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March 8, 2024 - The Michael Knowles Show
01:39:46
Daily Wire Backstage State of the Union 2024 Coverage
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Time Text
Hey, Michael Knowles here.
The latest episode of Backstage State of the Union 2024 coverage is available now.
Join Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, and the God King, Jeremy Boring, as they unpack Joe Biden's State of the Union address with me piping in from the actual State of the Union.
Take a listen.
Welcome to the Daily Wire's live coverage of the State of the Union.
Tonight, I'm joined by two of the best-looking men in the business.
I don't want to say who, but I don't want to start no fights.
I'm your host, Jeremy Boring.
We're glad to have you with us.
Before we get started, I want to remind you that all of our Daily Wire Plus members can submit questions, and we will do our best to answer a lot of them in the back half of the show coming up after the President's remark.
That's right, it's that time of year again, the worst night of the year, the night that the President stands up and Goes on and on and on and on and on.
It doesn't really matter to me if it's a Republican president or a Democrat president.
People used to say, oh Trump, it's gonna be great.
It was not great.
The State of the Union is one of the worst things that happens in American public life.
That's why we joined together so that you can suffer right here with us.
The only thing that makes tonight's State of the Union somewhat more bearable to me is that while we're here suffering it with whiskey and Mayflower cigars and whatever it is that Ben's allowed to eat according to his religion, Michael Knowles is actually there in person.
I know, I know.
He's suffering in an actual seat.
He's gone and his cigars are here.
It's perfect.
The best use of Michael.
He totally deserves this.
Good for him.
He's finally getting what he deserves.
Here's a little clip that Michael sent us from the event itself.
Hey, gents.
Sorry that I can't be with you all.
That's actually not true at all.
I'm very glad I can't be with you all, because I'm here at the Capitol with Congressman Andy Ogles, who very kindly invited me here for the State of the Union, so you jerks can all watch it on camera.
But, you know, we'll be here for the real thing.
Andy, you just gave me a very important button on one of the biggest issues facing the country right now.
Well, every small town in America, or every town in America, is a border town because of Joe Biden and his failed policies.
And so you have the results of Lincoln, Riley, and so many others that have now come forward in the news of the assaults and the rapes and the murders and the burglaries at the hands of an illegal at the feet, you can lay this at the feet of Joe Biden.
Bring up Reagan's line.
Are you better now than you were three years ago?
On virtually any measure, that is not the case.
So we'll see how the president can possibly spin this tonight.
You know, one is hard-pressed to think of even one area that has improved or even remained status quo under his tenure.
So we'll see what he can do, if he can even stay awake for the speech.
And then we'll speak to you afterward.
That's Michael Knowles at the Capitol for the event.
Probably the greatest night of his life, honestly.
If any of us were going to have to go to this thing, who would love it more than Michael, who is an actual political creature?
Again, he totally deserves it.
Anybody who enjoys it should be there.
Because not only is it the worst night just because the president talks like a dumbass a thousand years and lists all the things he's not going to do, but he's going to yell at you about.
But also, it's just a monarchic, anti-constitutional spectacle.
You have the President of the United States descending among the various legislators who all ooh and ah over him and rush to grip and grin and take a picture with him and make kissy face.
And then he's like, right over there in the corner, there's old Bob.
Bob was a plumber during World War II.
Stand up, Bob!
No, no, no.
I have it on good authority that Bob will not be there tonight and that every single person the President points out will be there to advocate for slaughtering innocent babies.
Oh, that's even better.
That's even better.
I actually think that's true tonight.
That's right.
He's big into the abortion talk.
And so it's all of that, and then half the crowd stands up half the time, half the crowd sits down half the time, and every so often you have Nancy Pelosi rip something up in the background, and that's pretty much the night.
It's garbage.
The painful part for me is the press.
The press has gone so far.
I thought I was inured to it.
I thought I'd gotten used to it.
And then I saw Joe Scarborough saying that Biden was, this was the best Biden ever.
So first of all, can I just say, Joe Scarborough now looks exactly like Waldo from Where's Waldo?
So we've answered at least one important question.
Where is Waldo?
But I just thought, like, what has to happen to you before you can speak those words?
F you, he said, if you don't agree that this guy is on point, he's alpha, he's really... It was the SNL routine come to life.
And I just can't... What Noel said, I hate to admit it, but Noel said something true, but he's right.
There's no area of American life that's better Since Biden took office that he has any control over.
And yet, you know for the next two days we're going to be listening to actual journalists wearing, who can dress themselves, wearing ties and dresses and looking like respectable people, lying about everything that just happened.
Well, Ben and I had a conversation today with a journalist who was asking us about why Gina Carano won't consent to being vaccinated if she purportedly wants to get back into the movie business, but she's unwilling to get vaccinated, which is now the industry standard in Hollywood.
And this guy, it was a wonderful conversation we had with him.
I'm sure he's on the other side, but it wasn't hostile in any way.
But he brought this up and he was actually, he said, God, help me understand.
I literally don't understand.
I do not understand.
I can't square it.
She says that what she wants is to be back in the movies, but she won't do the thing.
The only impediment is getting vaccinated.
Why won't you just get vaccinated?
Please, I genuinely don't understand.
And I thought, yeah, I know you don't understand because you're, you live in such a bubble.
The left has built, they're against walls, ostensibly, but they have built walls between them and us, such that they don't even understand how we think.
I'm not saying that he would agree if he knew how we think, but you would imagine that he would at least understand the basic premise of what it is. - I have to tell you, I spent this week in New York and I was talking to a lot of publishing people and a lot of stuff about my work and all this stuff.
And they're the same way.
They're like, well, you can compromise here, and you can cut this out.
And I keep saying to them, I can't.
Because it's not like I disagree with Woke a little bit.
I think Woke is evil.
I think you guys are the bad guys.
So it's kind of like saying, you know, you could just put a nice thing about Hitler here, you know, a nice thing about Mao.
But this speaks to, I think, one of the things that's happened to Biden.
So when Biden took office, he had about a 55-60% approval rating and he came into office as a supposed moderate.
He was somebody who was going to unify the country and govern from the center-left, right?
He won the entire race on the basis of not being Bernie Sanders on the one hand and not being Donald Trump on the other.
And so he enters office and that's sort of the basis of his entire administration.
And very quickly he shifts into, I'm going to be FDR.
And that means I'm going to swivel to the radical left and I'm going to make myself subject to every single thing the radical left wants of me.
And I'm just going to keep pandering to the radical left.
The problem is there aren't that many radical leftists.
And so what has actually happened is that the reason he's doing poorly in the polls is not just because his base is unenthused about him.
It's because independents do not like him.
Moderates do not like him.
I've been saying this for weeks at this point.
Joe Biden is not the moderate in this race.
Donald Trump is the moderate in this race.
That's right.
Well, that's true.
If you look at him positionally on every single issue, Donald Trump has now taken the center of the political spectrum.
That includes issues where we all disagree with him, right?
On abortion, for example, he might argue for, say, a 16-week federal abortion ban, which is way too late for any of us.
But for sort of the median American voter, that's a lot closer than Joe Biden, who's saying abortion up to a point of birth by every available poll.
About 48% of Americans, according to Gallup, support a 16-week abortion ban.
Only 24% of Americans want abortion available all the way up to birth.
The rest want more restrictions than that.
So that's not Biden's position.
That's Trump's position.
When you look at the Middle East, the crazies in Dearborn, Michigan, who are dictating to Joe Biden that he needs to be somehow putting pressure on Israel to stop the killing of members of Hamas.
That is not where the median American voter is.
The median American voter is in one of two places.
Either I don't want to hear about it anymore and don't care, which is totally understandable, or I like Israel more than Hamas.
The number of people in America who like Hamas more than Israel is minuscule.
I mean, truly minuscule.
And those are the people that Joe Biden is catering to in the middle of this entire fight.
In fairness, every one of the people in America who prefers Hamas to Israel is currently blocking the presidential route between the White House and the Capitol.
I'm not making this up.
All 17 to 18 of them are actually attempting to impede President Biden's approach to the Capitol.
And he's such a weakling that he won't actually just say to the cops, okay, move everybody.
Move them.
Right, he'll just leave them there.
It'll be four hours from now and we'll be sitting here.
Look at these morons.
One of the things we miss, I think, because we pay attention to the news, is most people are so taken with appearances.
I talk to Democrats all the time who say, you know, the Democrat Party has gone too far, but they still believe in Joe Biden because he looks like that guy who used to be the moderate.
I mean, I've always, I detest the guy.
I've always hated him.
I think he's corrupt.
I think he's mean.
I think he's small.
People forget he gave us Our dear friend Andrew Breitbart, who would just mark the 12th year since Breitbart's death.
Breitbart became a conservative in essence because of Joe Biden.
That's right, because of Clarence Thomas.
And the other thing about Biden, first of all I just want to say that I feel right at home because the start to this broadcast has been so negative and cynical.
It's great, I love it.
The other thing about Biden though, he's the radical in the race.
You know, what I think people are starting to finally realize about him is that he really hates the American people, and that's not just like a slogan, he actually does.
This has always been one of the distinctions between Trump and Biden, because Trump has the reputation of, you know, attacking people and going after people, but Trump always goes after the media, he goes after celebrities, he goes after politicians, he goes after world leaders.
Trump never attacks people.
He never attacks just like the American people, but that's exactly what Biden does.
And I would look for that.
That's one thing to look for in the State of Union address is when does he start going after the MAGA Republicans?
Because that's his favorite phrase now.
MAGA Republican means just people who vote for Trump.
That's right.
And that's tens of millions of Americans.
Well, it's another distinction that they don't understand on the left that I always get a Anytime a reporter writes something negative about Ben and I, they refer to us as MAGA Republicans, or alt-right.
Four years ago it was alt-right, now it's MAGA Republicans.
It's like, you don't understand that no one hates Ben more than the alt-right.
And neither of us are MAGA Republicans.
Although, listen, Donald Trump's the nominee and I'm... We both voted for him in 2020.
We'll both vote for him again.
That's right.
But the left has blinded itself.
The truth is that politics has just rotted all of our brains to the point that we can't see distinctions.
One of the things I've been amused by all week is that when I talk to people on the left and when I talk to people on the right at the moment, they both tell me this is the most important election of our lifetime.
They both tell me our democracy itself is on the line.
And so to confront this existential threat, both parties have elevated men who will either one of them be the oldest man ever elected to president, both of whom presided over large chunks of the worst failure of our government in the history of the Republic, which is the response to COVID-19, both of whom are are obviously diminished, although one of them Way more than the other.
More obviously diminished.
And both sides are going, I can't believe you would vote for that other guy.
Can't you see how old and corrupt and out of touch?
What that shows me is that we are so convinced that our politics are so important that we're willing to overlook sort of the log in our own eye to a large degree.
And so both parties are in this position of thinking that the other not only is evil, which is, that's one conversation, but out of their minds for actually elevating the person whom they're elevating.
I think to be fair, one of the things I've been talking about repeatedly on my show is I really do believe that we're watching the end of, really of my generation, of two failed ideas.
One is the Great Society, which has been a complete and utter failure.
But it has fed money and power into the Democrat Party, which is why they keep amping up the charges of racism against individuals and now the entire nation to deflect from the fact that really this stuff needs to be gotten rid of.
And that's Joe Biden.
He embodies that failure.
And the other is the failure of movement conservatism, the idea that we're somehow going to repeal the Great Society and maybe even dial back the New Deal and bring back a rebirth of freedom.
Donald Trump, as you say, is not a conservative.
He looks like a conservative.
He talks like a conservative.
He gestures like a conservative.
But the stuff coming out of his mouth isn't conservatism.
And I think the reason that nobody can see what's happening is nobody knows what comes next.
Nobody's actually talking.
In the way I think they should be talking in big, theoretical terms about what exactly the new movement, the new conservatism looks like.
I've been talking to 25-year-olds and listening to a lot of their podcasts, and you know, it's frightening.
It sounds a little bit like Knowles, you know?
It sounds a little bit like this kind of proto-authoritarianism, this idea that this guy Bukele, what a great guy, you know, he suspended constitutional rights and got rid of the gangsters.
He is a good guy, though.
In that country, he did the right thing, but I'm afraid that they like the suspension of rights more than they like the cleaning up of the gangsters.
That's what bothers me.
It's not the individual situation.
It's the idea.
What are they cheering?
Are they cheering the arrests of the gangsters?
Not to get off on a tangent, but in his case, they're cheering a leader Who cares about the safety and security of his people and will do what's necessary to secure that safety and to make their lives better because that's, you know, it's like a radical concept in this country, but your leaders are supposed to make your life better.
They're supposed to make it, you know, easier for you to live and raise a family.
But doing that requires you to do ugly, it's ugly, it requires you to do ugly things sometimes.
I can see the point in the case of Bukele.
I just think a lot of people cheering him or cheering for the suspension of the Constitution more than what you just said.
so I would just add to what you're saying, and obviously I agree with it, is with minimum possible force.
Meaning that the idea that you should use the means necessary in order to secure the safety and security of your people, but using the minimum amount of government compulsion you have to do in order to achieve that, is a different thing from saying that the government requires vast overarching powers in order to constantly do that thing. is a different thing from saying that the government requires And so the idea of, you know, for example, if Bukele was doing what he's doing as an emergency power, I think most people are okay with that, like on the normal person level.
And the question is in the United States, what kind of powers are we talking about delegating to the government for how long and how broad?
When it comes to the movement conservatism point, I would agree with you, except I feel, you know, like the no true Scotsman communists here.
I would agree with you, except I don't think movement conservatism has ever been tried.
There's never been a candidate in my lifetime running for President of the United States who vowed to actually seriously tackle things like the deficit, vowed to seriously tackle things like the Great Society program.
George W. Bush increased spending.
He campaigned as a compassionate conservative.
In 1996, Bob Dole was not campaigning as a slash and burn government guy.
In 1992, George H.W. Bush was not campaigning as a slash-and-burn government guy.
In fact, even Ronald Reagan was not a slash-and-burn government guy.
He talked like it, but he actually was not.
He wildly expanded government expenditures under his reign.
So, you know, the idea that what comes next might be something that looks like, say, for looking south of the border again, something like Javier Mille on the right, that would not be a bad thing.
Like Javier Mille coming in and just vastly cutting programs.
I'm totally in favor of that.
The big question for me tonight, getting back to Joe Biden and away from South America, the big question for me is, of course, whether Joe Biden is capable of remaining conscious or whether he's going to fall asleep the way I do on my Helix Sleep Mattress.
I've had my Helix Sleep Mattress for multiple years at this point.
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Drew, don't you also have a Helix Sleep?
I do indeed, and I stay awake all night, so I actually know how comfortable it is.
You guys fall asleep on it, but I don't.
I'm there, and it is an incredibly comfortable mattress.
That Helix Sleep mattress is keeping me alive because I sleep and keeping Drew alive because if he falls asleep, he dies.
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So, yeah, I mean, the truth is hovering over all of the political talk is the simple fact that most Americans vote based on who they just like when they get into the voting booth.
And who's taller.
Well, yeah, that too.
It is amazing to me.
I think that the Democrats really thought that everybody would just ignore the fact that Joe Biden is no longer sentient.
Everybody knows that's the underlying question of tonight is whether they're going to have to break out the defibrillators.
The only question is, How serious the health crisis will be.
You know, I'm sure there are over-under bets on how long he will pause during the speech to regain it.
If somebody... You can end his presidency tonight if you unplug the teleprompter.
If you unplug the teleprompter, dude is toast.
Because he will just start me...
That's what I'm...
Oh, my rosary...
It's just handing out Werther's Originals.
I mean...
That sounds like Werther's Originals.
There's only one way I truly think, honestly, that he can save the speech tonight.
That's to reach into the podium and get one of these.
- Oh no. - And may the force be with you.
May the force be with you.
We're not going to explain that at all?
No.
That's not the way of our show.
We make obscure jokes that no one... Fine, we'll explain the joke.
Okay, for those who haven't seen... No!
What are you going to explain the joke?
Because it's a great clip and so we have to show it.
Okay, fine.
So this went viral in 2003 in Chile.
We're back south of the border.
In Chile, they ran Star Wars A New Hope on TV and they did not tell the advertisers that they were not allowed to do this.
So the advertisers just did something unique with Cerveza Cristal.
And so we bring you this masterpiece.
You fought in the Clone Wars?
Yes.
I was once a Jedi Knight, the same as your father.
I wish I'd known him.
He was the best star pilot in the galaxy.
And a cunning warrior.
I understand you've become quite a good pilot yourself.
And he was a good friend.
Which reminds me, I have something here for you.
Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough.
Can I just say, when I watch that, I'm reminded about how bad the writing and acting in Star Wars is.
God bless it, Matt.
You're the worst person.
You're just the worst.
It doesn't hold up at all.
I'm not trying to be controversial.
I'm just saying.
It's not true at all.
It's not even remotely true.
Ben, because you watched it.
No, my kids watch it.
When's the first time you saw Star Wars?
I don't know, seven maybe?
Exactly.
You have a nostalgic attachment to it.
If you wait like I did and you watch it the first time and you're like 25, you go, like, this is Star Wars?
This is what everyone's freaking out about?
I have to tell you, this is the one opinion of Matt's I agree with 100%.
You do?
You do agree?
Of course you do, because you thought the talkies would never last.
By the way, you want to know something funny?
Ella Guinness in that movie is 56.
Is he?
Yeah, he's born 1914.
Every time I watch him, I think he's such an intelligent actor, he must be thinking, I hope the paycheck for this is very good because I'm making a fool of myself.
They're not Americans.
Are you going to defend the actor?
I never thought I'd want Michael back.
You think Mark Hamill?
Okay, Mark Hamill is indefensible, but I will say that Alec Guinness is great in everything.
And he's great in this.
And Harrison Ford is iconic.
He is.
I mean, you want to talk about the greatest run?
Sorry, Alec Guinness was 50, let's see, he was 63.
Anyway.
You don't have to defend Star Wars to these bozos.
It's one of the most successful films of all time.
Successful, no question about that.
And it deserves it.
No, no, no.
It destroyed the movie industry.
It destroyed the movie industry?
Yeah.
In what way?
That's an interesting take.
Why do you say that?
That's a stupid take.
Because the IQ of movies before Star Wars was up around 140.
After Star Wars, the movie industry is now 90.
What are you talking about?
I like that take.
Can I take that take?
That's a stupid take.
It's just a little copyright.
The IQ of the movie industry started to really wreck itself during Marvel era.
Okay, that's late, but it's really during the Marvel era.
But this created the Marvel era.
This created the place... This is 30 years before the Marvel era.
No, no, no.
It took a long time for the cancer to reach through the entire body.
I mean, now, go back and watch, like, the worst B-movie made in 1948, and the intelligence level is so far above Star Wars, and the depth of feeling and humanity.
People now think that there are good guys and bad guys.
Yes, but there was a decade called the 60s, and the movies sucked.
And then there was a decade called the 70s, and most of the movies, except for anything made by Francis Ford Coppola, sucked, okay?
And then you got Star Wars, and it saved the movie industry, because literally there wouldn't be a movie industry.
Well, it saved the movie industry by turning it into a stupid movie.
Amadeus won Best Picture three years after that.
I'm so glad I brought this up.
I'm so glad I brought it up, and also, yeah, that's a great take.
It's absolutely true.
When we were just starting The Daily Wire, I used to come in, and you guys would be arguing whether Spider-Man was really dead or not, and I would think, like, how old are these guys?
These people are over 12.
I know, he's talking about like Austin and Mathis would be arguing about, and he's blaming us.
Because from his vantage, we all look the same, and by we, I mean anyone under 60.
I used to yell at you about it, because you would sit there, I remember you sitting there yelling at people.
Who cares?
He's a guy in a costume.
Spider-Man?
Spider-Man!
What are you talking about?
It was some movie where he died and you were explaining to somebody that he had to come back in the next film.
I'm sorry.
People tell me conversations that I've had with other people and I can't believe that I've had those conversations.
I'm just not going to defend Star Wars.
Star Wars requires no defense.
Except for Kathleen Kennedy.
The real problem with Star Wars now, too, if you waited a long time to watch it, is that it's almost impossible to actually see the original trilogy without all of the self-destructive Lucas inserts.
that were made later, that I think Lucas did on purpose.
I think he had a sort of subconscious need to destroy the original trilogy because he did not direct Empire or Jedi.
Empire is one of the great movies ever made.
That's right.
And I think that after he did write and direct the prequels, he needed to go back and make the original trilogy much worse so that people would quit saying, you're ruining Star Wars.
So he actually rewrote even your memory of Star Wars to make it as bad as his prequels were.
I mean, my biggest problem with Star Wars was always that this is supposed to be highly advanced technology that can go the speed of light.
And they're using, essentially, swords.
Like, glowing swords.
Like, that, that's never, that never makes sense.
Yeah, repel lasers, my friend.
But even so, it just doesn't make sense with all the other technology that that's the weapon you're using is a glowing sword.
That's actually a good point, too.
I'm sorry.
Why is that a good point?
That's a terrible point.
Anyway, well, you know, we can talk Star Wars all night, but let's talk about the old man who might die tonight.
So anyway, he's sitting right here.
So I want to speak to that.
I think Biden's going to do a great job tonight.
I mean, obviously I hate the State of the Union.
I think every word he's going to say is a lie.
But I think the performance will not be what everyone thinks it is.
I think we always think, we always go into these things thinking that the performance is going to be bad.
In fact, during Trump, People thought the same thing.
Oh, he's so blustery and bumbling and he's gonna get up there and it's gonna be awful.
But it's not true.
They get up there.
It's a very controlled environment.
They're reading from the teleprompter.
Their side bails them out and claps for them anytime there's any sign of trouble.
I think that it's actually a very hard forum to fail in.
I think that we, on the right, Correctly observe, of course, that Biden is very old, too old to be president, and diminished.
But I think that we sort of assume that he's more diminished than he is.
And when you actually put him up on that stage in front of a teleprompter and pump a bunch of heroin into him, he's going to do fine.
He'll do fine.
Well, so here's where I disagree.
And I don't think it's possible for him to do fine.
The reason I say that is because I'm going to use the Roger Ailes before all the bad stuff about Roger Ailes came out test.
And the Roger Ailes test was... Can he twirl?
The answer is no, he can't.
The actual test that he used to determine whether somebody was good on TV or not is he would mute the TV.
So if he was watching a news program and he wanted to determine if somebody should be an anchor or not, he would watch them and he would mute the TV and see if he was still interested in watching the TV, which is actually quite a good test because TV is a visual medium.
Well, the thing about Joe Biden is that if you mute the TV, he looks like absolute death warmed over.
He looks awful.
He looks so much worse than he did even four years ago.
It's astonishing the amount of decline that he has undergone.
I'm not even talking about like how often he slurs his words or reaches for a word that he can't find or starts bumbling basic facts like who is the president of Mexico and who is the president of Egypt.
I'm talking about just looking at him as a physical specimen of a human being.
I know people who are 81, who are in significantly better shape than Joe Biden.
Oh yeah.
Like far, far better shape than Joe Biden.
He has undergone a steep decline.
I mean, look at Trump.
And so the very possibility... So when you look at him, if you don't see Kamala Harris lurking in the background, you're doing it wrong, because that dude is not... Trump is in much better shape, but Trump is also diminished.
He is diminished.
He is not 2016 Donald Trump.
He's not, but they've done everything they could possibly do to him to destroy him, and he's kind of amazing.
He's still making jokes.
Well, he's preserved his life energy by eating cheeseburgers and never exercising.
Amazing.
Peter O'Toole said the only exercise he gets is carrying the coffins of people who exercise.
Also, the delta between 2016 Trump and 2024 Trump is not nearly the delta between.
Yeah.
Oh, absolutely.
And that's the real question.
It's not that, of course, he's diminished, but he was starting from a point where he was a stand-up comedian who, like, makes funny jokes, and you weren't expecting him to deliver a disquisition on the future of Iraq or something.
Right.
You weren't expecting that if you watched from Joe Biden either, but that's what Joe Biden held himself up to be.
Joe Biden always thought of himself as this sort of senatorial Demosthenes, right?
He was going to be out there just speaking pearls of wisdom and speaking fluently and smoothly with the gift of gab and all that.
Like, Donald Trump has always spoken in short declarative sentences with about a fourth grade vocab.
That's not a rip on him.
It's one of the reasons he's a successful communicator.
Because of that, it hides a myriad of sins.
It's not as though he's a guy searching for the word myriad.
He's not going to be doing that, right?
The only thing that he's searching for is whether to use dumb or stupid, or great or magnificent.
Those are the big puzzles.
So when he has a brain fart for a moment, it also just fits well within his oeuvre.
That's what he does.
Okay, fine.
I agree he's diminished.
I do have to say... He can barely walk.
I swear, when he walks down the steps here, They're going to be so careful about him walking down the steps and the ramp down here.
That's why, actually, there has not been a State of the Union that mattered in my entire lifetime, and generally they're forgotten within... A week.
Within, really, the next day, no one's talking about it.
This does have the chance to actually be a State of the Union that will matter politically if there's a moment like that, if he slips and falls, if he has a really bad brain fart type moment.
It does have the chance of actually being a significant State of the Union.
I just don't think we'll actually get that.
I think that if you set yourself up to think you're about to see Joe Biden fail, that you're probably setting yourself up to fail.
We're seeing some footage here now of the Supreme Court Justices entering the House chamber, and you may notice that all of the Democrat Female senators and congresswomen are wearing white, and that's to show that they stand with the people who rip babies out of the wombs.
Shouldn't it be red?
I'm sorry.
They don't say white long and that line will work.
Props, by the way, here to Samuel Alito, who never shows up for this.
Every year Samuel Alito's like, we're a co-equal branch of government, I'm not doing this stupid nonsense.
And then he doesn't show up.
And cheers to Samuel Alito, because that is precisely... I don't see Clarence Thomas there either.
Yeah.
I mean, when was the last time Joe Biden spoke on camera for more than 20 minutes live?
When he gave that rousing... Fascist Independence Day speech.
Fascist Independence Day speech.
Oh, that was great.
I loved that.
Hellraiser 2.
Speaking of Star Wars, he literally looked like he was... I mean, it was Palpatine in the throne room.
It was Palpatine, yeah.
It was pretty wonderful.
You know, to go back to Trump for a minute though, I have to say the stuff they have done to him, I believe that every indictment against him, though not everyone is untrue, some of them are, they're all unfair, and they're obviously lawfare, they're obviously political.
Of course, yeah.
Okay, so here's my problem with this.
I know what that means.
- Wouldn't he be, he's winning. - I know, but it's real.
Like, even if they put you through that and you were winning, wouldn't it beat you down a little bit?
You know, he's like, he's having a time of his life.
- Okay, so here's my problem with this.
I don't know what that means.
Him being grumpy is a form of upbeat. - Right. - Like, really, what's he, I mean, Pugnacious is what you're looking for.
Donald Trump does not have a mode where he's in, like, mourning and self-reflection.
Right.
That mode does not exist in his brain.
And so if you attack him, him being pugnacious is just the norm.
But he doesn't even have a mode where he feels, like, beaten.
It's like, I'm sorry, but it's moving, you know?
It's kind of like when they say, oh, you've got to pay half a billion dollars, and he's like, uh, corrupt.
I'm gonna take him down.
I'm kinda thinking like, you go get him, buddy.
You know? - I mean, listen, I agree with all of that.
Also, I just don't wish to attribute, it's like when people say, "Oh, he did an amazing job fighting cancer." And it's like, what else is he gonna do?
The surrender?
I mean, like, what are his choices here?
I mean, like, he's running for president. - I don't even catch him in a candid moment, like staring at his shoes, thinking, you know, like, I could go to prison. - Listen, he's a high energy dude.
And the fact that he's a high-energy dude is the reason why he is such a contrast with Biden.
Because by all rights, he should be running 10 points behind Biden, regardless of what Biden is doing as president, given all the things that he's been hit with.
And given the fact that, you know, he lost the last election, and now he's running again against the same guy.
And yet— And yet, there he is.
I mean, he's ahead in virtually all the swing states.
And the New York Times is saying things like, well, one conviction and he'll be over it.
One conviction, he'll be elected in the last slot.
Yeah, one conviction, he'll be president of the world.
Yeah, this is wishful thinking.
It's like, every single time, it's Lucy and the football.
We've got him this time.
How did he escape?
How did it happen this time?
I will say, he's his party's nominee, which he wasn't the last time we were all together.
Before the raid on Mar-a-Lago, there was the idea that there might be a primary.
He's the last man standing and almost certainly, acts of God not withstanding, he's the nominee for his party.
And the truth is he has been since the raid on Mar-a-Lago.
Before the raid on Mar-a-Lago, there was the idea that there might be a primary.
After the raid on Mar-a-Lago, it pretty quickly became evident that to the Republican electorate, this was an incumbent president.
In other words, the primary itself was perfunctory, just like Joe Biden's primary was perfunctory.
I think that that is why some of the criticisms, for example, of say Ron DeSantis were And how he ran a terrible campaign.
I agreed with our buddy, Kurt Schlichter, like maybe he did, maybe he didn't.
It wouldn't matter if he had run a great campaign.
Well, I agree.
It was Donald Trump.
It wouldn't have mattered, but I also think he ran a terrible campaign.
I mean, again, both of those things could be true, but I think that basically there were two factors that cut against him.
One was the feeling of defensive protection that the Republican base took toward Trump the minute he got hit with the indictment.
And the other was Joe Biden collapsing.
Absolutely collapsing like a dying star in the polling numbers.
Because the entire basis for a competitor to Trump was, he can't win, I can win.
That's the reason you're running against him.
I say collapsing star.
I feel like dying star gives me visions of Kamala ascending and I don't really want to know, oh my gosh.
There just is no correct way to go after Trump if you're in a primary.
What do you do?
Well, I mean, it would be a good sales pitch if Trump were running at 35%, but Trump wasn't running at 35%.
And you go after him, you alienate his supporters.
It's just no, it's a, there's a no win proposition.
The rules don't apply to him.
His basic argument also was, I'll be Trump, but better, which is just not a very good sales.
Well, I mean, it would be a good sales pitch if Trump were running at 35%, but Trump wasn't running at 35%.
Trump was running dead even with Biden at the time.
And so that's- I think that Joe Biden is a once in a generation opportunity for Republicans that we didn't take.
There is a tragedy to DeSantis, who is the most successful governor of my lifetime, not being able to clinch the nomination.
I agree.
But he couldn't clinch the nomination.
I mean, it's funny to think, though, that Nikki Haley, I think, would trounce Joe Biden.
But I don't want Nikki Haley to be president either.
I don't think she'd be a very good president.
Well, I mean, the real question about what Trump does in Term 2 is going to be how serious he is about appointing serious people.
And whether they'll show up.
Well, I think that when somebody's the president, people show up around him.
I do think that.
But I think that Trump also has this thing in his head that, you know, if you weren't loyal to Trump from beginning to end, this time he's not going to take in anybody who even showed an ounce of disloyalty.
And so there could be a sort of internal battle inside Trump administration, too, between the loyalists who are not amazingly good at their job and the people who might be actually really good at their job and transformational and being able to, say, clean out the executive branch, but once said a bad word about Donald Trump or endorsed somebody else in a primary or something.
That could be a real problem.
I will say this, though, for Donald Trump.
Obviously, I'm not a fan of Donald Trump.
I wish he wasn't the nominee.
I hope, like Hillary, he wins the general because he is the nominee.
He doesn't hold grudges.
I actually think that there's this image that Donald Trump holds grudges.
Donald Trump holds a grudge right up until the grudge ends.
So, if you supported DeSantis, if you bashed Trump during the primary, some of Donald Trump's supporters may not forgive you.
Donald Trump will stop caring the second that you say something nice about him.
That's true.
But you have to say the nice thing.
You don't say the nice thing, you're dead forever.
Forever.
No matter what.
But you say the nice thing, he lets it go instantly.
Which, there's a kind of charm to that.
No, he does have a kind of charm, and the press enhances his charm because they're worse than he is.
So that everything, all the kind of overstatements he makes, the hyperbole and all that stuff, don't look like anything compared to the lies of the press.
And not only that, they take those and then they treat them absolutely literally.
Yes.
That's the part where we all start doing, come on.
Shane Gillis has a wonderful routine about Donald Trump's speech that he made after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed.
Oh yes.
It's a wonderful, wonderful routine.
When he says, like, what he's saying about the wonders of Trump and how Trump came out.
And where Obama, after they killed bin Laden, he came out and he was very somber and he was trying to explain in very measured tones what had happened.
Trump came out and he's like, we killed him.
He's dead.
He died like a dog.
Dirty dog.
Dirty dog.
And everybody found that charming.
And the media were like, I can't believe he would talk like that.
That's just so terrible.
And nobody looks at Trump that way anymore.
Like, it's all baked into the cake.
Donald, here's the other thing.
I think that there is a whole group of Americans who are older, who are looking at younger Americans, and they're like, what's happening right now isn't normal.
Like, it's weird and it's not normal.
And for younger Americans, guess what?
This is normal.
This has been happening since 2015.
It is now 2024.
There are people who are going to vote in the next election cycle who are legitimately 9 or 10 years old.
When Donald Trump became a presidential candidate for the first time.
And a lot of them, a lot of them, I had this guy I interviewed this week, a 24-year-old conservative talker with a small show, and he said, you know, 2020 happens, you watch these riots go on, you watch the press tell you that these riots will cure COVID, but if you go to a Donald Trump rally, that will spread COVID, and the riots are mostly peaceful with the buildings.
He said, and you realize, these people are not here for me.
They don't, they hate me, you know?
This is the greatest collection of IQ I've ever seen.
Mazie Hirono and Bernie Sanders laughing together about how many people they would put in a gulag if they actually had the opportunity.
Combined age of 650.
Their combined age is significantly higher than their combined IQ.
She wasn't wearing white, which I appreciate in this setting.
That is true.
I hate all these people.
I truly do.
I mean, like, Congress is filled with dullards.
The Supreme Court is, eh.
Will there be actual support after this for a presidential age limit?
No.
No.
There should be.
There should be, 100%.
Like, it's unassailable in my mind that, obviously, 75— At some point, you stop.
—should be the cutoff, if not earlier.
Yeah, that's correct.
I would cut off much earlier.
But this is telling us something, right?
It's telling us that the boomer generation is the last generation that was Well, I think that something you've said before, Drew, and I think this is right, is that, yes, we can yell at the boomer generation and blame them, and they deserve a lot.
But I think they think they're holding back something that's catastrophic.
I agree.
I do.
I do, too.
They probably are.
Yes.
Yes, I agree.
I mean, you think about even the, you know, we talk a lot about the DI in the airline industry.
Right.
And I think you've got this generation of, and I've seen people talk about this, this generation of, like, boomer pilots Who are just keeping us from catastrophe.
And once they shuffle off, we're in trouble.
That's what this kid said, by the way.
He said, you know, you guys have a lot to answer for.
Speaking of me, he said, you guys have a lot to answer for.
But you knew what you were doing.
You were competent.
You knew how to do your jobs.
And he said, that's just not true anymore.
Yeah, we will harken back to the good old days when planes didn't crash.
I mean, one of the pieces of reportage that we've done on the DEI stuff is on the surgery industry.
Yeah, good piece.
And the fact that DEI has now infused, you know, like the people who are cutting you open.
I mean, the insanity that is about to be unleashed among people of the younger generation is totally crazy.
The middle is not, there is no middle anymore.
The middle has been completely obliterated.
The truth is, not that there wasn't a conservative movement, Drew, the fact is that there was this sort of...
Everyone hates the blob, and for a reason.
The blob is terrible.
Yeah.
The question is always what comes after the blob.
Right.
And so, it could be something good, or it could be something even worse than the blob.
That is certainly a real possibility.
You could get a polarization between the Wokies on one hand, and the, you know, people who really do believe that the government should have extraordinary powers at the top level to ensure whatever they want from that side.
It could get way worse from here.
As I'm fond of telling Jeremy, it always looks dark just before it goes pitch So if you thought that joke was funny, you should become a Daily Wire Plus subscriber.
Even if you didn't.
You'll be able to ask us questions in the back half like, what the hell?
Which would be valid.
- So if you thought that joke was funny, you should become a Daily Wire plus subscriber.
You'll be able to ask us questions in the back half, like what the hell, which would be valid.
We'd try to answer that.
They say the president is still in the car, so it may be a minute here.
I don't know if that means that he's still stuck behind the... Has Kamala Harris ever looked not awkward?
No.
She's like the Michael Scott of vice presidents.
You know that she has, there's like a 20% chance that she is our next president.
Higher than that.
Higher than that, at some point, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I would say right now that there's maybe a 50% chance, because if you figure that Biden has a 50% shot of being president, then she almost certainly will be president.
That's right.
Because he will die, unfortunately, because you don't want that to happen to anybody.
There's Jill, who's guilty for pushing her.
The greatest doctor of our time.
There she is.
She is quite the doctor.
Very doctor-y.
Well, they made it in.
They must have run over a few protesters.
That's exciting.
Drew, what were you saying?
I still refuse to believe Biden's going to be the nominee.
That he'll be the candidate.
Of course he's going to be the candidate.
At this point, they have no choice.
Oh, they have one choice.
But only if Biden were to die.
The only path would be... Actually, that isn't a path.
The only path would be if they somehow convince Biden to step aside.
If he dies, Kamala Harris is the nominee and Donald Trump is the next president.
But if they could get...
Biden to step aside and get Kamala, or get... Man, look at this cabinet.
It's awful.
Lincoln.
Lincoln to me is... Who has set the world on fire.
Janet Yellen, who's created 40 year inflation.
Lloyd Austin, fresh from the hospital, who has done nothing but cripple the American military with woke garbage.
What a cavalcade of comedy geniuses we have over here.
Merrick Garland, the most corrupt AG of the modern era.
I think though, can I just say, Tomla Harris being the first woman to be president of the United States would be pretty funny stuff.
That would be some pretty funny stuff.
And to get there by default?
She's not elected, she just inherits it?
This cabinet is such a bleep show.
It's such a bleep show.
One after the other, my goodness.
Until you see them all in a room together, you're like, wow.
That's an amazing thing.
It's like watching a Seurat painting of stupidity.
Each individual dot, and then you pull back, and suddenly it's an entire picture of Sunday in the Park with George with morons.
I mean, there's Pete Buttigieg, who went on paternity leave, and he's probably still on paternity leave, and we just don't know it.
Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior, who, as far as I'm aware, does absolutely nothing.
I actually think that Democrats believe that Pete Buttigieg could be president.
Yeah, they do believe it.
They definitely believe it.
Man, they're high on their own supply.
They are so high on their own supply.
They think that Joe Biden is having trouble with his minority base.
Wait until you run Pete Buttigieg.
See how that works out for you.
Meanwhile, the transportation industry has, like, fallen apart.
I don't know what he really does anyway, but... There's Alejandro Mayorkas.
He just walked in with two illegal immigrants under his jacket.
smuggling them directly into the House of Congress.
So that's exciting news for him.
Mayorkas is the closest thing we have to Putin.
He's the closest thing we have to a man who speaks with no connection to his heart or mind.
The words come out of his mouth and he actually means nothing that he says.
He's the most corrupt individual.
How dare you speak about Vladimir Putin that way?
He just wants the best for the Russian people.
He just wants the best.
It's true.
He's a strong man.
He's a strong man, strong leader.
Rides bearers the whole thing.
I mean, he's 40 IQ points dumber than Putin, though, I would say.
That's the only difference.
Well, that may be.
but but just as wicked Man, it's so depressing watching these people.
So depressing.
Man, I'm becoming like you now.
This is your moment.
Becoming like you.
No, this is your moment.
All my energy just drops and stroke my much shorter beard.
I don't know.
Not sure I care anymore.
About life.
About anything.
We're definitely getting people excited to watch this thing.
Yeah, exactly.
Are we the uppers or are we the uppers over here?
Well, maybe there's a rerun of The Flintstones on it.
We could go back to the Star Wars conversation.
I was enjoying that.
That was good.
Star Wars is good.
I do have a question for you.
As long as you're going to do this, you're also anti-empire?
I'm anti the entire thing.
You're a terrible person and you have no taste.
That's terrible.
Okay.
This is my... You think the Empire Strikes Back is not... Fine, the Oscars are happening Sunday night.
Wait, wait, wait.
Let's do that.
I want to hear it.
Do you think that's like high art, Empire Strikes Back?
Yes.
First of all, Darth Vader, again, when you're 25 years old, you watch it for the... Darth Vader's a super corny villain.
He's just corny.
He's not intimidating.
He literally picks a dude up by his throat and kills him in the first five minutes of the movie.
A great movie villain is like Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men.
You would actually be terrified to be in the room with that guy.
Darth Vader, you're like... I find your lack of faith disturbing.
He uses his mind to choke people.
Like actually crush their larynx, like somebody who actually died of asphyxiation.
Yeah, he has great powers, but I'm saying in the performance and in the writing, I just don't feel...
James Earl Jones, highly overrated.
I'm just saying things now.
James Earl Jones was a great actor.
I saw him when he started out on stage.
I don't hold Darth Vader against him.
You thought this kid is going places.
Yeah, I did.
No, I actually did.
I saw him in The Great White Hope.
He stood next to me at the phone booths when my daughter was born because his son, I think it was his son, was born.
And the two deepest voices in New York were going, I have a daughter.
I have a son.
There's Lauren Boebert.
Fortunately, she doesn't have her boyfriend there this time.
So that's exciting news.
There's the Secretary of Energy.
What's her face?
Former Michigan governor.
You'll remember her from the DNC in 2012, waving her arms like a nut job.
Boy, that shot just there before was like this textbook illustration of the fall of the Republican.
Man, ah, Joe.
Ah, the greatest doctor.
So doctor-y.
And then there's, I gotta say, the Republicans have run their Congress beautifully, I think.
And the nice thing is, if you don't like this speaker, you can wait two minutes, and you'll get another one.
So, as long as we don't get depressed about everything, how about the fact that, like, they just booted a speaker for no reason, and they appointed a new speaker, and he cuts deals that look exactly like the old speaker's deals?
The exact same guy.
The exact same.
But it's not even the guy.
It's the incentive structure.
When you have a one-vote majority, you're done.
You can't do anything.
That's all.
Because I think he is, this speaker, is more conservative.
On a gut level, no question he's more conservative than Kevin was.
But the idea that Mike is way more conservative than Kevin in terms of governance, that's not the job.
People keep mistaking, and this is true for all of American government, people keep mistaking the man for the job, and it's not the same thing.
When you keep redefining the job and leave the incentive structures the same as they always were, the same exact thing is going to happen.
It's particularly true for Senate Majority Leader when people say, oh man, we'll get rid of McConnell and then we'll have somebody who's really go get him.
First of all, can I explain to you that Mitch McConnell achieved more conservative victories during his tenure than any Republican legislator of my lifetime?
You have a Republican majority on the Supreme Court because of Mitch McConnell.
That is why.
TV does not support institutional men.
It supports individuals.
Here comes the president.
Oh my God.
The door creaked open.
All right.
It's like the fall of the House of Washington.
That's right.
The President is entering the House chamber, and we're going to take you live to the State of the Union, and we'll be back to let you know just how bad it was as soon as the President speaks completely.
with Disney Noria.
Well, that was shit.
*laughter* My goodness.
I think we can go home.
That's the commentary.
It was honestly the worst State of the Union address that's maybe ever been given.
Especially for the first 30 minutes, angry, slurring, starting with the most hyper-partisan issues he possibly could.
The decision to, the very first thing you talk about is Ukraine was mind boggling.
Not the State of our Union.
Right.
Mind boggling.
He was using it only to get to call his fellow Americans equivalent to Vladimir Putin invading a sovereign country.
Yeah.
That's what that was.
I mean, that was his gateway into January 6th, because democracy is a threat in Ukraine, and democracy is a threat here at home.
That was literally the reason that he led with the Ukraine stuff, was that he could call his fellow Americans akin to Vladimir Putin.
That was, that's what that was.
I mean, wow.
This guy has always- Guys, I need something.
I'm so glad- Oh, come on!
I'm so glad that didn't work.
Even the music has stopped.
That's terrible, guys.
This guy has always been this guy.
He's always been an angry, mean, hateful, corrupt little son of a gun.
You know, this may be the only State of the Union that ever accomplished anything which might be getting Donald Trump elected.
If it accomplishes anything.
Number one, nobody listened to the State of the Union.
The only part that anybody heard was the first 10 minutes, which is why he led with all the hyper-partisan stuff, because he figures this is his last chance.
And he's figuring that what he can aim for here is energetic, passionate.
You know what the headlines are going to be, right?
Peppy!
He was fighting!
He was fighting feisty with the Republicans.
And the Republicans, of course, were probably helping him along with that by fighting with him because that way he can do his look at me.
I'm a feisty fighter.
I'm not an old geriatric dotard who feels like he's going to crap his pants any moment.
But, you know, the fact is that the State of the Union, just to remind everybody, is provided for under the Constitution of the United States so that the president can from time to time inform the Congress of the latest developments inside the executive branch.
That is the goal.
Instead, he didn't even get to the usual phrase you start with, the State of the Union is strong, or whatever.
He didn't even get to that until like 12 minutes into the speech.
And the entire opening of the speech was about how his fellow Americans are terrible and evil and corrupt and vicious and insurrectionist and terrible.
And particularly because of Ukraine.
There's so many problems, logically, with the speech.
I mean, first of all, he starts with the, there have been a lot of attacks on democracy, and then he leads with Ukraine and January 6th.
He saves all the Israel stuff, which is an attack on a democracy, by the way, by a terrorist group.
He saves that for the end when he chides the Israelis for not being nice enough to the Palestinians and talks about how we're... Did you guys know that we're gonna build a pier?
I'm excited.
As an American taxpayer, I'm really excited to build, like, a pier.
We can put, like, a Ferris wheel, maybe, like, a merry-go-round on the pier, in the Mediterranean, off Gaza.
He says we won't be putting American boots on the ground over there, which is weird, because I'm not sure exactly... What are they going to do, swim?
How are they going to build the pier?
There's going to be scuba divers.
Gazan scuba divers are going to jump out into the water and take the stuff in.
Yeah, putting Americans, it seems like, directly into a foreign war zone is probably the smartest idea that you could do.
How could that go wrong?
Probably it'll be amazing.
You know, I can't help I know this is comparing great things to small.
After the Civil War, 700,000 Americans slaughtered by each other, Abraham Lincoln gets up and says, with charity toward all and malice toward none, we're going to rebuild.
A couple of hundred doofuses go into the Capitol, and he actually puts this forward as the worst thing since the Civil War and the kind of threat to democracy that Putin invading a country represents.
The meanness of it, the smallness of it, and the one... Remember when Trump gave his inaugural and all we heard was, it's dark, it's dark, it's dark.
That's right.
Now you're gonna hear... Ah, we heard one other thing.
Yeah.
That's some weird s***.
But now it's like he's feisty and energetic and he's just mean.
That's right.
Just a mean man.
And angry.
It's the angriest State of the Union that's probably ever been given.
And the symbolism, I mean, of course it doesn't matter because nobody's going to remember, but the symbolism of you begin with Ukraine, He hits Ukraine, January 6th, abortion, IVF.
My predecessor.
Yeah, my predecessor.
And then he gets to, like, the size of chip bags, and then finally, right after chip bags, he gets to the border, which is the thing that's most, you know, one of the top issues for most Americans.
He proceeds to blow the name of the victim that people are wearing the pin for, by the way.
Right, because Lincoln... He called Lincoln Riley, as opposed to Laken Riley.
Whatever.
It's not even her name.
It doesn't matter.
And then he starts jabbering about, like, and how many thousands have been killed by illegals?
So he's just downplaying the crime.
Right.
That's literally what he yelled back at the Congress when MTG, when Marjorie Taylor Greene was pushing him to say the name.
He takes out the pin.
He mispronounces the name.
And then he says, and she was killed by an illegal, pissing off his entire left flank because you're not allowed to say the word illegal if you're on the left.
And then he follows that up by saying, and how many thousands have been killed by illegals?
The implication, of course, being that everybody is overestimating the amount of crime from illegal immigrants.
So that's like three screw ups in three sentences right there.
But also, I think, you know, I understand that the State of the Union is forgotten and people But I think people are going to remember that screaming.
I think they're going to remember the sound of that voice just scolding everybody and yelling at everybody.
Who the hell is he to do that?
What has he accomplished that he should be yelling at us for being unhappy that the price of food has gone up 35% since he took office?
And the value of the dollar is lower than it's been since anyone but Carter after this period of time.
And he's screaming at us?
It's like, go to hell, man.
I totally agree with you, by the way.
The screaming is going to be the takeaway, and it's really bad for him.
Yeah.
Because during the 2020 election, one of the things that he had going for him is that Donald Trump was the screamer.
Yes, that's right.
You remember during that debate that was terrible for Trump, it was the second debate, and Trump came out really aggressive, he came out super hot, and he was like talking over Biden, just kept jumping in, talking over Biden, and finally Biden kind of turned to the camera and went, ah, shut up.
And everybody, even people who were voting for Trump, like me, well I mean Trump was being very loud.
And loudness is irritating and annoying.
The one who is being loud right now, he's outlouding Donald Trump.
He's currently running the worst re-elect campaign we have ever seen.
I mean this is a truly awful re-elect campaign.
And it may be because he is bound by the strictures of who he is.
What's his skill set?
What's left in the bag?
Seriously, what's in the bag of tricks?
It can't be his policy.
His policies suck.
It can't be his charm, because he's not charming at all.
It certainly can't be his energy level, because he's dying.
And so what we end up with is the old man raging against the dying of the light, literally.
Like literally just looking out at the crowd and yelling at you.
For how long was that speech?
It felt like about four years.
My kids are graduating college right now.
That was a... It actually was a shockingly long speech.
There's a lot of talk going in that he might not be able to hold up long enough.
To give a normally terribly long statement.
My favorite part is where he said that he taught constitutional law for 12 years.
I like that part.
I'm not joking.
I think he's referring to Barack Obama and his time as a constitutional lecturer.
Legitimately, he's such a fabulist.
He spent eight years of his life telling the fable of Barack Obama.
I honestly think that he just lapsed into the wrong fable as his own biography.
During my time as a community organizer on the south side of Chicago!
As a young black man, growing up in Hawaii, doing coke.
And remember how they counted every lie, every hyperbole that Trump used, they counted it as a lie, and they had 3,000 lies and all this.
But Joe Biden is our tale-teller-in-chief, as the New York Times put it.
It's okay, because he's just telling tales.
They're meaningful.
I personally enjoy the new trend now of shouting out the President of the United States.
I think it's great.
It's really British Parliament, right?
Exactly, and also if we're gonna do this, like, let's drop the pageantry of pretending that we're all on the same side.
We all hate each other, so like, fine, if we're gonna do it, let's do it.
Like eggs, tomatoes.
Yeah.
Like really go for it, you know?
Oh yeah, for sure.
Make it more amusing.
Like a dunk tank.
Like, he says the wrong thing.
Mike Johnson just hits the thing.
I will say that Mike Johnson, I think, stood up one time in the entire speech.
It was when he said that Hamas should surrender, and that was pretty much it for the entire speech.
Mike Johnson had a really unenviable task tonight, which is he had to keep a straight face.
And behind him, you could see there were a lot of skeptical looks from Mike Johnson, who does have a very memeable face with the glasses and everything.
And so him, like, giving the kind of side eye to Joe Biden will be in it.
I was sorry he didn't tear up the speech at the end, you know, like, let him come after me.
Make it a paper airplane, like, just do some origami for you?
Kamala Harris being as absolutely smarmy and irritating as it's possible to be.
Without even opening her mouth.
Without even opening her mouth.
I was saying to Drew while we were watching that the noun rictus was coined in ancient times to describe her smile.
Like that is a rictus, a frozen rictus upon her face.
And it's just all the awfulness of American politics just telescoped into one hour and 20-minute segment right there.
Just lie after lie, the tax stuff.
I know.
We're supposed to be, at this point, inured to the stupidity of people suggesting the rich don't pay their fair share.
I'm never inured to it, because I used to be not rich, and now I'm rich.
And I gotta tell you, I pay a sh**load of taxes, guys.
Like, a lot of taxes.
And they never say fair share of what?
Fair share of what program?
Also, define fair share.
That's all I want.
If there is such a thing as a share which is fair, what is the size of that share?
And there's no fair share of garbage, you know?
There's no fair share of the stuff we're paying for.
It's not making life better.
Is life better than it was three, four years ago?
And it's all lies also.
He'll say things like, well, you know, the billionaires only pay 8.2% on their money.
What do you mean on their money?
Do you mean on their income?
Because if it's on their income, I promise you, they pay exactly what the federal prevailing income tax rate is.
If you mean their entire wealth base, yes, it's true.
Because you also do not pay a tax on the value of your house to the federal government, for example.
That would be a wealth tax.
We don't have those in this country.
They're not legal on the federal level.
It's just, like, the number of lies... He's talking about, oh my god, he says my favorite is when he talks about lowering the deficit.
I've lowered the deficit more than two... And then he's like, we cannot touch the retirement age.
Anyone who touches social security will immediately be shot.
It's like...
Well then you're not doing anything about the deficit.
But also he wants to lower inflation by paying for everybody's mortgage.
The other thing that always really disturbs me is this thing about controlling the price of medicine.
Because if you wanted to control the price of medicine, the thing to do would be to not allow them to sell it overseas for lower prices.
Not to change what it is here.
Well we'd actually do the same in foreign countries.
Yes, because really what happens when that happens is medicines that you would have had, you don't get.
So nobody understands that they're getting less.
So it's kind of sinister.
It's like, let people die so that we can lie to ourselves that we lowered the price of drugs.
Right.
But the other thing is, you could lower the cost of healthcare in this country markedly.
If you just let the market do it.
Yes, of course.
Everybody always says, we have a free market healthcare system in this country and it's the highest prices in the world.
We don't have a free market healthcare system in this country.
First of all, if you cross that border illegally, you can go to any hospital in this country and get any treatment that we offer and not pay for any of it.
Secondly, Most healthcare expenses are incurred in the last two years of life.
And most people in the last two years of their life are on Medicare.
Right.
Which means the majority of the healthcare that you will ever receive in your life is paid for by the federal government.
That is not a free market system.
And when you look at things that everybody has, like television sets, they come out, they're incredibly expensive, and then when they've sold them to the people who buy them at those prices, the prices drop.
The price of a TV that was literally $10,000 But that doesn't happen in medicine because the government is the biggest customer and the second biggest customer are insurance companies.
And so you end up in this situation where there is almost no direct relationship between who we think the customer is, which is us, And the provider of the service, which is the drug company or the hospital.
Right, because it takes more than one second to explain.
And because it takes more than one second to explain, it's easier to just say, Well, look at the price of my horizontals and now everything will be free!
That's right.
But you know, the litany of lies, I'm with Matt, the litany of lies to me is almost, it's pretty much utterly secondary because we've all watched, I mean I remember during the Obama years, fact-checking, I was working at Breitbart at the time, And I remember fact-checking, like, at length, all of Obama's speeches, and he would tell dozens of lies like this during the speech.
That's not the new thing.
The new thing that we're seeing right now is the utter demonization of half of the American public.
That's right.
And that is, it really is a new thing.
It's something that... No, it started under Barack Obama, who called Republicans his enemy.
Right, I mean, that's true, but I, honest to God, think that Joe Biden is going further than Obama did.
Oh, much further.
I mean, like, Obama was at least a little subtle about it.
It was sinister.
Right, but Biden is not.
He's like stupid people version of that.
He's like, he's saying, he's just saying all the things out loud.
And then he ends with something Orwellian like, my unity agenda, I'm president for all of it.
You literally just said half of Americans are insurrectionists or akin to Russian invaders of Ukraine.
Well, I mean, since you are funding the killing of Russian soldiers in Ukraine, I don't know what that means for, you know, those of us who disagree with you domestically.
I mean, that comparison doesn't sound so great, gotta be honest.
And if we assume that the election was fairly won, which I actually, I've never seen it proven that it wasn't, it's only a few people who were so angry at Donald Trump, who were so, you know, so opposed to Donald Trump that they moved over to the other side.
Trump got more votes than any other president, except Biden, you know, in the last election.
So he's actually saying that all those MAGA Republicans are the enemy.
He's saying like a huge number of people. - Well, you know, January 6th is an incredibly complicated topic, which makes it very difficult to ever discuss.
Obviously the Capitol compound is an enormous facility.
Obviously there were tens of thousands of people there.
You know, people on this side of the building don't know what's going on.
On this side of the building, obviously there was a long period of time.
So there were people who were there and then left and people who came and then, you know.
So, no one's experience of January 6th can really tell you what January 6th was.
There were plenty of people who police just let them in the building and they walked through the building and walked out the other side.
And there were people who broke glass and smashed through barricades and punched cops.
I mean, Many, many things are true about January 6th, and we, just as a people, I don't think this is just as Americans, I think it's as upright monkeys, you know, as human beings, we cannot handle The complexity and nuance of an event like January 6th, which means we can't create a true narrative about it.
We can only create these very, very hyperbolic political narratives.
There are a lot of true narratives about it, but there's only one false narrative.
And the false narrative is... This is where I was going.
Yeah.
The false narrative is that America was in dire danger of our democracy being overthrown on January 6th.
That is a lie.
There is no way to say that that is true.
It is not even remotely true.
It is not even a smidgen of remotely true.
At no point during that riot, and I hated the riot.
I thought it was awful.
I thought it was really a disgrace.
At no point during that did I think, oh my God, democracy in the United States is about to end.
A military dictatorship is about to be declared with God, Emperor Trump at the head of it.
Leading his way into the Senate and slaughtering his opponents.
At no point did I think that was even remotely true.
No, they took this issue that actually could have played well, the Democrats took, and they turned it into the Reichstag fire.
You know, it's like the small thing, it may not be a good thing to set the Reichstag on fire if you're a socialist, but still, that's no reason to take everybody's rights away and to declare half the country As insurrectionists.
That's exactly right.
I mean, the flip on the language that he is constantly and the Democrats are constantly doing is truly an amazing thing, right?
According to this speech, we're the safest we've ever been.
Which is presumably why Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, just unleashed 750 members of the National Guard to guard the subways so people would stop shoving each other in front of the damn trains.
Because things are going amazing.
He then suggested that his plan on the border was more hawkish Yes.
That's right.
Republicans' plans on the border, despite the fact that obviously that's wildly untrue.
I like when he suggested that freedom is under attack because true freedom is being able to kill babies.
Yes.
That portion of the speech was really solid to me.
When he just started ripping on the Supreme Court, which we know, by the way, is apparently that it's funny how that goes from being incredibly valuable and necessary to a danger to democracy back to being incredibly valuable and necessary, depending on who's ripping the Supreme Court at the time.
So he's sitting there and he's yelling at the Supreme Court with the Supreme Court sitting right there in front of him.
I mean, that's another... That feels pretty unprecedented to me.
I mean, except when Biden has done it before, but usually, historically, Democrats will, they might, you know, they'll make a few references to... I remember Obama did it, and there was a justice who actually shook his head, and it was like a national scandal.
But I mean, with abortion, with the abortion issue, they'll make a few references to reproductive freedom or whatever.
Reproductive freedom, of course, that ridiculous euphemism.
But Biden, I mean, he spent several minutes going after abortion in a really direct way.
I mean, this is obviously the most radically pro-abortion president we've ever had.
Meanwhile, he's of course sending his federal government after pro-life protesters and trying to put them in jail for 11 years.
And we've never seen anything like that.
Very disturbing to watch people stand up and applaud for abortion.
I'm sorry.
I cannot get that out of my head, that this is now something that a vast number of people feel is a human right.
And even if you would argue it's a terrible tragedy, but sometimes it has to happen, I would disagree with you.
That's at least an argument.
I was making this point on my show the other day, which is that Donald Trump's campaign is closer to Bill Clinton's 1996 campaign than Joe Biden's campaign.
By far.
It's not actually particularly close.
Bill Clinton ran on welfare reform, reduction in crime, balancing the budget, He ran on not gay marriage, because nobody's talking gay marriage in 1996.
He certainly wasn't trying to trans the kids.
He was, you know, like... And when it came to immigration, he wasn't an open borders president at that time.
Because it was already after the Reagan's amnesty.
Like, it's... The length to which the Democrats... Safe, legal, and rare.
Safe, legal, and rare.
That was where I was actually going.
The fact that the Democratic Party moved, in my lifetime, from safe, legal, and rare, to cheer your abortion, Celebrate your abortion is totally insane.
And that's why, again, I think that the thing he needs to do, he is under a fundamental misconception in this election cycle.
It's the same misconception every Democrat's been under since 2012.
If we get enough members of the base jazzed about voting for us, we'll win.
It didn't work in 2016.
It did work in 2020 because they changed literally all the rules and then went to every single human in the United States eight times and picked up the ballot from their house and dumped it in a mailbox.
That's right.
And in 2024, I don't think it's going to win.
And I don't think it's going to win specifically because it's wrong.
The theory is wrong.
He can get all the members of his base out.
It is not enough humans.
The thing he needs to be doing right now is appealing to moderates and independents.
And you can only do that in two ways.
With Trump, you can do it in terms of personality.
Right?
You can say, he's a crazy person and I'm sane.
That was an insane speech and he looked like a crazy, addled, old asshole.
I thought so too.
And then, you can also present a moderate policy agenda.
And he doesn't.
He presents Bernie Sanders' policy agenda.
So he goes zero for two on the two things he needs to do to reach out to the median voter.
He's pushing the median voter over toward Donald Trump.
The only thing Trump has to do is shut up.
If Trump shuts up, he'll be president.
That would be amazing.
Trump is.
And he's shutting up for two reasons.
One, they literally don't allow him on any social media platform to express himself.
And by the way, it's been the greatest favor to him.
If you're on Twitter right now, it'd be way worse for him.
I wonder if he knows that.
Number two, he is running a form of Joe Biden's 2020 campaign.
I mean, Donald Trump is not really out there campaigning.
He does the odd rally every now and then, but you're seeing less of Donald Trump so far in this election campaign than probably any President, or any candidate for the presidency in the modern era, except for Joe Biden 2020.
And he's not out there in a major way, which is good.
Yes.
Keep doing that.
I mean, I guess people have pointed this out.
He's ahead in the polls, which he never was in the last election.
Right.
You know, we always attack the polls, but he was never ahead in the last election, and now he actually is.
The great, hilarious thing about this election cycle right now, Donald Trump is running the best he has ever run against any candidate, 2016, 2020, any of them.
He is currently running ahead of Joe Biden by a point or two in the RealClearPolitics polling average.
He has led in, I believe, 24 of the last 31 polls.
Joe Biden has not had a RealClearPolitics polling average since mid-September.
At no point, literally no point during the 2020 race was Donald Trump polling ahead of Joe Biden.
Literally no time.
As soon as we got to the point where Biden was the nominee, Biden led wire to wire in that election cycle.
And the final result in the RealClearPolitics polling average, Joe Biden was up by 7.5 points.
He ended up winning by 4.5 points.
If Donald Trump is up by two and a half points right now, or two points, he's actually up by four.
That's right.
And because there are a bunch of people out there, independents, who are telling pollsters, I don't know, I'm not so sure.
And then when it comes right down to it, they're going to vote against Biden.
They are.
He is forcibly pushing moderates away from him.
I was in a major, I can't say who it was, for reasons that will become clear, but I was in a major New York media office this week.
Where the head of that office started talking about Trump in such a way that one of the other people said, I should close the door.
Because he was saying, you know, Trump really was a better president.
And he saved this country in a lot of ways from some terrible things.
This is a guy I know left us down to his knees.
In every election of my lifetime, the question of who wins the presidential election is determined by who it is that the election is a referendum on.
Yes.
And Donald Trump's enormous mistake in 2020 is that he could not subordinate his ego.
He couldn't let it be a referendum on the left.
It had to be a referendum on himself, because he wanted to be at the center, because that's, for better and for worse, that's Donald Trump.
Right now, if you are the president, You sort of are de facto who it is a referendum on unless you change that narrative.
Right.
What Biden was trying to do at the beginning of his speech tonight was make the election a referendum on Donald Trump.
But I think he did it in such a tone-deaf and angry way.
Yeah, because he blamed the people.
Because he blamed the people.
That's a great point.
But it kept, right now today, This election is still a referendum on Joe Biden.
He didn't do anything to change that.
And because even when Trump makes this election about himself, he's making it about them because they're after him.
And they're legitimately after him in such a way.
I mean, this guy's talking about unity while he gave instructions to his Justice Department to indict his major competitor.
You know, the New York Times actually had an op-ed by this guy Edsel, who's one of their big left-wing columnists, saying, we can't win unless we convict them.
We're going to take a few questions from our Daily Wire Plus subscribers.
If you want to get your question in, head over to dailywireplus.com, be a member, submit a question, and we'll see what we can do about it.
This first one is for everyone, and the question is thus.
When would you guys say was the last time we had an election that was truly about voting for the guy that you like rather than voting against the guy that you don't like?
To me, that was 2008 between McCain and Obama.
Boy.
I do think, oh four.
I think 2016 for a lot of people.
That's what I was going to say.
I think 2016 for a lot of people, you know, they voted for Trump.
They voted for Trump, yeah.
I feel like that was still a referendum on, maybe for some people.
I mean, I think for the majority of people who voted for Trump, at least in the independent crowd, which shifted two to one for him, was voting against Hillary.
Because she was the least popular.
Yeah, I mean people hated her.
But I think it is fair to say 2008, the election of Barack Obama Was an aspirational moment for the country in 2008.
Obviously I didn't vote for Obama, I understood what he was, but we're deeply initiated in politics.
I think for the average person in the country they thought Elect a black man?
What a wonderful thing for us to do as a nation.
He speaks about unity, and he speaks eloquently about unity, and he speaks with a kind of authority about unity because he's from the group that ostensibly needs to be unified, that's not been part of the culture in the way that that was perceived.
The problem is that You know, everybody says this is the most important election of our lifetime.
I'm starting to sound like Joe Biden.
Everyone always says that every election is the most important election of our lifetime.
And every election is very important and consequential.
The most important election of our lifetime was 2012.
It is not this election.
It was 2012.
Because 2008 was an aspirational vote for Barack Obama, but by 2012, Obama had made a cynical political calculation to divide the country on race to secure re-election because Mitt Romney was popular and was an actual threat to him.
I never liked Mitt Romney.
Mitt Romney was popular and was a threat to Barack Obama.
And he made that cynical calculation.
He made it right out in the open.
And we had one opportunity to reject the fundamental transformation and all of the chaos that's ensued ever since.
You can say, well, Mitt Romney wouldn't have been a great president.
Mitt Romney would have been a squishy president.
And electing Mitt Romney, all that's true, but electing Mitt Romney would have been tacking back toward The traditional relationship between the parties, the traditional relationship between the people and the government, traditional American history.
Instead we'd act far away from that.
That's right.
It wouldn't have been about Romney being present.
That's correct.
It would have been about rejecting the argument that Obama was making, which is that there is a victim-victimizer complex in the United States, and he was at the head of the Coalition of the Oppressed, rising up against the system.
And when we miss that opportunity, everything else that's happened has happened as a result of missing that opportunity.
So, certainly voting for Obama in 2008 was because people liked the idea of Obama, but voting for Obama in 2012 was a cynical decision by Democrats, and everything has been a reaction since then.
That's my take.
Why do candidates make so many lofty promises when they know they can't actually deliver?
How is that helpful for them?
Do the majority of voters not look at these things realistically?
I actually believe that voters are somewhat smarter than we give them credit for.
TV has an investment, whatever you want to call it, the screen, has an investment in making us think that what we care about is witty lines at debates and the way people look and the way they present themselves.
All those things are actually important.
We do live in a showbiz nation.
But people do understand that food is too expensive, that policies are not working, that some policies are actually a threat to their freedoms.
People understand more.
Let me put it this way, more people understand more of that than we give them credit for.
And so the promises, you know, they're showbiz, they're part of politics, they've been part of politics, democratic politics forever, as long as there have been people campaigning, they've made stupid promises.
But I think it's partly a cynicism that actually the people don't deserve.
People actually have some sense of what's going on, more sense of what's going on than we ever give them credit for.
It's just because they have nothing else.
They don't have actual policies that work.
And I would just say that there is a complete information overload.
Obama really introduced this into our politics.
It hadn't existed before that.
They always say there were no scandals during his administration.
He was scandal-free.
The reality is he so overwhelmed us with scandalous behavior that you could never focus on making any one of the scandals last or stick or be meaningful.
Also the press.
The press was completely subservient to him.
But this sort of shotgun effect has been our national reality ever since Barack Obama.
Politics comes at us so fast and so constantly now, no one will ever remember any of the promises that Biden made.
I don't think we can blame Obama for the information overload.
That is the story of our time.
No, but he steered into it.
He utilized it.
The minute that we, and this is just a historic argument, the minute that we expanded the inherent power of the federal government, this was the wage.
Because as soon as the power, when the power was small, you couldn't promise things that were completely undeliverable.
If you promised that you were going to put a chicken in every pot in the United States, everyone would be like, hell, you don't have that kind of power.
That's not a thing you can do.
It'd be like me arguing that for my income, I'm going to give each person in the United States a million dollars.
Like that's not, that's not possible.
And everyone would know that's not possible.
The minute that the government expanded its powers, what it did is two things.
It made an empty promise to the American people that it could use those powers for exorbitant purposes.
And two, it did everything way more incompetently.
And that combination means you get a spiral of promises.
Because what happens is that people look at the size of the government like, why can't the government fix this problem in front of me?
We spend seven trillion dollars a year.
Why can't we fix this problem?
A problem that the founders never would have thought the federal government should be in the first place.
It turns out the federal government can't fix that problem because the federal government is crap at everything.
So instead, the federal government, but if you're a congressperson, you can't make the argument, well, crap at everything, because if you're crap at it, it will replace you.
So instead what you do is you say, I will fix it.
You put me in charge of the $7 trillion federal government, and I'll fix that problem for you.
Then you fail, and you say, well, the reason that I failed is because I didn't have enough power, guys.
Obviously, if I had more power, then, I mean, that's Joe Biden on the border, right?
He's obviously failing on purpose, but if you just give him more power, then he'll fix all your problems for you.
And again, the only check that the American people had on that was the original constitutional structure that limited the inherent power of the government.
As soon as it becomes a big grab bag of cash and power, then the person who promises to do the most for you and your friends with it is going to win.
These are questions from our Daily Wire Plus subscribers.
They make it possible for us to bring you the show, so we try to give them horrible answers to these questions.
What is your opinion on starting a boycott on CVS and Walgreens over the abortion bill?
Matt?
I mean, on an individual basis, if somebody decides they don't want to shop at a store like that for that reason, I think that's perfectly noble.
I wouldn't be in favor of announcing a boycott on CVS and Walgreens, or even one or the other, certainly not both, because it will fail.
And the thing we learned with Bud Light is that you can have a successful boycott, Until you have powerful people on the right who come along a year later and decide to undercut it for ridiculous reasons.
But you can have a successful boycott, but you have to be very targeted, and you have to be smart.
You have to find a good target, a target you have a leverage over, and that you could conceivably, you know, you could remove this from people's lives, and it wouldn't be a huge inconvenience to them.
You know, the problem on the right for so many years, the reasons why we couldn't successfully complete a boycott is because, you know, we're just, it's like every company is woke, every company is doing stuff we don't like, and so we're just kind of firing randomly.
And, you know, something like Walgreens and CVS, you're just not.
Where are you going to get your medicine?
They need prescriptions, and so we can announce that and say we're not going to go there anymore.
It's legal.
I mean, in their pharmacies, it's kind of not quite the same thing as putting Dylan Mulvaney on Bud Light.
It's just an insult.
It's just not.
It's a noble thing, it's moral, but it's not a smart strategy to announce a boycott like that.
I think that's right.
Next question, I live in California and all of my friends are liberal, but they hate Joe Biden.
Of course, they hate Trump too.
How can I show them that while Trump may not be ideal, he's definitely better than Biden?
Oh, I have an answer to that.
You absolutely can't.
You can't do that.
That's right.
You're never going to convince people, left people in California, California leftists, that Trump is anything but a monster.
Okay, but generally on the left, so here's what I'd encourage, so I agree with this, your liberal friends break down into two categories.
The ones who will soto voce sort of say, oh man, I would hate to vote for Trump, but if I, man, I might.
Right?
Those people, you can get those to vote for Trump and they probably will.
The people who are like, I hate Biden, but man, Trump is so much worse, he's a jerk, he's the worst person in the entire world.
Trump is Hitler.
Right, Trump is Hitler.
The Trump is Hitler people aren't going to vote for Trump.
Just convince them not to vote at all.
Yeah.
Right?
I mean, that's the reality.
And you don't have to convince them.
You just be like, man, you're right.
What a disheartening election.
I wouldn't be surprised if voter turnout's down this year.
It turns out that a vote not for Joe Biden is a vote that doesn't get counted for Joe Biden.
You don't have to switch it over for Trump.
It's worth half a vote if he doesn't vote for Biden.
For years.
Just don't, I was going to say, don't try to trick them.
By telling them that the election's on a different day?
If you tell them the election's on a different day, then Biden will throw you in prison for... Because he loves democracy and free speech.
You know, for years, many years, I've been telling my left-wing Jewish friends that all the anti-Semitism is on the left.
So I thought I would cash in on October 7th by saying, I told you so, will you change your vote now?
Not one of them.
Not one of them.
They all say, yes, this is terrible, but it's not Joe Biden.
He's a big supporter of Israel.
And I keep saying, he's going to stab Israel in the back.
You know, everything he says, he is actually, he's not the greatest supporter, as he said, but he's been a fairly steady supporter.
To speak for the Jews, I will say that, number one, I'm going to separate off my community.
The Orthodox community is going to vote 197% for Donald Trump.
That's just the reality.
We did the last election cycle.
We did the election cycle before.
It'll happen again in 2024.
But with that said, that's actually not my experience.
I've had a bunch of people who are liberal to kind of moderate left Jews who are quietly saying to me, like people who I haven't talked to politically, just people I know from my life, who have called me up since October 7th and been like, I cannot vote for this party.
This party has lost it.
I can't vote for this party.
Well, I believe that's happening.
I'm just telling you my experiences.
I say these things to people and it's like hitting a wall.
You're also in California and New York.
That is true.
It is also the case that if you believe, as people have allowed themselves to believe, that Trump is Hitler, nothing is worse.
It doesn't matter what else happens.
Which is funny because, I mean, on the other side you have people who literally are standing with people who like Hitler, so that's interesting.
Isn't it illegal to use the State of the Union as a campaign speech?
The Hatch Act doesn't apply to the President, but surely this is illegal.
Well, I mean, because the Hatch Act doesn't apply to the President, it's not.
But would it be if he were not the President?
Yeah, I mean, that was a campaign speech.
And he was obviously using the State of the Union as a campaign speech.
Again, that's another thing.
I think that the Americans who like the State of the Union, who are the ones who are most likely to be affected by the State of the Union, are not going to like this approach to the State of the Union.
If you're like us, you and me, we hate the State of the Union generally.
Or Matt, you and me, we're like happy to see eggs thrown at the President and all that.
Again, no laws to be violated.
We're different.
The people who are watching the State of the Union because they want to see the pomp and circumstance, like the Oscars of presidential politics, and then they see the president roll on in there with his Harley-Davidson jacket on and be like, I hate all y'all!
I'm not sure that's going to rub everybody the right way.
Who do you anticipate Trump will choose for his VP and why?
Himself.
Amazing.
I think some of the predictions are probably off because, well, first of all, I don't think Trump wants a VP who he feels will get more attention than him or overshadow.
That's why someone like Vivek, I don't think that's going to happen.
Or people saying, Tucker, not a chance.
Yeah, there's no chance.
So it would have to be someone who he feels is politically advantageous but won't overshadow him.
And I'm not exactly sure.
Tim Scott.
That's what I was going to say.
Tim Scott.
Also, Trump likes to do this thing where he's like, I will cast this like a movie because he's a producer.
So, who looks like a vice president in that group?
He's like, oh, it's a racially diverse, united colors of Benetton cabinet, and here's Tim Scott, who has kissed the ring, and has been as subservient as I've made him be, and he will stand beside me.
I guess Kristi Noem, I can see.
Maybe, although the kind of personal life is dicey.
I also, I don't think that Trump wants a woman.
I actually don't think he wants a woman.
Because I think that he's afraid that it will overshadow his campaign.
So I think right now that Tim Scott is the obvious kind of frontrunner right now.
That is my guess as well, which I find very dispiriting.
I know who I think should be chief of staff though.
I think Jim Jordan should be Chief of Staff.
Because personally, I think the Chief of Staff is going to be the most important person in the next administration.
And he loves Trump.
He's been, you know, Trump's pal.
He's incredibly smart.
He knows how everything works.
And I think that he could actually run a good government while Trump is doing whatever the hell Trump is going to be doing.
Yeah.
Well, there will be, if Trump is to serve another four years as President, there will be at least five Chiefs of Staff.
So, getting Jim Jordan in... Yeah, I meant the first three months.
Definitely could happen.
Let's see if we have any more questions from our Daily Wire Plus subscribers.
Do you guys think that the VP pick really matters?
Nope.
No, not at all.
Nope, it's stupid.
It only exists so when Joe Biden dies, Kamala Harris is president.
Can we get some Dr. Dreidel t-shirts in the VW shop?
I will say that the Fax, from what I've been told, the Fax sweatshirt that I wear in that amazing rap video, that piece of high western art, is one of the top selling items we have ever had in our e-commerce department.
That it is in fact a monster smash hit.
It was a big hit.
I have to say that Dr. Dreidel may be one of my top five Daily Wire jokes, I think.
I agree.
I wish we made it up.
We did not.
We stole it.
Who made it up?
I think it was terrible memes.
I think you're right.
I think it was terrible memes and it was... It's spectacular.
It is real and it's spectacular.
Can you please articulate why Trump's many character flaws do not disqualify a Christian to vote for him?
I could tackle this one.
Can we get a King David reference?
An interesting thing happens in the Bible.
You know, Paul kind of expounding on Jesus saying, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.
Paul makes this point that you should obey the governing authorities and basically stay out of revolutionary politics.
And I think that was a really pragmatic thing for Paul to say because the early church would have just been stamped out if it had taken any other But I also think that there's theological truth to it as well.
But something does happen in a republic.
There was no republic at the time that Paul was writing.
The Roman Republic had been supplanted by the Roman Empire, and the Jews didn't live in a republic, obviously.
They were colonized by Imperial Rome.
But in a republic, in a democratic republic, the government is comprised and given its power by the people.
And in that sense, what Paul said, or what Christ said, rendering to Caesar what is Caesar, is not that that isn't still true, it's just that that relationship looks much different.
You have a role in the government, and so it's not, I think, a fair New Testament position that you shouldn't be involved.
In the government when you live in a democratic republic.
So to the extent that you do exist in a democratic republic, you have responsibilities.
And one of those responsibilities is your vote.
You don't always, in an electoral system, have the opportunity to vote for a great person.
You very rarely have the opportunity to vote for a great person.
You don't always have the opportunity to vote for a particularly good person.
Nevertheless, you do have a vote, and that vote does come with responsibility, and it is a kind of power to impact the government.
And so the choice before you in this election, I could not vote for Donald Trump in the primary.
Even though Ron DeSantis has already suspended his campaign, I voted for him in the Tennessee primary on Super Tuesday.
Why?
Because a primary is a party preference election, and I do not prefer Donald Trump to represent In a general election, however, it's not about my preference.
Now we're down to a true binary.
Who is going to be the leader of the country?
To whom will I confer what little piece of power I have in a Republican system to represent me and to represent the country?
I don't have an option there for someone who I prefer, who actually has an opportunity where my vote can make a difference and actually help them Yeah.
be elected president.
I saw this slightly differently in 2016.
I thought there were a lot of unknowns around Trump that could be as bad as anything. - Perfectly fair. - I made a decision in 2016.
2020 was different because Trump had been president for four years and I had seen some-- Certainly he did bring some of the bad things I was worried about.
He brought some good things that I never thought in a million years that he would bring.
He didn't bring, and this is the critically important point, he didn't bring the worst things that I feared in 2016 he might bring.
And so in 2020, he's a known quantity, and it became clear to me that even as a Christian who objects to many of the behaviors of Donald Trump, when I'm actually looking at the policy distinctions between Donald Trump and his opponent, Joe Biden, I need to use whatever power I have, not to endorse Trump, but to oppose the agenda of... It's also fair to say that in 2016, both you and I had the luxury of being in a state that absolutely did not matter.
Wouldn't have mattered.
Now that we're in California.
If we'd been in Ohio, I probably would have voted for Trump.
I think that's true.
We would have made a different calculation.
But you know, Antonin Scalia once said, when he was asked what it is to be a good Christian judge, he said it's to be a good judge.
And I think that the same thing is true of being a good voter, a good Christian voter.
That I'm not voting for the best Christian.
That's not what I'm voting for.
I'm voting for the best president.
That I think will win.
It's pretty simple.
The other guy wants to kill babies.
Trans kids.
Right.
And destroy the border.
And he's hunting down pro-lifers and throwing them in prison.
That's it.
Like, what is there to even think about?
That's right.
Again, your vote doesn't say that Donald Trump is the person who you would prefer to be president out of all of the people.
It says that Donald Trump is who you would prefer to be president in a race against Joe Biden.
One of them will be.
Do you guys think that we're realistically on the brink of World War III, and do you think Joe Biden being a weak leader is a main cause of that?
No, I don't think we're on the brink of World War III, no.
I think that I could see a series of events that would lead to World War III, but you can almost always see that, and I think the situation we're in is directly caused by his weakness and his, especially the chaos, the chaotic leaving of Afghanistan.
But, you know, the brink of World War III is a little...
That's very strong for this situation.
Brink means like right here.
Yeah, that's the brink.
Okay, so I think that to be realistic, in order for there to be a World War III, you have to think about which powers would be involved in that world war.
Russia does not want to go to nuclear war with the West.
That is not a thing that Russia is pursuing or interested in.
Russia does not want to go to conventional war with the West.
It would be the end of Russia.
Oh my God, they're getting destroyed by Ukraine, which is a second-rate military being armed with our old weaponry.
I mean, so there's that.
I mean, where else could World War III come from?
Iran is not capable of fighting a World War III.
If Iran actually launched serious assaults on the United States, the United States would end that regime inside of two weeks.
Like, really.
China is capable of theoretically fighting with us, but China also does not want to do that.
They see themselves declining, but they don't have the strength to seriously challenge.
What they would do is make regional power grabs in places like Taiwan.
They don't want to get into like a real shooting war with the United States.
Well, they're fighting a different kind of Cold War with America right now.
That's right.
An information Cold War, a cybersecurity Cold War, a trade Cold War.
And it does resemble sort of the later stages of the Cold War in the sense that they have a collapsing demographic, a collapsing economy, an expanding military-industrial complex, and a containment policy that's a problem.
So, you know, that's not going to be a Cold War.
That'll be a bunch of regional wars around its borders, if anything.
But that said, we have more war in the world now than we have at any time during really my lifetime because in enough areas of the world you have these wars that are cropping up.
Obviously, we had the war in Afghanistan, but that was like one place.
We had the war in Iraq.
That was one place, and we were directly involved.
But in terms of like international conflagrations that could break out more broadly, we have two major ones right now, one in the center of Europe and one obviously in the Middle East.
Both of those are Joe Biden's fault.
Both of those are Joe Biden's fault.
I mean, what's happening in Ukraine?
Joe Biden literally said a month before the invasion of Ukraine that if basically Vladimir Putin just used the tip, He'd be fine.
Right?
He was like, if you just take part of Ukraine, then it'll probably be okay.
And Putin read that and he goes, okay, well, what if I go like further than that?
I mean, oops, oops.
And so there was that.
There was the fact that he had already pulled out of Afghanistan and obviously had no stomach for any serious long-term conflict.
And communicated that very well.
Right, it was his belief that he could split Europe based on European dependency on gas.
And so he made a miscalculation, but that miscalculation was caused by Joe Biden's appearance of weakness.
In the Middle East, the real factor, there's not Afghanistan, obviously, the real factor is re-engagement with Iran.
The attempt to re-engage with Iran, the attempt to re-center Israeli-Palestinian policy at the center of Middle Eastern policy is the single worst foreign policy mistake of my lifetime.
You had a burgeoning peace deal between a wide variety of Sunni states in the Middle East and Israel.
All it would have taken for Saudi to sign on to a full normalization day one is like this much.
All Biden would have had to do is basically just pat MBS on the back.
Normalization would have happened.
Hamas is now trapped and Iran is contained.
It was like this close.
And if Trump had been re-elected, there is zero doubt, I mean less than zero doubt, that that absolute 100% that would have happened.
The first thing that Biden did is he came and he wrecked everything.
He came in and he delisted the Houthis, which are Saudi's enemies, as a terrorist organization.
He started renegotiating using Robert Malley, an Iranian cutout, as his go-to guy.
He started talking about how Israel needed to make concessions to the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, both of which are Iranian-funded enterprises at this point.
And all of these things simultaneously led Iran to believe that if they push hard enough, they're going to be able to scuttle all peace in the Middle East while killing a bunch of Jews.
And...
And to be fair to them, strategically, so far, that's been a success.
I mean, strategically, by launching the war and forcing Israel, because what else are they going to do?
To then go in and wipe Hamas out.
They've obviously put any peace deal on hold because all the domestic populations in places like Saudi Arabia are not going to be super happy.
But beyond that, the next move the Biden administration is making is even more insane.
The idea that the United States is going to put its force and weight behind a Palestinian state in the aftermath of the Palestinian government fomenting the worst terror attack in my lifetime or my parents' lifetime is so batshit insane that all it's going to do is lead other terrorist groups in the Middle East and think, okay, push where there's mush, man, go.
I think we are the closest to a third world war that we have been in my lifetime with the possible exception of the early days of the Reagan administration.
But I don't think that even compares.
I think we're the closest we've been to a third world war in my lifetime and I still don't think we're all that close.
Can we get the beer bit one more time?
No, if the button works.
Thank you for prouding me on that.
I think it's a great bit.
Thank you.
- Sounds like a... - - Classic.
- I just live to humor you here, Matt.
We have a clip from Michael Knowles.
We were hoping he might be able to make it to a studio across from the Capitol, but we don't even have that clip.
No, they literally said in my ear, we have a clip from Michael Knowles if you want to play it, and then as soon as I started talking to you fine people about that clip, they said we don't have a clip.
It actually is just a picture of Michael Knowles, as it turns out.
And it's not all that great.
I mean, I won't say he looks amazing in this picture.
It's not his best look.
I've seen him look better.
Not much better.
He's within margin of error, probably.
Has Michael ever been happier than being at the State of the Note?
He pretended that he didn't want to be there when I saw him this morning.
He wants to not do things.
He totally wants to do things.
It's a swamp.
Where else would he be?
Michael is to going to the State of the Union as you are to directing films.
I really don't... but a little I do.
I'll say one more thing about the Third World War, which is, I do think that we're... I just like when you start sentences that way.
I do think that we're at a fairly high likelihood of finding ourselves In a war.
Not a third world war.
I think we're at a very high likelihood right now.
With Biden's announcement today, I think we're like five minutes away from the United States having to shoot things at people in Gaza or at Hezbollah.
You bring a bunch of ships right off the coast there, all it takes is one rogue Hezbollah agent firing a rocket at an American ship and suddenly America's active in Lebanon.
I mean like that's, this is, it's one of the dumbest things I've ever heard in my entire life.
Terrible.
As somebody who does not want American boots on the ground in the Gaza Strip, I would much prefer that we not put American boots on the ground two meters from the Gaza Strip.
Wait a minute.
I saw on X that you're an evil Jew who's trying to get Americans killed.
Aside from that.
Aside from that.
You mean you can't believe everything?
Obviously.
I mean, listen, in my status as a Mossad agent, I have to cover for my actual view.
How are we looking on that Michael Mulls clip?
I don't think we're going to get it.
Gents, I wanted to come to you live, but unfortunately the deep state has conspired to shut down our signal here, but we're just right here in the Capitol.
I'm with Congressman Ogles.
Congressman, you had a better view than I did, and you were there with some of the hecklers and the rowdy crowd.
So what'd you think?
Well, I was the first to speak to Joe Biden as he entered the chamber, and I pointed to my pen and said, Lake and Riley, and it didn't even ring a bell to him.
And when I pointed to my pen, he simply said, I like your pen.
And then later in the speech, when he said her name, he actually pronounced it incorrectly.
So the guy's clueless.
The lights were not on upstairs, you know, for Joe Biden.
He had some energy.
But I mean, you could clearly tell that he wasn't wasting it.
Michael Knowles and Congressman from our great state of Tennessee, Congressman Ogles, who just attended the President's speech.
We've done all that we can do, fellas.
I think that we have... We've done it.
We've done it.
We've delivered the people wonderful commentary.
So guys, what do you think about Return of the Jedi?
What's that?
Return of the Jedi.
We look forward to seeing you on the next Daily Wire backstage.
Thanks for hanging out with us tonight.
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