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Sept. 30, 2020 - The Michael Knowles Show
41:12
Daily Wire Backstage: Jeremy Said This Debate Wouldn’t Happen Edition
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Hey, Michael Knowles here, and do I have a treat for you.
The latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage is available now, and you do not want to miss it.
Join me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, and the God King, Jeremy Boring, as we discuss the latest news and cultural events, all while enjoying some fine whiskey and cigars.
It is all that and more.
Take a listen.
Welcome to the Daily Wire backstage.
Jeremy said this debate wouldn't happen edition.
I am the Jeremy in question, and we're just 15 minutes away from finding out if I owe every one of these schmucks 100 bucks each, which is still less than Ben had to pay us for his 2016 election prediction, but who's counting?
Joining me tonight to take my money are Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, and Michael Knowles.
We're glad you're here with us.
We're going to watch this thing so that you also can watch it.
I mean, I was going to say it so that you don't have to, but everybody has to.
Like 65 million people watched the debates in 2016.
It's only going to be more people watching it this time to see the two oldest candidates in the history of the republic duke it out with or without breaks every 30 minutes, depending on who wins the coin toss.
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Well, I mean, they don't have to watch the debates.
They're cheerful, right?
Yeah, exactly.
So, yeah.
How much do you guys want to die?
I gotta tell you, I'm very excited.
I'm hoping Trump eats Biden for lunch.
I am a little nervous, though.
There's some pitfalls.
I would like to point out that the first time in now six months that Drew has come to the backstage in person was to take $100 from Jeremy Corbyn.
I just want to say...
It is the first time we've all been together in like nine months.
It's kind of fun.
It's true.
It's pretty weird.
And the last one for a long time.
We're all leaving.
Everybody's just leaving you here, Drew.
I'll be sitting here sweeping up the streets, you know?
Well, good luck with that, because have you seen what's going on in the streets over here?
Oh, my God.
You've got to take a mop, not a broom.
You saw they shut down Sunset last night?
I saw that.
Like, BLM full-on shut down Sunset last night.
Because?
Why not?
Some men ask why.
Some men see Mountain and they ask why.
Others see Mountain and they ask why not.
Some see Sunset Boulevard and they ask why not.
Well, because they already canceled Gone with the Wind, so they were going to cancel Sunset Boulevard, one of the other great films of the era.
Was that a groaner?
Okay, so predictions.
I have a prediction.
My prediction is this.
Everybody's focusing.
You'll love this.
You're going to love this.
Comes at me, hit him.
Okay.
Everybody's focusing on Joe Biden.
Will Joe Biden be able to do anything other than stand on his feet and not drool?
But I actually think that Trump is the guy to watch today.
And the reason I think this is because Trump, as we all know, is not exactly a scholar.
He's not somebody who reads things.
What?
I know, a shocker.
But he is a guy who learns on the job.
He is not the man he was in 2016.
He is a guy who actually now knows what he's talking about.
If he can convey that, if he can be articulate enough to convey the fact that he actually now knows that there is a country called Korea, maybe a North, maybe a South, somewhere out there, that he knows how things work.
He could actually make Biden look bad, even if Biden delivered.
Hold up, wait.
So your theory is...
I just want to make sure that I'm following you.
Your theory is that Donald Trump is going to drop knowledge on Joe Biden.
Not that he's going to drop a kitchen sink on him.
I agree he'll drop a kitchen sink.
That's the specialty, right?
I actually think he now has something he didn't have before, which is knowledge.
Because this is the way he learns.
He learns by doing stuff.
I actually, I agree with that.
I'd also like to present Exhibit A. I'd like to present some evidence for this.
I don't know if you guys, did you watch the Trump Town Hall?
So it was that he was sitting down, I forget, with some left-wing outlet.
Do you remember this?
And he handled it incredibly well.
He was measured.
He was prepared walking in there.
There was a setup question that was so easy.
The only reason they let this question come into that town hall was because it seemed like it was pro-Trump, but it wasn't.
It was this woman who talked about how sad it was that her parents had died from COVID.
And they all really loved Trump.
And so isn't he going to open up the borders and not build the wall and increase immigration?
And what did he do?
He was totally sympathetic.
He talked all about her and what a wonderful daughter she is, and then moved on, and he pivoted, and he didn't take the bait.
I think that is evidence of learning something.
So, I agree that if the Trump who showed up for that town hall shows up tonight, he stands to really gain a lot.
My concern is that instead we'll get the Trump who showed up at that debate a couple of days ago, didn't know where Azerbaijan was, or was it Azerbaijan?
I don't know where it is.
Yeah, you're not the president.
Thank God.
I think that the real fear going into tonight is that Donald Trump Thought that he was in a WWF match.
He's good at WWE, right?
And it's all crap talking beforehand.
But Biden didn't take the bait.
And what you're left with now is that Trump has basically set the bar so low for Joe Biden that it's hard to see how Trump can actually have a victory.
If Joe Biden does stay on his feet for 90 minutes, he all but wins the debate.
It's a very dangerous thing to go into a debate that neither you nor your supporters believe you can lose.
Just ask Hillary 2016.
No, I think that's fair, but you've got to remember about these debates.
They're not debates, right?
They're not real debates.
They are opportunities to get a viral moment.
And there are two or three viral moments.
And where do the viral moments come from?
They come from the quick wit.
All of Trump's big moments in 2016 came from, I don't want to live in Trump's America.
Yeah, because you'd be in jail.
Yeah.
You know, all of these little quick moments there.
You call women ugly and terrible.
Only Rosie O'Donnell, right?
Zig, zig, zig.
And Biden, look, he can be charming.
He's a stand-up comedian, right?
I mean, he's great at going out.
Trump is a stand-up comedian.
Insult comedy is his thing.
The problem is...
And I think this really is the difference between 2016 and 2020.
It's not Trump.
It's not that Trump has changed or anything.
It's that Hillary Clinton is not Joe Biden, and Joe Biden is not Hillary Clinton.
And what I mean by that is that people despise Hillary Clinton, and legitimately so.
I don't get the feeling that people viscerally despise Joe Biden.
Like, they look at him, they're like, who is this doof?
Why is he here?
They're kind of mildly annoyed by Joe Biden, if anything.
Even if you really dislike him, it's mostly because you think he's a stand-in and kind of a liar and kind of corrupt.
But in the same way everybody else in Washington, D.C. is a liar and corrupt, not in the unique, horrible way that Hillary was, where just every time people on the right looked at Hillary Clinton, they saw this machine that was designed to go after the presidency in the most ambitious possible way.
I mean, he's a klutz and he's a buffoon, Joe Biden, who somehow found himself in this position.
And so there isn't the same sort of drama to the debate, meaning that going up to the debate against Hillary, And this really pervaded the primaries in the Republican side.
It was, who is going to just clock her?
Who is going to go in that debate and just throw at her the Clinton Foundation and throw at her her corruption and throw at her bill?
And who's going to do a press conference with the accusers five seconds before?
Who's going to do that?
And the only person up here who's going to do that is this crazy reality TV show host.
I think those were 10 points from the primaries.
This time around, I just don't get the sense that it's like people are just drooling and foaming at the mouth.
Somebody clocked Joe Biden.
All this I agree with.
Since we don't know what's going to happen, I can agree with anything.
Anything could possibly happen.
But the one thing is that Biden has not been hit with a single tough question, not one, since this thing has started.
He was being asked about the state of Trump's soul.
One of the questions he was asked is, why aren't you more angry at Donald Trump?
Like me.
The unbiased journalist.
Exactly.
I mean, they haven't been playing softball with him.
They've been playing like wiffle ball.
But he did take some blows during the primary, and he held up.
He managed to be victorious.
But those were blows from the left.
Those weren't blows from the right.
Meaning that the blows from the left, his whole candidacy was, I am the moderate bulwark against the Kamala Harris's, against the Bernie Sanders's, against the Elizabeth Warren's.
If he takes a blow from the right, like a serious blow from the right, it could theoretically hurt him because his whole campaign is that he's moderate.
So what that means to me is that the temptation for Trump, I think, tonight and always is going to be go after the fact that he's quasi-senile, go after the fact that he seems like he's in poor health, go after Hunter Biden's cocaine use, right?
Like, go after the fact that he has grandchildren that he apparently doesn't know about, right?
Go after all the things that Trump really is animated by because all the National Enquirer stuff is the stuff, like, he won't read the intel reports, but he'll read the National Enquirer.
So that's The stuff he's really interested in.
But the stuff he actually needs to hit him on is the radicalism of packing the court.
He needs to force him to answer whether he's going to disassociate from both Antifa and Black Lives Matter.
And he should say, he should ask him on the stage, Joe Biden, you expressed sympathy for an alleged rapist in Kenosha while ripping into the police and saying they should be arrested.
So what the hell's the deal with that?
That's the stuff where he really needs to hit hard.
And I think, my fear is that he won't.
That he'll go after all of the kind of red meat for the crowd.
Sleepy Joe.
Exactly, the Sleepy Joe stuff, but...
I wonder if this is the kind of thing that he has learned, because this is where he's been living for the last four years, so he does know stuff that he didn't know before.
Well, Jen Ellis, your friend Jen Ellis and ours, got mad at me on Twitter because I said, don't get cocky.
No, that's right.
And she said, well, I think the president has earned a measure of trust that he always knows what he's doing.
The problem is...
The president has not demonstrated for four years that he always knows what he's doing.
He's demonstrated that he often knows what he's doing.
But there are several blunders that we've all skipped right over.
And the way that he has framed this debate, listen, if he wins, then he set it up the right way.
But he's made it harder to win by the way that he set it up.
That's what I'm worried about.
I'm also worried about who's at my front door.
Right.
I got this new kid, you know.
I adopted this child, this human baby.
I know, beautiful, beautiful child.
Thank you, thank you.
Well, I mean, I have nothing to do with it.
That's the only way that could happen.
Her mind is being crafted.
Her mind is being crafted by me and her soul, unfortunately.
I have found this amazing thing, though, that I am so much more defensive and protective now that I have this child in my home.
Before, you just had a wife.
You know, it's like, whatever.
But now I have a child.
She can take care of herself.
She married me.
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So here's how this thing's going to work.
We're going to sit here and watch the debate.
All right.
If you are a Daily Wire all-access subscriber, you're going to be able to join us as we watch the debate.
We'll be in the discussion group.
You can go up there, click on the discussion, come on over.
We'll be answering questions as we go and maybe making little comments if I know us.
We'll be right back.
Also, probably piss you off.
What I have found is that all of our superfans, they actually are not...
Like, if you were a band and you have some superfans, they're always excited to hear the new song.
They're always excited to find out who you're dating now or what you're wearing.
Our superfans come for the dopamine hit of being pissed off every time.
It's like, they don't like soccer!
Officiate my wedding!
They always say that.
They always say things like that.
So here we go.
We're going to tune into this debate.
Thanks for joining us and we will see you right after.
No!
Well, holy crap.
Shut up!
You clown!
I do want to acknowledge, after the worst debate that I've seen in my adult life serving politics, I do have to confess that the debate did, in fact, happen.
So here you go.
Thank you, sir.
There you go.
$100.
I basically made that peddling your name.
This night really turned out, actually.
I changed my mind about the debate.
This is great.
No amount of money.
No, I'm cheap.
That actually was it.
Fair enough.
As a conservative...
As a conservative grifter, every now and then it's good to part with some of the money that I've made.
Well, that was...
What a...
Absolutely the worst debate I've ever had.
I have to say, I think we're all agreed on that.
It was a disaster.
It was a chaos.
Okay, so who should we start with?
Because it was like a disaster all the way around.
Yes.
So here's the problem.
From a 30,000 foot level, if you think Trump already is winning, then you're real happy because nothing changed.
If you think Trump is losing, like the polls say, then...
You're also happy.
You're happy because nothing changed.
Meaning that what the debate really did more than anything else was just to underscore all of the personality foibles and flaws of both of the candidates.
Biden is not completely there.
He is irritable.
He is irascible.
He can get under his skin.
He says nasty things.
And Trump is a badger.
And there's a theory out there that one of the reasons that Trump has not been able to pick up support, despite the fact that Biden is an incredibly weak candidate, is because people are just tired.
If you are of the mind that people are so tired of all of this, this has been an exhausting year from beginning to end.
It's been exhausting.
And really, it's been exhausting since before the election, 2015.
But it's been exhausting for four years because the news cycle has been nonstop for four years.
If you abide by the theory that the least exhausting candidate wins, Trump was absolutely exhausting tonight.
Now, if you are somebody who thinks, okay, well, he took it to Biden and he was punching him and he was rabbit punching him and it was just punch, punch, punch, punch all night.
That's okay.
I mean, that's fine.
But if you're thinking of this outside of the vacuum of the debate alone...
It has always been Biden's biggest strength.
The reason he's...
And you and I talked about this in the West Wing three years ago.
The reason that Biden is the greatest threat to Trump is because he is the alternative to all the chaos of the last three years.
Whereas a Bernie would have represented a new kind of chaos.
That's right.
A Warren would have represented...
And Biden, despite all of his flaws, I think benefits from tonight for the simple fact that I wasn't exhausted when I watched him.
This is the issue.
I take issue with this.
I half agree with you that it was a chaotic, horrible debate.
Yes, it was a chaotic, horrible debate.
It's it's worse for Trump because if the polls are right, he's trailing in the poll.
Right.
And I think it moved the needle.
Not at all.
Yeah, I think that Biden confirmed everything we thought about each candidate.
Biden was a bore.
He didn't know what he was talking about.
He was a blithering idiot.
He said some pretty horrible things, by the way.
He did.
Antifa's only a philosophy, it's not a group.
Trump's a racist.
Systemic racism infuses every single element.
There's a two-tier system in America, in every single part of America, right?
He said not just about the justice system, but in the economy, everywhere.
I mean, that's an evil thing to say because it is not true.
And Trump...
He benefited from the fact that Chris Wallace was the worst thing in the debate.
He benefited from that, but his constant interruptions, A, were bad strategy.
Let Biden talk because he makes a fool of himself.
That's right.
It's just bad strategy.
And B, it's just annoying.
It's annoying.
The funny thing is, Donald Trump and Chris Wallace had the same strategy.
Yes, you're right.
Which was just Hector and Badger and Interrupt.
The best thing that the president had going for him tonight was Chris Wallace.
Totally.
I do want to say this, because a lot of people watching- Which means by default, by the way, that Biden wins.
That's right.
Meaning that if Trump and Wallace were the losers of the evening, with all the badgering, then Biden is what he has always been.
He's the guy who's still standing after the giant NASCAR wreck.
Yeah, but I want to say- He's trailing the field.
I want to stay out of the gate before we talk any more about this.
The vast majority of the people watching us are going to vote for Donald Trump.
We're all going to vote for Donald Trump.
The vast majority of the people watching us want the president to win.
That's right.
And when you watch tonight, it may be frustrating to you that we say that the president had a bad night.
A lot of media outlets take the position that what we're supposed to be doing right now is basically image building for the president, that we're supposed to basically fly.
No matter what he did tonight, our job is to come out and tell you how great he did, how successful he was, how undefeatable he is, and give you some kind of talking points so that tomorrow, when you're at the water cooler, you can defend the president's performance.
That's just really not what we're about.
I think if you want that, go tune into Fox News.
If you start getting mad because we say the president didn't do great tonight, be mad at the president for not doing great tonight.
He's got two more debates.
I'm not paying on every debate.
I think this is my game.
The debates happen.
You've got your money.
The president has time to make up some ground.
But if he gives that performance at each of the two subsequent debates...
I agree that the badgering was frustrating and he shouldn't have done it.
I agree with that.
He shouldn't have done it as much as he did.
He should have done it a little bit.
But the issue is, Ronald Reagan said it, the only way you can have peace, you can have it in the next minute, the only guaranteed way to have peace, is surrender.
And this is the issue and this is why Trump's got to pester and badger.
Because when you actually threaten the left, I'm not talking about just cutting taxes or something.
I mean, actually threaten what the left is about.
They come at you relentlessly, like Chris Wallace did tonight.
Chris Wallace, I think, is a Democrat, but he's on, ostensibly, the right-wing network.
And he was awful.
He was terrible tonight.
And think about it.
It's only going to get worse, right?
He's the most conservative guy.
I will say that Wallace did morph over the course of the night.
So for the first 45 minutes, he wasn't terrible.
And then he started to get very, very terrible.
On climate change, he interrupted the president six times and debated him.
The white supremacy question was absolutely awful.
Ridiculous.
Because the premise of the critical race theory thing was completely awful, where he suggested that it was just, you know, racial sensitivity training, where we're all supposed to be nice to each other.
And that's also Trump's fault for not being able to explicate it.
But it is Wallace's fault for asking a garbage question.
But you got the impression with Wallace that he came in with a game plan and Trump completely threw over the table.
And Wallace didn't know what to do, and so he just became another one of the debaters.
It was like a three-person debate again.
Yeah.
We saw this a lot in 2012 with Romney and Obama where the moderator trying to save Obama would insert themselves into the debate and become part of the story.
I thought you saw that with Wallace a lot tonight.
But to me, the bottom line is that when it comes to Trump's hectoring and badgering, listen, I'm good at debate, right?
I do it professionally.
There are times where this is good.
When you ask somebody a question, and they refuse to answer the question, and you follow up with the same question, and they refuse to answer the question, and so you follow up again, and you ask them the same question.
And so he could have done that a series of times.
He did it a little bit on packing the court, and then he did it a little bit again later when he said, you know, can you name a single police organization across the country that supports you?
The problem is when you do it on every single thing...
All night.
There is no point of contrast.
Even I want to hear what Joe Biden has to say.
And it's not just I want to hear what Joe Biden has to say.
It's that you really have to pick your spots.
If all you're doing is throwing haymakers all night long, and some are hitting and some are not, it's very difficult at that point to even tell which ones are hitting and which ones are not.
All you get is the general sense that he's punching. - So we're gonna keep talking about it.
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Okay, guys, you got anything to say about this?
I do.
I do.
I actually do have anything to say.
Which is...
All of my inhibitions are gone.
It's totally...
I agree.
I totally agree with your point that Trump was throwing way too many haymakers and he was badgering too much.
But the thing I think we're overlooking here is...
Here's what I think we're overlooking.
In a normal presidential year, you want the president to seem stately and in control, and he's just debating the Democrat.
But that doesn't work for Trump.
That's not how he got elected.
That's not how he's ever thought about running for office.
He is this different thing, which is he's got to be the outsider.
I think one-on-one does not work as well for Trump as two-on-one.
I think he actually, it benefits Trump to have Chris Wallace jumping in there.
I agree.
And the crazy thing about Trump is, he is this billionaire who is outside the establishment.
How has he worked to that image?
I don't know, but he sure has.
He talks like a truck driver from Queens is part of it.
And what's even crazier is he's a billionaire for 40 years or whatever.
He's now the president, and he somehow presents as outside of the establishment.
The only way that works is when you're fighting Joe Biden, very establishment Democrat, and Chris Wallace, who's been part of the D.C. establishment forever.
I'm not saying it was a great night for him.
I'm just saying that framework is...
I agree with that.
The only thing I think about this is I just think it was a wash.
The media is going to come out tomorrow.
Their whole story is going to be that he didn't denounce white supremacy clearly enough.
You know, that when they said white supremacy, he said, Proud Boys, stand back, but somebody has to deal with these people.
That sounded like he was saying, you know, wait, hold your water and then go into an attack.
That's what they're going to run.
So that's what they've been doing to him for the whole time.
If everything else is awash and he's behind in the polls, that means he remains behind him.
It's a blown opportunity.
It's a blown opportunity.
And by the way, that's typical for a first debate for the incumbent.
Well, I mean, we'll see.
I mean, maybe on Jeremy's side, I'm not sure there will be a second debate.
I'm not either.
I mean, like, especially after that one, I could easily see Joe Biden saying that was a complete waste of time.
He wouldn't let me talk.
I'm just not doing it anymore.
And I'm calling the lid on the rest of the campaign, basically.
I mean, really, I could absolutely see him doing that.
The last answer that he gave about...
Voting and the Supreme Court and not accepting the results of an election is a complete fail.
Honestly, it's extraordinarily counterproductive.
It's discouraging his own voters from voting by mail, which is idiotic because all the Democrats are going to go vote by mail.
And it's legitimizing all of the Democratic complaints that he's not going to hand over power because he's going to try and go through the Supreme Court, which now puts Coney Barrett on the hook for whatever dumb crap he says about ballot counting or whatever.
Do I think it's a major mistake?
No.
But do I think that he can afford any mistakes at this point?
No.
And that's the bottom line.
If you want him to win, the whole thing is he has to do better than this.
It can't just be a wash.
Okay, when you're behind nine points in the polls, in two separate polls in Pennsylvania, when you are running dead even in Florida, and you're running within three in Georgia, right?
And there's a poll today that had Biden up in Georgia.
Okay, these are not the numbers you need in order to be this sanguine about these opportunities.
I completely agree.
Honestly, I'm angry at him.
I'm angry at him that he didn't do better.
I'm angry at him that he didn't do better.
I'm not angry at him because I want him to lose.
I'm angry at him because I want him to win.
Okay, I'm angry at him the same way I'm angry at my six-year-old and my four-year-old when they're having a fight with each other.
I'm like, just don't do this.
Just don't do it.
And honestly, maybe that's part of my problem is that I go home and I deal with my six-year-old and four-year-old slapping the crap out of each other every day.
And then I figure, okay, well, you got a couple people who are 70.
They probably won't do that.
And then I realized that the most rational part of my day was my six-year-old calling my four-year-old a poophead and my four-year-old smacking her on the grill.
You know, if you take...
Your six-year-old saying, I think I deserve...
He made a statement.
I would like to respond to the statement.
I think if you take the debate out of context and you just look at it as a debate, it was a wash.
But I think if you put it in the context of what the polls are saying, if the polls are right and...
Right, always with the prize.
It is bad.
By the way...
You want him to have won.
And in the moments when he did what you say, in the moments when he punched properly into Biden's talk, then he was winning.
I actually disagree with this.
Because in the moments where he was doing what he should do, Chris Wallace would interrupt him and stop him from being able to...
Well, he did do that.
And what the president didn't do a good job with...
So I don't think he did a good job debating Biden, but I also don't think he did a good job debating Chris Wallace.
I agree.
And if he had handled Wallace more like Newt Gingrich handled the press...
In 2012.
Or even as Trump handled Anderson Cooper and whoever it was during the debate with Hillary right after the Access Hollywood tape broke.
The president did a great job of handling an oppositional debate moderator in that particular debate.
Tonight he didn't.
And so you can't really come up with a single time when the president won an exchange.
Hmm.
Because he either did a poor job with Biden or he did a poor job with Wallace.
I think the reason for that is what Ben said, though.
The reason is that it crept up on him.
This is right.
That's fair.
And I also think that part of that is because Wallace...
So to people who are watching, you know, closely, I think you can see Wallace change over the course of the debate.
From a guy who wants to ask the question, then let them talk and let it go.
Because at the beginning, he is letting it go.
No, a fair bit.
They're really talking over each other for the first 15 minutes of the debate.
I mean, solid 15 minutes where Wallace really does not interject.
And then Wallace starts to realize, I need to actually get in control of this debate.
I'm the moderator.
It's time for me to moderate.
And the problem is, because Trump has talked over Biden so much at that point, that when Wallace steps in and says, Mr.
President, you need to show etiquette, then everybody kind of goes, well, somebody needs to reestablish some sort of control here.
But the problem is, of course, that Wallace didn't reestablish some level of neutral control.
He then proceeded to, instead of saying, listen, the time limit has run, Stop talking.
The time limit has run.
Instead of doing that, he went to, I'm now going to badger the crap out of you on a bunch of questions where I would not badger Joe Biden or I'm going to step in to protect Joe Biden.
He was 100% running cover for Joe Biden.
Of course.
In the last 45 minutes, I totally agree.
In the first 45 minutes, I'm not sure I agree with that.
But even beyond that...
You know, he keeps attacking the president for his lack of etiquette.
Joe Biden called the president of the United States a clown twice.
Told the president of the United States to shut up two or three times.
Called him a racist.
Directly called him a racist.
Twice.
Have we ever had a presidential debate in the last hundred years?
Have we had a presidential debate that contentious?
No, but again, like, I don't mean to be, I feel like a parent here.
But when my kids are fighting...
Like, it is rarely one of them who is being a jerk.
Usually both of them are being a jerk.
I mean, the president did say that Joe Biden was mentally inept, right?
He said, you know, you couldn't even spout these sentences.
Forget the truth of whatever these insults are to each other.
And my general view of insult fights is that generally everybody's correct.
But the reality is that Who is the target audience is the question that we should all have in mind.
The target audience is not us.
The target audience is really not really supposed to be the base.
I mean, the debates are really for the people who are in the middle.
Is there anybody in the middle who changed their mind in any significant way on this?
If they did, I think it's suburban moms who are like, eh.
If I hadn't thought that Jeremy was going to give me $100 after this debate, I would have tuned out after the first 15 minutes.
This is exactly right.
I think after the first 15 minutes, the sucker was over.
After the first 15 minutes, I tuned out.
Okay, I was watching it.
It's not just a debate, though, about the people right now.
It's also a debate to establish what's happening on Election Day and after the election.
And this is why I'll push back a little bit on the mail-in answer.
I agree.
I don't think he handled it great.
But I do think he had to address the issue of the widespread mail-in voting.
He made this distinction, maybe too many times, but he made it importantly, between a solicited mail-in ballot, absentee ballots, ballots for the military.
He's right.
Which are great.
They've worked for a long time.
And unsolicited mail-in ballots.
Now we are told, by the way, if you criticize, if you suggest there could be fraud with the unsolicited widespread mail-in ballots, even though you can point to it, right?
The James O'Keefe story about Ilhan Omar's district or the box found on the side of the road or the box found mislabeled.
You can even point to discrete examples.
They'll say, mail-in ballots have never had any problem in America.
And you say, sure, widespread unsolicited mail-in ballots.
Have never occurred.
They are totally unprecedented.
First, Chris Wallace wouldn't actually let him make that answer about solicited versus unsolicited.
Because by that point, Wallace was fully a third debater in the contest.
So I think that that's...
The bigger problem is this.
What is the typical...
He's gone south on Fox News as well.
I've never liked his technique.
I've never liked the technique for repeatedly interrupting people who aren't, if you aren't filibustering, you shouldn't interrupt an answer.
And he does it all the time.
But now he's got a little bit of Trump derangement syndrome.
I think he really thinks there's something about Trump that is specifically offensive to him that he goes after.
And after all, listen, we all know Trump has his big flaws and he can be incredibly offensive and all this.
But Joe Biden also has his huge flaws and is incredibly offensive.
Biden got away with nearly everything tonight.
I mean, really nearly everything.
To me, the one that stuck out when it came to Wallace is Wallace specifically, I believe, said before the debate that he was really going to follow up with Biden on the packing the court thing.
He really didn't.
He asked Biden about it, and Biden elided it again.
And instead of him just...
Terriering him the way he did with Trump on global warming.
Instead, he just sort of let it go.
And that was the first, I thought, indicator of the night.
That happened about 20 minutes in.
That was the first indicator of the night where I was like, oh, this is going to go south on Wallace real fast here.
But as far as the mail-in ballot thing, here's the problem.
Again, this runs to the exhaustion syndrome.
Biden was saying...
Listen, I mean, his answer at the end was, whatever the answer is, all the ballots will be counted, and then you'll have a president.
And Trump's answer was, well, there could be widespread mail-in voting, they could be corrupt ballots, they could be fraudulent ballots.
And so people go, wait a second, there may not be an end to this ever.
That's right.
Ever.
It's actually Trump's worst answer.
Because even if he plans on contesting it, the right answer tonight was...
I'm going to make sure that we have a fair election, but if I lose a fair election, I will, of course, concede the election.
What's so funny about this is we know Biden plans on contesting.
Exactly.
Of course we know that.
He's already hired 600 lawyers.
He's already bragged about this.
And this is part of the issue, though, on the mail-in, encouraging mail-in versus in-person, is I think I'd be willing to put money down right now that Trump wins on election night.
If they even count the votes on election night, they might not even do that.
But the votes counted on election night, I suspect he wins.
The Democrats are already admitting this.
They're saying he'll win, but it'll be a red mirage.
And then they're gonna find some boxes of ballots on a truck somewhere in Jersey or whatever, and then somehow Biden will win. - By the way, to be fair, that did happen in 2018.
I mean, we were here and we said, "This is not a blue wave." And then over the course of the next three weeks, it became a blue wave.
There were a bunch of seats that we thought were gonna go red that ended up going purple, particularly in Orange County. - Yeah, love those mail-ins, yeah.
Love 'em.
For the first time Orange County has these mail-in ballots, it's the first time that they've gone Democrat.
The ballot harvesting.
The ballot harvesting is a real problem.
It's a real problem.
He's not wrong to point that out, but he is wrong to go on for five minutes about how the election might be fraudulent.
You're absolutely right.
It's exhausting.
Are you tired?
I'm tired, okay?
Really, I'm tired.
And I'm not just tired because I got up at 5.30 this morning, right?
I'm tired because this was exhausting.
And who was more exhausting?
I mean, let's just be raw about this.
Who was more exhausting on the stage, Trump or Biden?
You know, that's where I challenge you.
I thought the whole thing was exhausting.
I think it was Jonah Goldberg who tweeted that it was like a remake of Grumpy Old Men.
And that's what I really thought it was.
I did not think...
That Trump was more exhausting than Biden.
I thought Biden was really awful.
I didn't think...
I thought it was a wash.
Again, taking the debate out of context, out of the polls, out of everything, if you just showed me that debate and I didn't know the context, I would just think, this was a disaster.
It was chaos.
I don't know who won.
I don't know who's right.
But Biden didn't contribute to the chaos.
This is right.
Biden gave a bad performance, but he did not contribute to the chaos.
Clown, shut up.
No.
The chaos is Donald Trump didn't allow...
Joe Biden to get a word in edgewise.
And Chris Wallace didn't let Donald Trump get a word in edgewise in the second half.
That's the chaos.
In fact, that is the one thing that Biden has been very consistent about throughout these debates.
He strategically withdraws from the debates.
In the primaries, he would withdraw for 20 minutes in the debates.
He would just disappear.
And then he would duck back in and say, my time has elapsed.
It is another word of lapse.
My time has expired.
And then he would stop himself, literally dead in the middle of the answer.
We'd all be like, what was that?
Why didn't he just continue his answer?
It was the difference between somebody saying jerky things, which he did.
He said a bunch of terrible jerky things tonight.
Horrible things.
In fact, I think he said a couple things that are actually outright evil, including the idea that America is racist in all of its iterations.
I thought that was an evil thing to say.
I think it's an evil thing to say.
But it is the difference between A person occasionally saying nasty things you don't like, and a person in your ear going...
And that's what it was.
I have children.
I'm in the car with them.
Jeremy can attest that when we are on the phone and children are screaming in the car, your first reaction is to hang up the phone.
I doubt there are four of us in this room.
I doubt five people.
Made it all the way through the end of that debate.
Oh, I agree.
I agree.
But again, I just think that they were both awful in different ways.
What a referendum on America.
Everybody's awful.
Are you kidding me?
Everyone in his or her own way.
I think when you're watching a debate like this and you think back to what debates used to be, even at their most zingy, even at your most captured moment, I zinged you and now I'm on TV. Even then, this was a disaster.
Right.
Remember, okay, so the zingers used to be, you're no John F. Kennedy.
And he had to set it up.
He had moments to set that joke up.
Right, or, you know, agent and experience.
Agent and experience one.
I mean, when Reagan says, I will not make age an issue of the campaign.
And Mondale laughed.
Right.
It was that respectful that Mondial laughed at the joke.
Honestly, it just shows the degradation of the American intellect.
I gotta say, because our insults used to be good insults.
These were crap third grade level insults.
You're a racist.
You're a moron.
You're stupid.
Your son's a drug addict.
We get what we deserve good and hard in this country.
That's it.
Me about Trump from the very beginning, the very beginning, is that I think that Trump is necessary to do what he has done, which has been great.
Some of the stuff he's done has been great.
I think he's necessary, but I think it's tragic that it's necessary.
I think it is tragic that in order to do the kinds of things that Trump has done, you have to be a bull, and you have to be a bully, and I think that that's too bad.
Again, I would be okay with all of those things.
On a pure Machiavellian political level, I'd be okay with all of those things if I thought that they were drawing him closer to victory.
I just don't think that drew him closer to victory tonight.
Really?
Because I wouldn't even be, I mean, I would be happier.
I said on a Machiavellian level, on a virtuous level, I wouldn't.
On a virtuous level, I'd prefer this as Lincoln-Douglas.
But it ain't Lincoln-Douglas.
This is the world we live in.
I get it, right?
I get it.
As I've said before, I don't think that Trump is the murderer.
I think he's the coroner.
I think he came across the body of American politics.
That's right.
And he said, okay, this body is cold.
And then people are like, oh, you're standing above it with a knife.
He's like, no, I took the knife out of the body.
I didn't murder the body.
I've been saying that for a long time.
No, I think that's absolutely right.
Perfect description.
With that said, like...
On a pure Machiavellian, you like the guy's policies.
What you want the tragedy to be is not a tragic flaw.
Normally, the tragedy ends with an actual tragedy where he does all the good things, and then it turns out that his tragic flaw eats him alive.
That's the narrative that's being drawn right here.
That's what I think it is.
I think that's right, too, because Donald Trump, the one thing we know about Trump, more than any other human being, living or dead, is that the man loves the spotlight.
He cannot evade the spotlight.
He's like a moth to it.
And in a time when people do not like you, the best move you have is to leave the spotlight.
The best thing that happened to him in 2016, I heard Chris Steierwald, I thought, had an excellent analysis of this.
He does a good podcast with Dana Perino.
And they were talking about 2016.
He said the best thing that happened to Trump was the Access Hollywood tape.
Why?
Not because of the Access Hollywood tape, but because of two factors.
One, Democrats thought he'd lost the election and they stayed home.
And two, Donald Trump was so put off by the Access Hollywood tape, he went into hiding for three weeks.
And because he went into hiding for three weeks, the center of the election went, and it suddenly focused on Hillary.
And when Comey hit her with that letter near the end of the election cycle, the only thing people were talking about in the week leading up to the election was Hillary Clinton.
Do you think anyone is coming away from this debate talking about Joe Biden?
No.
I think that's why it was a strategic error, leaving everything else aside.
It was a strategic error to keep interrupting him because if you let Biden talk, he makes a fool of himself.
He should have done that.
He should have rope-a-doped him a little bit more.
I agree.
We want to thank you guys for joining us.
We're going to be back for whatever debates might happen.
I'm not going to make any bets about whether or not they will or will not, but if they do, we will be here.
Until then, you can hear from these guys on the morrow as they bring you their normal podcast, and you can hear from me hopefully never again.
We'll see you guys next time.
We'll see you next time.
Executive producer is me, Jeremy Boring.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Our assistant director is Pavel Wadowski and our technical producer, Austin Stevens.
Editing is by Jim Nickel.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina and our audio assistant is Robin Fenderson.
Playback is operated by Nick Sheehan.
And hair and makeup is by Nika Geneva.
Daily Wire Backstage is a Daily Wire production.
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