job in many areas, and I'm sorry to see him go.
And hopefully, you know, President Trump has replaced bad appointees with good appointees and good appointees with better appointees.
And I hope that that is the case here, but we'll just have to see what happens moving forward.
What we do know The show must go on, and that's what this is all about.
I think that's why the Sessions resignation came today.
I think that's why Trump had this wild press conference today.
The show must go on, and it is going on.
The best news that comes out of these midterm elections, the absolute best news, and the reason why losing the House is actually probably a benefit to Trump, might hurt the Republicans broadly, but it's probably a benefit to Trump, is that Trump now gets an adversary.
He's got someone to fight against.
When Donald Trump doesn't have an adversary, he's fine.
He treads water.
He's okay.
But when he's got an adversary, that's when he shines.
When he's got a Jeb Bush to go after or a crooked Hillary or now a Nancy Pelosi, that is when he shines.
And, you know, President Trump learns a lot from Reagan and from Obama.
Don't forget, Barack Obama lost 63 seats in the House in the 2010 midterms and he got re-elected in 2012.
The Democrats aren't talking about that very much right now.
So what does it mean?
It means that Democrats are going to investigate everything.
They're going to investigate security clearances, conflicts of interest, the Trump Organization, porn stars, all that stuff.
They're saying now that they're going after tax returns.
They're going to get Trump's tax returns.
They're going to see it.
They are falling into a trap.
I'm glad they're falling into this trap.
They set the trap for themselves a year or so ago.
Now that the Democrats have the House, they can request Trump's tax returns from the Treasury Department, and they almost certainly will get them, but they can't release them.
So they can't have their tax returns and eat them too.
They can have their tax returns, or they can pressure Trump to release his own tax returns, but they can't get the tax returns and then release them.
That would be a violation of the law.
So I just think they don't learn anything.
You You know, this election should have been a blue wave.
It really should have, historically speaking.
And it wasn't.
It wasn't even close to a blue wave.
They took the House, but no wave at all.
And they're focusing on things that people don't care about.
They don't care about the tax returns.
No American cares about Trump's tax returns.
Nobody is going to win an election on Donald Trump's tax returns.
It ain't going to happen.
But President Trump is playing along.
He is the troll-in-chief.
And he's got great words for Nancy Pelosi.
Plus, we will get to this unbelievable press conference today.
An epic smackdown of Jim Acosta.
But first, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
If you're on Facebook and YouTube, I'm amazed you're still there.
Go to dailywire.com.
If you are already on Daily Wire, thank you.
You help us keep the lights on.
If you're not, it's $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.
You get me.
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You get to ask questions in the mailbag.
You get all that stuff.
By the way, if you happen to be in Los Angeles tonight and you're thirsty for some sweet, sweet leftist tears and salty, Come out to Loyola Marymount University at 7 p.m.
I will be joined by the Supreme Lord of the Multiverse himself, Andrew Clavin, to entertain and enlighten both friends and snowflakes.
Hope to see you there at Loyola Marymount University, 7 p.m.
Pacific time.
It's going to be a lot of fun.
You'll need the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
You're going to need it because the Trump agenda, with the exception of tax reform, has been all through the Senate, not through the House.
We've made gains in the Senate.
We're going to get more judges through.
We're going to get more Brett Kavanaugh's.
I hope you like beer.
I like beer.
I still like beer.
And I still like leftist tears.
Go get your Tumblr.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
So we elected a showman.
We're getting a show.
President Trump tweets this out today.
He says, quote, He's saying Democrats are threatening not to make Pelosi their speaker because she's 155 years old and she's not a terribly competent person.
Though she is a shrewd politician in many ways, and we'll get to that.
So President Trump is saying that's fine.
If your Democrats won't make you speaker, maybe we'll send you some Republican votes so that you can become speaker.
You deserve it, Nancy.
Of course he wants Nancy Pelosi.
She's one of the most detested people in the entire country.
She's a perfect adversary for him, and he'll win every time that he goes up against her.
So we hope, we're supporting Nancy for speaker, Pelosi for speaker, 2018, let's do it.
I hope we all unify here at the Daily Wire.
So he sends that out.
She's also a shrewd politician, by the way, because she's already saying impeachment is probably not going to be pursued.
Of course not.
I mean, they would be so stupid.
Both Pelosi and Trump learned the lesson of the Clinton impeachment, which is that when an overzealous house overreaches, you get political gains for the incumbent president.
That's exactly what would happen.
No hope of conviction in the Senate.
No hope now or in 2020, probably.
So it would be a huge waste of time, a huge distraction, and Trump could continue to get his agenda through executive orders and proceedings.
Through the judges.
So she's taking that off the table.
She also said that they're not going to try to impeach Kavanaugh.
I think they've learned from the Kavanaugh effect, which is that the senators who voted against Brett Kavanaugh basically all got routed last night.
Okay, that's fine.
That's the Pelosi side of it.
Now President Trump gets up there and he puts on a show.
He starts with the incredibly satisfying smackdown of Jim Acosta.
They're hundreds of miles away, though.
They're hundreds and hundreds of miles away.
That's not an invasion.
Honestly, I think you should let me run the country.
You run CNN. All right.
And if you did it well, your ratings would be much better.
If I may ask one other question, Mr.
President, if I may ask one other question, are you worried?
That's enough.
That's enough.
Pardon me, ma'am.
I'm...
Excuse me, that's enough.
I'll tell you what, CNN should be ashamed of itself having you working for them.
You are a rude, terrible person.
You shouldn't be working for CNN. Go ahead.
I think that's unfair.
You're a very rude person.
The way you treat Sarah Huckabee is horrible.
And the way you treat other people are horrible.
You shouldn't treat people that way.
Go ahead.
Go ahead, Peter, go ahead.
In Jim's defense, I've traveled with him and watched him.
He's a diligent reporter.
Well, I'm not a big fan of yours either, so to be honest with you.
Show me the lie.
Show me the lie.
Fact check true on all of that.
By the way, that was after Jim Acosta asked about 100,000 questions.
He wouldn't shut up.
They weren't questions.
He's just arguing with Trump.
He says that the caravan isn't invading the country.
The illegal alien caravan isn't invading the country.
They are.
They're not American citizens.
They're foreign nationals and they're forcing themselves into the country.
By definition, that's an invasion.
So Trump says basically that.
And Jim says, no, they're not invading.
They're just coming into the country illegally.
He says, yeah, okay, we have a difference of opinion, but they're invading.
And he just goes on and on and he keeps badgering.
And, you know, there are other reporters there, presumably, who want to ask questions.
And so finally says, all right, that's enough from you.
And he smacks him down.
And he's right.
Jim Acosta does treat people wrong.
What you didn't see in that clip is that a White House aide, this young woman, goes up to get the microphone from Acosta because he keeps demagoguing and won't let anyone ask another question.
And Acosta shoves her.
He shoves her away.
He pulls the microphone back and he shoves her away.
And yet we're told that President Trump is this awful bully and he's a misogynist.
Look at Jim Acosta shoving a woman who's trying to do her job away from him and refusing to give up the microphone and let anybody else speak.
It is awful.
And I love that President Trump, probably alone among possible Republican presidents right now, is able to call that out.
He was absolutely right.
He also, I'm actually, by the way, trying to draft Jim Acosta to be the 2020 Democrat nominee.
That's the showdown we're all waiting for.
If you're watching, the heads of the Democrat Party, Maxine Waters, Hillary Clinton, Michael Avenatti, I want you all to nominate Jim Acosta.
President Trump, during this great press conference, also fired back at some of his critics within the GOP. Here he is.
You suggested that- Who was retiring?
You said that many of the retirements that happened in the House made it very difficult- Many retirements, yeah.
That made it very difficult for you in this election cycle, and that it was because they were chairmanships that were vacated.
But Jeff Flake wasn't a chairman of a committee, and Paul Ryan also retired the cycle.
So why do you think that is?
Whose fault is it that there were so many retirements?
In Jeff Flake's case, it's me, pure and simple.
I retired him.
I'm very proud of it.
I did the country a great service.
Go ahead.
Give him that.
Give him that.
He is retired.
I'd like to call it another word, but we're going to treat him with great respect.
Go ahead.
Thank you, Mr.
President.
That's another beauty.
Go ahead.
But we're going to treat him with great respect.
That flake, what a beaut he is.
Absolutely right, too.
And a worthwhile point on this is that the GOP got blown out in the suburbs in the House races here.
They got really damaged in the suburbs, which only makes sense.
The rural areas generally vote for Republicans.
Urban areas generally vote for Democrats.
And the suburbs are where they battle it out.
But for years and years now, the suburbs have been moving bluer and bluer.
And in a swing year, in a year that should favor Democrats, it's no surprise that the Democrats took the suburbs.
That's the easiest place for them to take.
But, you know, Jeff Flake is the kind of Republican who talks to the suburbs.
Guess what?
Even Republicans who talk to the suburbs lose.
If you stand in the middle of the road, you're going to get hit by a truck and...
There are few words that I have for Jeff Flake that I haven't already said on this show, so we can leave it there.
But he's just awful.
He's just the worst kind of preening narcissist, and I'm very happy that he's no longer in the Senate, and we all should be, and Trump did do a national service in doing that.
It's also nice because it shows a certain independence from Trump.
Which is that he's not simply a partisan guy.
I mean, he hasn't been a partisan for much of his life.
He's been a Democrat, he's been a Republican, he's been a Reform Party guy.
And this helps him in many ways because it's frustrating when he's fighting with Paul Ryan.
It's frustrating when he's fighting with members of his own party.
But I think it gives him a lot of credibility for...
American voters who are not hardcore Republicans or hardcore Democrats.
It shows an independent streak.
It's frustrating for those of us who are more partisan, but I think actually in the long run it probably helps.
Then he also showed us in this press conference that the media are not getting any fairer to the GOP. This was an amazing exchange with a woman, I believe from PBS, talking to Donald Trump.
It's not even a question.
It's just an accusation.
Here she is.
On the campaign trail, you called yourself a nationalist.
Some people saw that as emboldening white nationalists.
I don't know why you'd say that.
That's such a racist question.
There are some people that say that now the Republican Party is seen as supporting white nationalists because of your rhetoric.
What do you make of that?
I don't believe it.
Well, I don't know.
Why do I have my highest poll numbers ever with African Americans?
Why do I have among the highest poll numbers with African Americans?
I mean, why do I have my highest poll numbers?
That's such a racist question.
Honestly, I mean, I know you have it written down and you're going to tell me.
Let me tell you, it's a racist question.
You know what the word is?
I love our country.
I do.
You have nationalists.
You have globalists.
I also love the world.
And I don't mind helping the world.
But we have to straighten out our country first.
We have a lot of problems.
Excuse me.
But to say that, what you said, is so insulting to me.
It's a very terrible thing that you said.
I'm so pleased that he said this to her and that he took it the way that it is.
Because one, it's a very racist question.
What he said is, I'm an American nationalist.
I'm for the American nation.
The American nation is not an ethno-state.
There is no race called the Americans.
There are many races who have come to America.
It was founded by people who were English and people who were Dutch.
And people who were black who were brought over as slaves.
And people who later were Irish.
And then some Italians when the Sicilian sardine boat came over and met up with the Mayflower boat and produced little old meat.
And other people too.
And obviously every race under the sun has come to America over time.
To say that you are an American nationalist is to make a statement that is absent of race.
And she says...
If you support America, you are a racist.
That's what she's saying.
That's why her comment is racist.
She's saying America is a white country.
Or an English country.
Or an Irish country.
Or whatever.
And then she says that you said you're a nationalist.
And some people have said that means white nationalists.
Some people.
You're some people.
You're the some people who said it.
Admit it.
At least have some courage and say, I'm criticizing you for this and I'm equating American nationalism with white nationalism.
This doesn't make any sense.
When Trump says he's a nationalist, he's spoken with stunning clarity on this.
He is saying that he supports the Westphalian system, the system of nation states that we've had for about 400 years in this world to preserve the world order, and that independent nations are the best units of the global order to preserve liberty for its people.
That's what he's saying.
He juxtaposes it with globalism, which refers to transnational, supranational empires like the European Union or the United Nations or any other.
Okay, so he says this, and she says, well, what about, isn't that just like white nationalism?
White nationalism is actually the opposite of nationalism, because there is no white nation.
There's never been a nation of the whites.
In fact, actually, the only sound argument against nationalism is Europe, is the white continent, because there isn't just one white nation, which is called Europe.
There are many of little nations, the French nation, the Italian nation, the English nation, The Spanish nation.
And all of those nations would fight with one another.
The argument against nationalism is that all of those independent nations having too much sovereignty will get all of the various white people to kill each other in Europe.
There is no nation of the whites.
There can be white empires.
Plenty of people have tried to create empires such as that.
But it is not nationalism.
So it's both a misunderstanding what she's talking about.
But it's also an awful calumny.
It's an awful slander.
And so he says, your question is racist, which is true.
And then he said, your accusation against me is so horribly insulting.
And I'm glad he said that because they get away with this.
They've gotten away with this for decades.
They call you a racist and we're supposed to take it.
We're just supposed to take it.
I've had people in ostensibly polite conversations call me a racist flat out or imply that I'm racist or bigoted or I don't like people of other races.
And that's so, you know, I got two words for those people, though I try to be polite in conversations so I don't say them very much.
But it's awful and the people who do it should be ashamed of themselves.
They behave like children, like little, angry, hysterical, mean-spirited children.
And that's how she was behaving.
And she should sit down.
And I'm glad that President Trump called her out for it.
The press conference only got better from there, of course, because it's not just that reporters are unfair when it comes to racial insinuations.
It's that they're unfair on questions of basic history.
They're actually trying to rewrite history to make Barack Obama look better and to make Trump look worse.
Look at this stunning exchange, which for some reason the left is spreading all around Twitter right now.
President Obama allowed a very large part of Ukraine to be taken, and right now you have submarines off that particular parcel that we're talking about.
That was President Putin who annexed Crimea, sir.
That was President Obama's regime.
That was during President Obama, right?
That was not during me.
But it was President Putin, sir, who did the annexation.
No, it was President Obama that allowed it to happen.
It had nothing to do with me.
Okay, go ahead.
That's exactly right.
I suppose technically both of the people in here are right, except the reporter is wrong because he's trying to pretend that his point contradicts Trump's point.
It doesn't.
Trump said Barack Obama allowed Crimea to be annexed by Russia.
That is true.
Crimea was annexed by Vladimir Putin and Russia in 2014.
Barack Obama let that happen.
Barack Obama, he's supposed to be the leader of the world, he's supposed to go in there and kick the bad guys and draw red lines, and he let it happen.
George Bush, by the way, routed Vladimir Putin out of most of Georgia when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia, and Barack Obama failed to do that in Crimea.
So Trump makes that point.
And then the reporter says, well, no, Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea.
Yeah, right, dummy.
That's not the point I'm making.
The point I'm making is that Barack Obama allowed him to do it.
And they're sending this around on Twitter now.
Prominent blue checkmark dummies, you know, probably the Pod Save America people.
I don't know for sure, but if I had to bet, I would bet that those kinds of guys are tweeting it around too.
Trump is right.
And they're trying to rewrite that because they don't want to admit Barack Obama's weakness and failure as president.
But he failed.
And I like that Trump is doubling down on it too.
They're trying to rewrite history.
Not just read your mind, impugn your motives.
We're trying to rewrite history, and we shouldn't let them do it.
They also have no idea how the government works, but we're going to have to save that for tomorrow because we're out of time right now.
You should check out the speech tonight.
It's going to be a lot of fun.
I suppose it'll be more of a conversation than a speech with me and the supreme leader of the multiverse, Andrew Klavan.
So check that out.
I hope we're going to live stream it.
Hopefully we'll record it too, but if you're in town, check it out at Loyola Marymount University, 7 p.m.
Pacific.
And otherwise, I'll see you tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you then.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Semia Villareal.
Executive producer, Jeremy Bory.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Jim Nickel.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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