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Aug. 26, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
48:06
Ep. 404 - Trump’s Big Challenge

President Trump has a got a new primary challenge from the Right. Then, the trade war heats up, and Jimmy John’s gets into trouble for shooting an elephant. Date: 08-26-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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President Trump has got a new primary challenge from the right in the form of Joe Walsh.
Some complacent conservatives are laughing this off, but I don't think they should be so comfortable because life has been good to Walsh so far.
We will examine Trump's real big challenge.
Then the trade war heats up and Jimmy John's, the sandwich shop, gets into trouble for shooting an elephant.
We will analyze the hubbub.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
Joe Walsh has announced that he will run against President Trump in 2020.
Let's take a look at his big campaign announcement.
Walsh reportedly went on to boast, quote, I live in hotels, tear out the walls.
I have accountants pay for it all.
They say I'm crazy, but I have a good time.
I'm just looking for clues at the scene of the crime.
Life's been good to me So far at, I'm sorry.
I'm just receiving word now.
President Trump is not being challenged by former Eagles guitarist and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Joe Walsh.
He's actually being challenged by a squishy one-term congressman.
I'm very sorry for the confusion.
Here is former congressman Joe Walsh announcing his Republican primary campaign for president.
And Joe Walsh joins us now.
Good morning.
Hey, George.
Good to be with you.
Have you reached a decision?
Yes, and it's great to be with you.
I'm going to run for president, and I'm happy to be on your show announcing my candidacy.
George, no surprise.
We've got a guy in the White House who's unfit, completely unfit, to be president.
And it stuns me.
That nobody stepped up.
Nobody in the Republican Party stepped up.
Because I'll tell you what, George.
Everybody believes in the Republican Party.
Everybody believes that he's unfit.
He lies every time he opens his mouth.
You say that.
You say everybody believes he's unfit.
But one of the things the White House points to and the president points to often is just about every poll shows more than 80 percent support for the president among Republicans.
They don't have an alternative.
I'll tell you what, George.
And look.
I'm running because he's unfit.
Somebody needs to step up.
And there needs to be an alternative.
The country is sick of this guy's tantrum.
He's a child.
Again, the litany.
He lies every time he opens his mouth.
Look at what's happened this week.
He is the president of the United States is tweeting us into a recession.
I can tell you, George, that most of my former colleagues up on the Hill, they agree privately with everything I'm saying publicly.
But then how do you explain why they stand behind him so strongly?
Because they're afraid.
Because they're scared to death.
They're scared.
That's why they're doing it.
Every Republican believes that President Trump is unfit for office.
He said, well, I'm a Republican, and I don't think he's unfit for office.
And I suspect many of you are Republicans, and I suspect many of you don't think he's unfit for office.
And actually, he's got really, really, really high approval ratings among Republicans.
But at least Joe Walsh doesn't think that he is fit for office.
He also goes on.
I mean, this is the issue.
What's the alternative?
Because he goes on, he says, President Trump is having temper tantrums, he's behaving like a child, he's a little crazy child.
You are doing what you are accusing President Trump of doing.
When you say, he's behaving like a child, he's calling people names, that little child, that little temper tantrum, you are calling him names.
You are speaking without any pointing to evidence, without citing any facts.
You're just name-calling.
And actually, in the case of his first opening salvo, the statement he's making, I am running for president because, that statement is a lie.
You said, I am running for president because everybody in the Republican Party opposes Donald Trump.
That's an obvious lie.
It's demonstrably untrue.
First of all, the Republicans nominated him for president.
Then they elected him president.
Now, all of the polls show he has actually very strong support among Republicans.
So if you're running because you think he's a liar, why would I vote for you?
You are obviously a liar as well.
That's your opening call.
Joe Biden fell into this same trap.
Joe Biden, when he launched his presidential campaign, the first line of his campaign was about how President Trump called neo-Nazis good people in Charlottesville.
And Joe Biden is going to restore character and integrity because he's not going to lie to you and he's not going to be a vicious bigot such as that.
What character?
Your first line to the American people is a lie.
What is the alternative?
When we look at this guy, Joe Walsh, frankly, I would rather the Eagles guitarist be the nominee rather than this one-term congressman.
When you look at him, you have to ask, why would anybody believe that this guy is better suited to be president than Donald Trump?
I'm not saying Trump is the greatest president in the history of the world.
I'm not saying he's the be-all and end-all.
I'm just asking, why is this guy any better?
There's another Republican running against Trump.
He's a so-called Republican.
He's not a real Republican.
Bill Weld, former governor of Massachusetts.
Even if you don't like Trump, even if you think he's a bad president, why would anybody believe that Bill Weld is a better candidate or Joe Walsh is a better candidate?
By what measure Can we say this is a better option than President Trump?
I mean, there are at least three categories, I think.
And on every one, Trump beats the other guys.
We'll get to that in a second.
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All of these guys who say that Trump is unprecedented, he's the worst, By what measure?
By what measure are we talking about that?
You know, if you look at the economy, President Trump's been president for, what, two and a half years now?
The economy's been great.
The economy has been much better than the previous eight years.
What is Joe Walsh's record on the economy?
Why am I supposed to believe that we've currently got a president who's had a lot of economic growth in two and a half years.
He's a billionaire.
He's built many successful businesses.
He's been in the public eye for 40 years as a successful businessman.
Why am I supposed to think that a one-term congressman Is somehow this economic genius and the billionaire who turned the economy around is adult?
Why am I supposed to believe that?
Joe Walsh doesn't really have any record to compare this to.
He ran for Illinois State House of Representatives twice and lost, and then he was a congressman for two years.
But at least while he was a congressman, not that Congress has a big say over the economy, the economy was terrible.
Why else are we supposed to believe Walsh or Weld or anybody else Is it because of these supposedly crazy things that Donald Trump says?
He does say crazy things.
He says funny things.
The other day he was talking about a trade war with China and he said, I have to fight this trade war with China.
Then he looked up to heaven and he said, I am the chosen one.
I am the one who's going to take on China.
He was joking.
He was kind of laughing at the time.
The reporters were laughing.
He talked about how he was joking afterwards.
He makes jokes.
I mean, he's a TV star.
He's made jokes his whole life.
He'll use the phrase, very stable genius.
He'll tweet about covfefe, right?
This is a guy who tells jokes pretty clear.
Joe Walsh has also said plenty of crazy things when he's not joking.
Here is Joe Walsh giving an endorsement on film of giving four-year-olds mortar and grenade training after he got duped by Sacha Baron Cohen.
The intensive three-week kindergarten course introduces specially selected children from 12 to 4 years old to pistols, rifles, semi-automatics, and a rudimentary knowledge of mortars.
In less than a month, Less than a month, a first grader can become a first Grenader.
In less than a month, a first grader can become a first Grenader.
And he's not even joking.
He's reading an obvious comedy script that Sacha Baron Cohen wrote for his Showtime show, Who is America?
And Joe Walsh, so thick, he doesn't even realize that he's reading a comedy script.
So if you're talking about the crazy things he says, I don't think this guy's a better choice than Trump.
It's hard to find someone who said crazier things than Donald Trump and somehow the one guy who, you know, Bill Kristol is now supporting or retweeting, the one guy that anti-Trumpers are supporting for president has said crazier things than Donald Trump.
Well, then what is it?
Is it the tweets?
Is that why we're supposed to vote for some guy over Trump because Trump sends crazier tweets?
Here, too, Joe Walsh has a much more incendiary record than President Trump and George Stephanopoulos in this interview called him out for it.
You said you want to make the case against the president.
The question is, are you the best messenger?
You said you want to make a moral case against the president.
Here's what the Washington Examiner, conservative newspaper, said in response to your potential candidacy this week.
There is the matter of his history of being Trumpier than Trump.
He's made a living on peddling the same sort of demagoguery, conspiracy mongering, and right-wing bomb-throwing for which he now condemns the president.
Your response?
I helped create Trump.
And George, that's not an easy thing to say.
Look, we were divided before Trump.
I went to Washington eight years ago.
Part of the Tea Party class wanted to shake Washington up.
I got involved in the battles.
And there were plenty of times where I went beyond the policy and the idea differences.
And I got personal and I got hateful.
You did provide aid and comfort for the kinds of things he was saying.
You mentioned Obama.
You called President Obama Muslim, an enemy, a traitor.
On racial themes, I want to show a couple of tweets that you had right there.
Number one, we lowered the bar for Obama.
He was held to a lower standard because he was black.
That was just in 2017.
And then a few months after that, not just President Obama, Senator Kamala Harris said something really dumb.
Meh.
If you're black and a woman, you can say dumb things.
Lowered the bar.
That is kind of textbook racism and sexism.
Well, again, Well, never mind.
I'm sorry.
So even when you're talking about Twitter, this guy has said more incendiary things.
And I don't just mean to call out Joe Walsh.
Who cares about Joe Walsh?
Joe Walsh is going nowhere.
I'm saying it because, in a way, everyone challenging Trump is a sort of Joe Walsh.
Everyone challenging Trump has their own Twitter history, has said stupid things on camera, has a weird personal life.
All of them.
Is it the character?
I mean, just look at character, right?
If you just look at the personal lives, Trump always gets knocked for his personal lives because he's been married multiple times and he's been divorced and all of that.
Well, here too, Joe Walsh, Joe Walsh, who is a stand-in for the Trump opponents, Joe Walsh probably doesn't want to throw many stones.
He's divorced.
He's remarried.
His wife sued him because he didn't pay child support.
He then filed a motion with a judge to try to stop paying child support because he was unemployed.
That is the guy?
You say, I have this, Trump has a terrible character and I have Sterling character, even though I've done exactly the same things, I've said the same things, I've tweeted the same things, and I helped create Donald Trump.
Therefore, vote for me, because Trump is bad.
And it's not just Joe Walsh.
We all created Donald Trump.
Trump is us.
Trump is America.
P.J. O'Rourke, the conservative satirist when Trump was running, he had a great article.
I'm going to paraphrase the headline because I don't quite remember it, but it was something to the effect of ugly hair, garish tastes, Donald Trump is America.
He is, and in a representative government, in a republic such as ours, the guy who's in office reflects the country.
He is us.
Look, a lot of people in this country get divorced and remarried.
A lot of people in this country say a lot of things on the internet.
A lot of people in this country make jokes.
A lot of people in this country are egotistical.
He is us, right?
He is us, and he is certainly Joe Walsh.
Walsh is trying to spin the revelation of all of these things about himself as courage.
He says this is why other people won't run against President Trump.
There is a kind of courage involved here, but it's not the kind Walsh is talking about.
We'll get to that in a second.
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Here is how Walsh, Walsh as himself and as the stand-in for all the anti-Trump forces, tries to spin why his bad character is good, but Trump's bad character is bad, and why he, who's accomplished basically nothing in his life, is going to save the country, and Trump, who's accomplished a lot in his life, is going to destroy the country.
Here's his spin.
Look, George, this isn't easy to do.
I just sat down with you and said, I'm gonna run for president.
I'm gonna challenge this guy.
I'm opening up my life to tweets and attacks.
Everything I've said and tweeted now, Trump's gonna go after and his bullies are gonna go after.
You ready for it?
Yes, I'm ready for it.
Right.
There is courage involved in running for office.
There actually is.
You open yourself up to all these attacks, but Trump has already demonstrated that, right?
It's kind of a wash.
It's easy to preen from the sidelines, but when you actually compare yourself, it's a little bit tougher.
You might find out, like Joe Walsh, you're not that much more virtuous than Donald Trump.
You're not anywhere near as impressive as Donald Trump.
You might find out that the narrative that Trump is the worst guy in the world is maybe just that.
It might just be a contrived And Walsh is not the only one who's doing this kind of stuff.
Trump is also being challenged in hysterical terms from everyone from the far right to the far left and the center right and the center left.
Here is Brett Stevens speaking on Meet the Press in even more hyperbolic terms than Joe Walsh.
The real issue for Republicans is simply to call out the fact that the president does not stand in any way for the traditional conservative economic principles that have defined the party for the better part of the last 70 years.
So what he just said is not true.
It's a misconception.
I'm not saying he's lying, but he's getting it wrong.
Stevens is making this economic argument that Donald Trump is totally reversing conservative and Republican economic policies of the last 70 years.
You hear this a lot from libertarians.
Trump is not a true conservative, capital T, capital C, trademark over the E, because he's questioning unfettered global free trade.
Is this really the test of a conservative?
Are you serious?
Maybe it is the test of a conservative, but it's probably not in the direction that Brett Stevens and the libertarians want it to be in.
The historical record is pretty clear.
The GOP was founded as a protectionist party.
It was founded in large part to oppose unfettered global free trade.
Abraham Lincoln, the founding president of the Republican Party, said, quote, give me a tariff, I'll give you the best nation on earth.
By the way, I'm not making an argument against free trade right now.
I'm not making an argument for tariffs.
I'm making an historical observation that the GOP and conservatives generally have not always been the party of unfettered global free trade.
Actually, they've only embraced that fairly recently and for a short period of time.
Russell Kirk, who wrote The Conservative Mind, he identified free trade as one of the great threats to conservatism.
Russell Kirk's book is one of the founding books of the modern conservative movement in America.
What happened?
After World War II, because we were fighting a Cold War against Soviet communism, you had a lot of conservatives embrace global trade.
That was to win the Cold War.
That was to draw distinction with the command economy of the Soviet Union.
But in politics, we don't just live as abstracted brains floating in the sky somewhere.
It's based on circumstances.
When circumstances change, then our strategies and our tactics change too.
Sometimes our enemies change.
Our opponents change.
So you had basically from the 1980s and into the 90s, you had the conservative orthodoxy on global unfettered free trade.
And that's pretty much when it ended.
I mean, you're looking at like maybe 20 years of that opinion.
Then, pretty quickly, you had conservatives sounding a warning cry on global trade arrangements for the past 20 years.
Why?
Because while there has been a lot of advantage to certain trade arrangements, there has been a big disadvantage to many others.
And this includes China, which we'll get to in a second, because the trade war with China is heating up.
There's a lot of misinformation going on about that.
So unlike what Brett Stevens is saying, you're not talking about upending 70 years of conservative opinion on economics and trade.
You're talking about maybe upsetting 15 or 20 years.
And by the way, Trump isn't even doing that.
I think he still holds the general conservative ideas, lower taxes, lower regulation, help out the economy.
Economic growth is a pillar of conservative thought.
Trump has repeatedly said he wants no tariffs.
He wants zero tariffs.
So he's not even upending what Brett Stevens is saying.
Just totally untrue.
But the arguments against Trump that are going on right now, on the left and the right, are not about facts.
They're about insinuation.
They'll say, okay, I've seen the tape.
Maybe he's not a racist.
But secretly, I think he is.
He said that he hates racism.
He condemns it repeatedly.
But secretly, I think maybe he is a racist.
Maybe Trump hasn't caused World War III. But secretly, secretly in my telepathic plane that I have with President Trump, secretly he wants to.
Maybe Trump isn't selling out conservative principles.
Maybe I'm misrepresenting conservative history and principles.
But secretly, secretly though, he wants to.
And then you have Brett Stevens go for the jugular on the hyperbole.
Never mind the economic principles, broader principles of character.
I mean, what we saw over the last few days is a president who is either mentally unwell or morally unfit.
Maybe both.
I don't know.
But it's important to simply call these things as we see them.
You have behavior that is unprecedented in any kind of presidential history in the United States, or frankly elsewhere.
Unprecedented behavior, immoral, unfit.
You notice he can't name any of the behavior.
He just says it.
It's just insinuation.
That's what the critics do.
He can't name the behavior.
What behavior is unprecedented?
That he says outrageous things?
I think that's what it comes down to.
That he says outrageous things.
Just a quick trip down memory lane.
The Bush administration criticized its opponents for living in the quote, "reality-based community." That's an actual quote.
This was a big moment in the Bush administration because the critics said, hold on, you guys are living in such a fantasy land, you're criticizing us for living in the reality-based community.
The point they were trying to make in the Bush administration was that the U.S. actually has so much influence that they can change the nature of reality.
Whether or not that was borne out is a matter for another time, but it's a pretty outrageous thing.
Ronald Reagan on the radio one time declared the Soviet Union illegal and said the bombs would drop in five minutes.
Pretty outrageous thing to say.
Soviet Union went on a high alert.
We almost had nuclear war because of it.
Lyndon Johnson said disgusting things.
One time, more than one time, he whipped out little Lyndon Johnson in cabinet meetings.
He held other meetings on the John.
Kennedy, John Kennedy, pimped out his interns to his staffers in the White House swimming pool.
Pretty outrageous behavior.
Whatever Trump is doing, I don't think it's unprecedented.
Don't forget what three presidents ago, not Obama, not Bush, but Clinton, don't forget what he was doing in the Oval Office.
Unprecedented.
Brett Stevens, I mean, hysterical.
No facts here.
Just insinuation.
And then we get, on CNN, on Reliable Sources, the most ironically named TV show in television history, you get a psychiatrist named Dr.
Alan Francis, who has really just gone for it.
He's done with all this mild-mannered talk.
He's saying Trump is Hitler.
Well, I think that medicalizing politics has three very dire consequences.
The first is that it stigmatizes the mentally ill.
I've known thousands of patients, almost all of them, have been well-behaved, well-mannered, good people.
Trump is none of these.
Lumping the mentally ill with Trump is a terrible insult to the mentally ill, and they have enough problems and stigma as it is.
The second issue is that calling Trump crazy hides the fact that we're crazy for having elected him, and even crazier for allowing his crazy policies to persist.
Trump is as destructive a person in this century as Hitler, Stalin and Mao were in the last century.
He may be responsible for many more million deaths than they were.
He needs to be contained, but he needs to be contained by attacking his policies, not his person.
And there you have Brian Stelter looking really, really serious while he's making this crazy point.
Obviously, the political point he's making is very stupid.
But the meta-political point that he's making, the point about how we talk about politics, is actually a good point.
And this is what it comes down to.
This is what the big challenge for Trump comes down to.
What this psychiatrist, this lunatic, is saying on TV is that we shouldn't just bring on TV psychiatrists and have them diagnose Trump with some medical condition based on nothing, which is dangerous and it makes psychiatrists look like even more of quacks than they already look like and it undermines the purpose of representative government where we debate things in the public square.
Francis is right on this point.
If people want to take down Trump, They should try to do it by attacking what he's done, not by attacking his person or his psyche.
This is President Trump's big challenge.
He has to convince people.
His big challenge isn't Joe Walsh.
His big challenge isn't Brett Stevens.
His big challenge isn't some TV psychiatrist.
His big challenge is he has to convince people that he's the normal one and that his opponents are the crazy ones.
He's got to convince people that he gets America.
He gets what America wants.
He's delivered on a good number of his promises.
He's got the right priorities.
He's turning the country in the right direction.
And what the media are going to try to do, and the left generally, is they're going to try to pretend that they're the normal ones and he's the crazy one.
He's a bigot.
He's a sociopath.
He's all of that.
That's how they always defeat Republicans.
They convince people that Republicans are hateful and terrible.
Trump breaks through that because he's a celebrity.
Now he's got to use that celebrity to show that he's a very stable genius, as he said before.
That's how you use chaos.
You know, if the narrative is that he's undisciplined, he's a reckless child, he's impetuous, that's what some of the anti-Trump right and the left says.
He's got to show.
He's stable.
He's normal.
His opponents are crazy.
He's done a good job.
And he's getting a lot of help showing that from Democrats.
He's got to keep up that challenge.
Be the very stable genius and forget about all these nothings, all these little footnotes on history.
They're not even footnotes on history.
He's getting a lot of help from Democrats like Joe Biden, who's showing that he's the stable one.
He's getting a lot of help from people leaking to the press.
There was a report out that Trump wants to nuke hurricanes.
I'll examine what I think that's really about, because I think it's actually not a good idea, but it's a good idea to tell the press that.
Then, trade war with China heating up, and we've got to get to Jimmy Jones.
There's a lot more to get to, but you've got to go to dailywire.com.
Tune in tomorrow, 7 p.m.
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Do you know who it's going to have on it?
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We've got a whole lot more to get to.
Trump's getting a lot of help showing that he's a normal one from Democrats, including the leading Democrat of 2020, Joe Biden.
Because Joe Biden is showing that he's senile.
I don't mean that to throw bombs.
I just mean the guy is losing it.
Here is Joe Biden over the weekend in New Hampshire, explaining, of course, how happy he is to be in Vermont.
I'm back.
I've been here a number of times.
Last time was, I think, uh, All the way back in 2014, but I've been here before that.
I love this place.
Look, what's not to like about Vermont in terms of the beauty of it?
And what a neat town.
I mean, this is sort of a scenic, beautiful town.
The mayor's been a good guy, and everybody's been really friendly.
I like Keene a lot.
He's not in Vermont, and Vermont is not a town.
It's a state.
He somehow managed to screw up every single thing he said in that statement.
Been here a lot of times.
Been to Vermont.
Been here how many times?
Three, oh, three, three, oh, oh, Joe, Joe times.
He's not looking...
Great.
And it's not just Joe Biden.
I don't just want to pick on him.
It does tell you something.
The front-runner of the Democratic primary is losing his marbles, but it's not just him.
Here's a DNC speaker, William Barber, explaining how socialism is endorsed by both the Constitution and the Bible.
If we embrace moral language, we must ask, does our policy care for the least of these?
Does it lift up those who are most marginalized?
He's got kind of a strange outfit on anyway.
That's already got you a little bit on guard.
That is the moral question.
If someone calls it socialism, then we must compel them to acknowledge that the Bible must then promote socialism.
Is that right?
I'm not so sure about that.
Reverend?
Is he a reverend?
I don't know.
Because Jesus offered free healthcare to everyone and he never charged a leper a copay.
Yes, God healed the sick.
The Messiah healed the sick.
I don't think he upended the Roman healthcare system, though.
Just to say, if you want to have a moral debate, bring it on, baby.
The Bible says that a nation will be judged by how it treats the poor and the sick and women and the immigrant.
The Bible says that God makes it rain on the just and the unjust alike.
If you want to call caring for folk socialism, then the Constitution is a socialist document because it calls us to promote the general welfare.
What on earth?
He's just saying words that don't seem to me.
He says, well, the Constitution is socialist because socialism is good and the Constitution says it should be good.
So, checkmate, capitalists.
The Bible says that it will rain on the just and the unjust alike, which is an observation about the nature of reality, that good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people.
Socialism!
Ha!
Gotcha!
Gotcha!
Checkmate, Christians.
Checkmate, constitutionalists.
What on earth does that mean?
He's not saying anything other than socialism is moral.
And, I mean, we could debunk...
We could debunk the Christian argument, the constitutional argument for a long time, because all of these people who I suspect have never cracked so much as the spine of a Bible once in their lives, when they talk about how Jesus was a socialist, they never mention the scene when Jesus rebukes his apostles Because they don't want him to use expensive perfume on his body.
They want him to sell the perfume and give all the money to the poor.
And he says, the poor will always be with you, but I will not always be with you.
Give me the nice perfume.
They seem to forget that scene.
They seem to forget the parable of the talents, which I refer to as the parable of the hedge fund manager.
Where the good master rewards the guy who got a good return on his investment and he casts the unprofitable servant into outer darkness where there's weeping and gnashing of teeth.
You could go on and on and on.
As for the Constitution, it's unbelievable.
Obviously, there's nothing in the Constitution that would even remotely suggest socialism.
So they just have to go and they say, in order to promote the general welfare, which is in the preamble, and they say, see?
And I think socialism promotes the general welfare.
So there you go.
I mean, that kind of craziness turns people off.
That turns people off.
And so I think President Trump is having a decent time showing that he's a normal one.
He's got to keep that up.
And one way he's doing it, by the way, speaking of crazy stories, is pretty counterintuitive, but I like it.
And nobody...
Has given this read on it, as far as I can tell.
President Trump is pushing back today on reports that he wants to nuke hurricanes.
This story came out on Sunday that Axios reported that Trump wants to nuke hurricanes.
Here's the report.
Quote, Trump said, I got it, I got it.
Why don't we nuke them?
According to one source who was there.
They start forming off the coast of Africa as they're moving across the Atlantic.
We drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it disrupts it.
Why can't we do that?
The source added, paraphrasing the president's remarks.
And the source allegedly said, you could hear a gnat fart in that meeting.
People were astonished.
After the meeting ended, we thought, what the F? What do we do with this?
The source told Axios.
And then Trump dismissed these claims this morning on Twitter.
He said, quote, the story by Axios that President Trump, he refers to himself in the third person, of course, the story that President Trump wanted to blow up large hurricanes with nuclear weapons prior to reaching the shore is ridiculous.
I never said this, just more fake news.
So what's going on?
Did he say it?
Maybe.
I'm not convinced he didn't say it.
Does he really want to nuke hurricanes?
I don't think so.
He benefits from pretending that he's crazy and from people thinking he's crazy.
I don't think we have any evidence that the president would use a nuclear weapon to stop a storm or ever use a nuclear weapon.
But I think he may have said it.
Why?
I think he may have said it to identify leaks.
Because what, what would it benefit Trump to say this, especially if he's not going to do it?
It would benefit him to say it because depending on who's in the room, he could make that statement and then assume that it's so outrageous that it would leak to the press.
And then you can tell because they're, the source is being quoted here.
So it's not just that it's on background.
They're actually using the, the direct quote from that.
It could help to identify leaks.
The White House has been incredibly leaky and the White House has also gotten better and better at governing itself.
There was so much chaos early on.
There has been more order brought to the White House since those early days.
I wouldn't be surprised if this nuking the hurricane story actually has nothing to do with weather, nothing to do with nuclear weapons.
It's all about identifying the leaks in the White House, which is very important as more and more people from Trump's orbit turn on the president.
Now, speaking of something that actually matters, we've got to get to China.
This trade war has been so misrepresented, most people have no idea what's going on.
Part of that is because trade negotiations are extremely boring, and they're extremely complicated, and all shallows are clear.
And if you think that there is a simple answer to our trade relationship with China, you are completely out of your mind.
The only wrong answer on trade is that it's simple.
It's really, really not simple.
This trade relationship has been pretty poisoned since 2001 when we stupidly let China into the World Trade Organization.
We had no leverage on it whatsoever.
It was completely unlike our letting other economies in, you know, South Korea or Japan, where we had military leverage over them.
We were providing a lot of their defense.
They were relatively small economies.
We could manage that relationship.
China, not the case.
They had over a billion people.
Huge economy.
Obviously, they don't rely on our military protection.
From the beginning, this was a tough problem.
They've been cheating from the beginning.
They've been stealing our property, illegally subsidizing steel and aluminum, stealing our jobs by illegally devaluing their currency.
So it's not just that it was the natural flow of market forces that took some of our manufacturing jobs away to the tune of 3 million or more.
That's not what happened.
We would have saved millions of jobs had we stopped them from illegally devaluing their currency.
Which violates the World Trade Organization treaties, and it's something that we can't really fight against because if we devalued our currency, the world would spin into economic chaos because we are the superpower, we are the global reserve currency.
I'm not even scratching the surface on how complicated this trade relationship is.
I'm just telling you it's very complicated.
And so when people say, you know, drop the tariffs, that is just nonsense.
That is not an adult way to handle this.
So this trade war has been heating up.
It's been tit for tat, tit for tat.
China goes hardcore in its negotiating position.
People walk away from the table.
Things are looking really bad.
President Trump has to face re-election in 2020.
Then, apparently, allegedly, China called the White House over the weekend and asked...
The White House to get back to the negotiating table.
Why?
Because President Trump said, rather than backing down on the tariffs, which he also signaled he might do, that he would raise the existing duties on a quarter, on $250 billion worth of Chinese products to 30% from 25% starting on October 1st.
He also said that tariffs on another $300 billion of Chinese goods would take effect on September 1st, and they would now be 15% instead of 10%.
So he just, at the moment when he, it seems like he's going to back down because it's hurting his own base, it's going to hurt him in reelection.
He says, nope, I'm going all the way, baby.
I'm turning the covfefe up to 11.
Guess what happened?
The Chinese yuan fell to an 11-year low against the dollar.
And China, it looked like the U.S. was going to blink.
Now it looks like the U.S. isn't going to blink.
China perhaps is blinking.
This is a huge win for the United States.
It doesn't solve the problem.
It's not even close to solving the problem.
It just shows that we're moving in the right direction.
And the left is furious about that.
Here is the CNBC headline.
This is the CNBC headline reporting on this latest turn.
Chinese newspaper editor debunks Trump's trade war claims, says China didn't change its position.
Oh, okay.
Well, if the Chinese newspaper editor said...
What newspaper was that, by the way?
Could you...
Okay, let me see.
Hu Jixin is editor-in-chief of the Global Times, a tabloid under the People's Daily, which is the official newspaper of communist China.
It's the official party newspaper.
Oh, you're saying that the Chinese government...
Disagrees?
The Chinese government doesn't want it to become clear that the U.S. has just won its position on the trade war?
Well, I wouldn't have expected that.
Thank you for reporting that, CNBC, for carrying the Pravda of China and their propaganda against the United States.
It's ridiculous.
This is good news.
I mean, I hate agreeing with Chuck Schumer on anything.
The only place I've probably ever agreed with the guy, two places, on the Iran deal and on this trade war with China.
He said not to back down.
It requires a lot of political courage for President Trump not to back down on this issue.
But it's very important that he doesn't.
I think if he does blank, if he does back down, actually it will hurt him in the 2020 presidential election because it will show he's weak and he's weak on one of the biggest issues facing our country and one of the biggest issues he talked about on the campaign trail.
The other reason I think he shouldn't back down is I think he's going to win.
And I don't think that Americans are going to vote based on bean counting.
I don't think that we're going to vote because GDP is a little bit lower.
If we go into an all-out recession, we might have some trouble in re-election.
But otherwise, people want to win.
They want to solve this problem.
They want someone to fix it.
Neither party has done it for 20 years.
And they want Americans to be respected.
American jobs.
American manufacturing.
They want to make America great again.
This was Reagan's call in the 80s, actually pursuing similar policies.
This is Trump's call now.
I think it'll work.
You've got to stay strong.
He's done a good job so far.
It's probably the highlight of his administration, even though some nervous Nancy's on the right who are clutching their pearls and who are nervous that their stocks are going to tick down a few days out of the week are saying that he should give up and let China eat our lunch.
Terrible idea.
Speaking of eating lunch, I've got to close today on Jimmy John's.
One of my favorite sandwich shops.
Huge fan of Jimmy John's.
Now I'm sort of even more a fan of Jimmy John's because the founder of Jimmy John's, Jimmy John Liatode, I didn't know his name was Jimmy John, but that's great.
I really like that.
He was caught in a photo hunting.
And this is causing calls for a major boycott on Jimmy John's, one of the great sandwich shops.
Part of the outrage is that he was hunting an elephant, and people don't want you to hunt elephants.
Now this crops up every time someone goes and hunts big game.
The hysterical left, the environmentalist left, the backwards left, throws a fit about it.
They don't point out that big game hunting is actually serving the purposes of conservation because it costs tens of thousands, if not $100,000, to buy the licenses to kill these animals.
These animals are usually not reproducing anymore.
In some cases, like when you're hunting rhinoceros, they're actually taking a toll on the population because they're not reproducing and they're harming younger animals who could be reproducing.
None of that is included.
None of that is mentioned.
That the conservation movement was founded out of a love of hunting.
None of that is mad.
It's just the emotional appeal.
How awful it is to kill a beautiful elephant.
I love elephants and it's terrible.
It's good to hunt certain elephants.
It's a good thing.
It's not even just an okay thing.
It is a positive good.
Because you can protect other elephants.
We need to shoot the elephants so we can protect the elephants.
We need to protect the elephants so we can shoot the elephants.
Just to show you the moral backwardness of this, you have Mark Hamill, Luke Skywalker, tweeting out, thumbs up to a boycott of all Jimmy John's restaurants with apologies for posting this obscene photo.
It's the obscene photo of the owner of Jimmy John's with the elephant.
A few months ago, it came out that Mark Hamill sent aggressive text messages and notes to his son's girlfriend, begging her and pressuring her and intimidating her to kill her child because Mark Hamill's son knocked up the girl and Mark Hamill insisted that the girl go to an abortion clinic and murder her own child, his own grandchild.
That would be good.
And he was saying how awful it would be if she wouldn't do that.
This is a grown man, a millionaire actor, pressuring some poor girl to kill her own child, his own grandchild.
That's a good thing.
But the idea of killing an old elephant is unthinkable, unspeakably immoral.
This is the moral backwardness of the left.
They hate people.
They love animals.
They hate conscious beings.
They love unconscious beings.
I love elephants.
Elephants are my favorite animal.
It's the only animal I want to go see at the zoo.
I like appreciating the beauty of elephants.
If an old elephant is going to die anyway, no one here gets out alive, I'd much rather some hunter goes out and kills it and gives a lot of money to conservation and cuts the thing's head off and puts it on the wall and I get to admire the beauty of the elephant head.
I'd much rather do that.
I'd also much rather protect human beings.
I think that's a good thing to do too.
But we're in a culture that is very confused.
I can't even say it's just the fault of materialism.
It's just the fault of atheism.
It's just the fault of environmentalism.
It's not.
Because it's so confused, it doesn't make sense.
If we're all just meat, if we're all just clumps and blobs of cells, then it doesn't matter if I kill the elephant, and it doesn't matter if I kill the baby.
If we all have souls, if we're all totally dignified, and the mouse is just as dignified and valuable and a creature and in the image of God as a man is, then we shouldn't kill either the animal or the human.
Obviously, humans are built to eat meat.
Most people still eat meat, so I don't think that's the argument people are making.
Then there is the traditional argument.
That man has dominion over the sea and over the air.
That man is a steward of his natural environment.
That all the animals are here for us to be stewards of.
That the animals are here for our pleasure, for our enjoyment, and we don't want to be cruel, and we don't want to be gluttonous, and we don't want to ravage our environment, but we want to protect it for us.
That's the traditional idea.
And that's the only idea, it seems, that everyone agrees we need to get rid of.
And they're pursuing just other kind of incoherent versions of it.
It's just outrageous.
And the outrage comes up every single time.
Maybe we should, instead of posting around the photo of this lovely elephant, which is going to provide meat to people, possibly.
It's going to provide beauty to people when it's put up on a wall.
It's going to provide money to conservation.
Instead of sharing that as the image of gross immorality, maybe we should all tweet at Mark Hamill.
Send him a picture of a little baby and say, hmm, maybe we should boycott the Mark Hamill movies.
Maybe we should boycott...
The Star Wars movies for a genuinely immoral act compared to this moral confusion on the question of environmentalism and beautiful animals.
That's our show.
That's a big challenge.
Not just a big challenge for Trump.
It's a challenge for all of us.
We are in a representative government.
We are in a republic.
The government reflects us.
We are the government.
We are the people.
If you want to make a change, you've got to change yourself.
If you want to make sense, you've got to make sense yourself.
If you want to recapture a culture that will make America great again, that starts with you.
A big challenge, not just for Trump, but for all of us.
That's our show.
Come back tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you then.
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Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
The left is unhappy because conservatives are using the same nasty techniques against them that they always use against us.
Sad panda.
They can dish it out, but they can't take it.
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