Ep. 1534 - Trump's Greatest Speech Summarized In 5 Mins
President Trump closes the RNC with perhaps the best speech of his political career, Democrat sources say Biden is likely to bow out, and the list of Secret Service failures continues to mount, all while Kimberly Cheatle keeps her job.
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Ep.1534
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Five days after being shot in the head, President Trump gave a 92-minute speech to accept the Republican nomination for president.
The speech began after Joe Biden went to bed and lasted longer than Joe Biden can stay awake.
And despite its length, it was perhaps the best speech of Trump's political career.
We will get into the key moments, as well as the terror stirring in the hearts of Democrats.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Top sources are breaking the news that Biden, rather, is about to bow out imminently and
And everyone seems to think this is an established fact.
Biden, he's going to bow out any minute.
I Remain skeptical.
It could happen.
It could happen, but I remain skeptical, and I will get into why that is.
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Before anyone accuses me of a cheap shot against Biden, That the Trump speech began after Biden went to sleep and it lasted longer than he can stay awake.
He was not awake for that speech.
There was a statement issued by the Biden-Harris 2024 campaign, and it came specifically from the campaign chairman, Jen O'Malley Dillon.
Of course, the Biden campaign chairlady has two last names, of course.
Of course, I bet she subscribes to Ms.
Magazine too.
She released this statement, but she made a big mistake.
The statement was written as though it came from Joe Biden.
But Joe Biden was asleep and doesn't know what his name is and might not even be the Democrat nominee anymore.
So at the last minute, they released the statement from the campaign chairman, Jen O'Malley Dillon, but they forgot to change the pronouns.
Libs, you'll notice, are very bad with pronouns.
They don't know.
They call men she, they call women he.
And this lady, Jen Dillon, identifies as the President of the United States.
It opens up, I won't read the whole thing.
Tonight, Donald Trump rambled on for well over an hour and failed to mention Project 2025 even once.
Slight digression here.
I had a lovely sit down the other day with the head of Project 2025, Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, on his show, The Kevin Roberts Show.
You can go check that out on YouTube and over at Heritage.
I go on.
He failed to mention how he had inflicted pain and cruelty on the women of America by overtaking Roe v. Wade.
And, you know, it's all just the classic Democrat talking points.
But here's the problem.
Then it gets down to the next paragraph.
I am running on a different vision.
I am running for an America where we defend democracy, not diminish it.
I am running.
I am more determined than ever to defeat Donald Trump and Project 2025.
But Jen O'Malley Dillon is not running for president, to my knowledge.
Maybe she's the person that the Democrats are going to use to replace Biden.
I don't know.
It's just a, it's a weak statement from a weak campaign that has a very weak where the candidate doesn't even matter.
The candidate is just a placeholder.
And you could fill in Jen Dillon, you could fill in Kamala Harris, you could fill in Michelle Obama.
For all we care.
There's nothing to the campaign.
The campaign is just the regular old Democrat talking points, not even reacting in real time to what Trump said.
Not even getting the time right.
They could have said it was well over an hour and a half.
They didn't.
It's just this rote, mechanical nonsense that does not know what time it is.
Whether we're talking about an 8 p.m.
speech or a 10 p.m.
speech, it just doesn't know whether we're talking about politics in 2024 or they're talking like it's 10 years ago.
So what did Trump say?
It was a marvelous speech.
It went on really, really long.
I was actually at a dinner while this was going on, so I didn't watch the whole thing in real time, but I had to watch much or most of it in real time.
I couldn't pull myself away because Trump opened up You know, gave the usual pleasantries and then he said, look, you all want me to talk about the assassination attempt.
I'll talk about the assassination attempt and you're only going to hear me talk about this once.
So listen up.
I will tell you exactly what happened and you'll never hear it from me a second time because it's actually too painful to tell.
I'm not supposed to be here tonight.
not supposed to be here.
Thank you.
But I'm not.
And I'll tell you, I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of Almighty God.
A beautiful statement and classic Trump self-deprecation.
Classic Trump realism.
People accuse this man of being a narcissist and an egomaniac.
And he certainly plays one on TV, but I don't think he really is one in real life.
Because you hear these little comments.
You remember years ago, he mentioned that he didn't drink.
He said, I've never had a beer.
I'm probably the only president that's never had a beer.
Could you imagine if I did drink, I'd be the worst.
It's the only good thing you can say about me is I never had a drink.
And it was just a little line, but for people who don't pay close attention to Trump's words, I think they sometimes believe this narrative, or they believe the character that he's a big narcissist, and he thinks he can do no wrong.
I don't think that's true.
And you see this perfectly last night during the speech.
He says, look, I'm not supposed to be here.
And they're all chanting, yes, you are.
Yes, you are.
He goes, thanks for that.
But I'm not.
Actually, I'm really not.
I didn't survive the assassination attempt by my own skill and greatness.
I would also say Trump is obviously supposed to be here.
But I think what he's saying is, according to the order of nature, I'm not supposed to be here.
According to just the working out of people's free wills in the regular order of business, I should be dead right now.
I am only alive By the order of grace.
I'm only alive by this improbable, and I think most would say miraculous, intervention.
The fact that I looked at this chart that was on the projector just a nanosecond before the assassin's bullet flew, and so it hit my ear instead of blowing the back of my head off.
And so I'm not supposed to be here.
I'm here by the grace of God.
Which is a humble statement and a true statement, and Trump knows it's true.
He knows it's so true that he actually corrects his adoring fans and says, no, guys, it's really, however miraculous you think it is, you don't understand.
I totally owe my life to God.
It has really nothing to do with me.
Then, you might have noticed if you were watching that clip, there is a firefighter's uniform on the side of the stage.
Trump then spent a good deal of the speech addressing the supporter of his who was murdered by the assassin's bullet.
There was one man killed at that rally, Corey Comparatore, and then there were two people who were critically injured but who happily have recovered.
And many people who were scared but didn't run away.
Everyone there, everyone showed really amazing courage under fire.
Trump, when he made a special point to discuss this supporter who was murdered, then he walked over and he kissed the guy's fire helmet.
Glory, unfortunately, we have to use the past tense.
He was incredible.
He was a highly respected former fire chief, respected by everybody, was accompanied by his Wife Helen, incredible woman, I spoke to her today, devastated.
And two precious daughters.
He lost his life selflessly, acting as a human shield to protect them from flying bullets.
He went right over the top of them and was hit.
What a fine man he was.
One gets a little misty-eyed watching, especially this portion of the speech.
Because we've seen this kind of thing from Trump before.
In some ways, we saw the prefiguring of this moment some years ago when Trump walked over, he said, I love America, I love America so much, he goes over, he hugs the American flag and he kisses it.
And it's a kind of funny, it's a comedic expression of something true, which is that Trump really loves America.
And he doesn't love America in some dorky, purely ideological way, the way that political nerds often do.
He really loves America.
You know, he loves the flag.
He loves hot dogs on the Fourth of July.
He loves fireworks.
You know, he loves America in, I think, a deeper way than many ideologues do.
And here you saw a much more somber expression of that, but I think Equally, and perhaps even more, sincere than the first one.
When he walks over, and he's not afraid to make himself look a little silly, or when he kisses the hat, I think he really thinks, man, this guy took a bullet to support me.
That's why he was there, was to support Trump's candidacy.
And immediately he took a bullet to protect his family, and that's an extraordinarily honorable and noble thing.
And Trump is recognizing that.
And so, of course, nothing is going to ease the grief other than time and faith for the family.
But this is an amazing honor for a guy who deserves it because he went out in the most honorable way you possibly can.
And that's a sweet memory for the family and it's worth honoring.
Real, a lot of misty-eyed people there.
And then, Trump gets into the campaign part of the speech, the stump part of the speech.
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I tweeted out about halfway through, I said, this speech is magnificent.
It's a masterpiece in both letter and delivery.
Because I think many people who are not familiar with political oratory have failed to recognize how incredibly difficult this speech was to give.
We have just experienced an historic moment.
This man was within millimeters of being murdered.
He survived by an apparent miracle.
And then two days later, he's at a political convention.
And time keeps moving on.
So we're just in the throes of the campaign again.
His opponent, the incumbent president, might drop out of the race because he has dementia.
President Trump doesn't even know who his opponent will be.
Everything is so up in the air.
And so Trump's got to come into the convention.
He's got a bandage on his ear because part of it was blown off days ago.
Then he's got to talk about this, this national trauma that just occurred, and give his eyewitness He's got to relive the moment that he almost died and that one of his supporters did die.
He's got to pay honor to the man who did die.
And then he's got to give a convention speech.
Then he's got to give a nomination acceptance speech.
That is...
So, so difficult.
And the big criticism that the speech is getting is that it went on too long, and it went on really long.
By historical standards, it didn't go on extraordinarily long.
But now we all have the attention span of a gnat, so nobody can pay attention to anything longer than a TikTok.
It went on for 92 minutes.
There is a rhetorical purpose for that length.
Maybe Trump just went on and he just had a lot to say.
The guy was almost murdered a few days ago.
I think he could speak his mind.
But the campaign purpose of giving this long a speech is to draw even more sharply that contrast between him and Biden.
Biden, at this point, by the time Trump took the stage, Biden had probably been asleep for hours.
Sincerely, there's no way the guy was still up watching the speech.
And there's no way Biden could have spoken at this length with this clarity, with this energy, for even a fraction of the time Trump did.
So just from the perspective of a campaign, it is digging in and further highlighting the vast Difference between these two candidates in terms of their energy, in terms of their focus, in terms of their mental acuity.
So Trump gets into this portion of the speech where he talks about all of his accomplishments when he was in office.
And one of the stranger things that he included, I think some people were scratching their heads, was his right to try regulations.
Before I get into it at all, here's Trump talking about it.
We got right to try, they were trying to get that for 52 years.
Somebody's terminally ill.
And hopefully there's nobody in this audience, but it does happen a lot.
They're terminally ill and they can't use our new space age drugs and other things that we are way ahead.
We have the greatest doctors in the world, the greatest laboratories in the world, and you can't do it.
They've been trying to get that approved for 52 years.
Wasn't that easy?
The insurance companies didn't want to do it.
They didn't want the risk.
The labs didn't want to do it because if it didn't work, people are pretty far down the line toward death.
They didn't want to do it.
The doctors didn't want to have it on their records, so I got everybody into an office.
52 years they tried.
Sounds simple, but it's not.
And I got them to agree that somebody that needs it will, instead of going to Asia or Europe or someplace, or if you have no money going home and dying, just die.
We got them to sign an agreement, agree to it, where they're not going to sue anybody.
They're going to get all of this stuff.
They're going to get it really fast.
And what's happened is we're saving thousands and thousands of lives.
It's incredible.
So, a lot of people were scratching their heads, I think, and they said, why of all the big Trump accomplishments, of all the big campaign promises, why focus on right to try?
This medical regulation that allows people to have early access to drugs that have not made it all the way through the approval process and been released to the general public.
And furthermore, why wouldn't he define what right to try is?
A lot of people don't know what right to try is, so why is he talking about it in this way?
And I thought this was a A perfect little window into Trump's oratory and rhetoric.
First of all, he's talking about right to try because voters tend to be old.
The reliable voters tend to be people of a certain age.
This is especially true for Republicans.
So he's going to highlight issues that are important to elderly, conservative Americans.
That's smart from the perspective of what you include in the speech.
But then two.
Trump is not a dork.
I've hit this point time and time again, and this is just another expression of it.
Trump is a guy who speaks bluntly, he seems energetic, he's not pushing his glasses up his nose writing some white paper at a think tank.
So if he came out there and he said, and we did right to try, and what is right to try?
Right to try is a A deregulation of the medical industry which is afraid of the trial lawyers so they wouldn't allow people to have early access to certain drugs.
So what we did was we moved up the number of weeks after the clinical trials to that people would be asleep.
He doesn't define it.
He doesn't explain like a professor does.
He paints a picture.
He describes like an artist would.
That's the difference.
And people are going to call my rhetoric hyperbolic now, but I've been saying this since 2016.
Trump really does use the best words, folks.
Trump has a sense of poetic diction.
I know the libs are going to laugh and the Trump skeptics are going to laugh, but he really does.
That's why his slogans are so powerful.
That's how he recognized that Make America Great Again, which was a slogan sometimes used by Reagan.
I think Nixon even used it once, but it wasn't the Republican slogan he recognized.
This is powerful.
Make America Great Again.
This is mostly Saxon words, short.
Pithy, evocative words.
America, I guess, is not a Saxon word because our continent is named after an Italian.
But, you know, that's the name of the country.
What are you going to do?
Make America Great Again.
It paints a picture in your mind.
That's why he's so good with symbols.
The red hat.
When he brought out that hat, the first time it was a white hat.
I actually have one of the original run of these hats back when it was white and blue.
And he wore it and everyone made fun of him.
Look at this big dumb hat says, Make America Great Again.
That symbol now Is so powerful, he understands.
He understands the symbol of the power suit with the power tie.
The man wears a uniform, pretty much the same thing all the time.
It just paints a picture for you.
His nicknames for his opponents just paints a picture.
There's Low Energy Jeb, there's Little Marco, there's whoever.
And so here, you don't need to know the specifics of this one deregulation that Trump did in office.
We did this before people were dying.
There was death.
They were going home to die.
They couldn't live.
And now people live instead of die.
And it also pulls into the theme of the whole speech, which is, I was supposed to be dead.
My opponents wanted me dead.
They nearly left me dead.
God saved me.
Now I'm alive.
We're gonna bring this country back to life, is what we're gonna do.
Because politics is the medium Through which we achieve not only our natural ends, but our supernatural ends.
This is it, baby!
We're not abstract spirits just floating around.
We live in time and space.
We are also bodies.
We move in history.
And we're doing it.
And there's an intersection here.
Reagan made this point during his famous time for choosing speech.
Says, there's something going on.
When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn that we're spirits, not animals.
And there's something going on in time and space and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells destiny.
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.
It's very similar kind of rhetoric.
Not exactly the same words, but it's the same thrust.
It's the same point.
And he lands the whole thing on MAGA.
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My favorite comment.
Yesterday is from politically incorrect 956, who says things have become more divided since I became president.
Therefore, I will run for president again.
That is the Biden campaign theme.
That is very true.
Doesn't doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, but most of the Biden campaign doesn't make a lot of sense.
Okay, we're gonna move on from Trump.
But the final point he makes, I love, is on his campaign theme, which he's had for eight years.
It is what we were just talking about.
It's MAGA.
Greatest movement in the history of our country.
Make America Great Again.
When they criticized it, they said, we're gonna try and stop MAGA.
I said, MAGA is Make America Great Again.
What are you gonna stop?
There's nothing to stop.
Then they say, oh, that's right.
It's very tough to fight it.
And all of the people that did try and fight it have failed.
What are you talking about, you're going to stop it?
It's make America great again.
How are you going to stop that?
There are many politicians, they want to go out and they all want to be Pericles, okay?
And so they go and they use this soaring, high-flying rhetoric.
Wow, my goodness, all this elevated language.
And Trump gets into that.
Obviously, this was an inspiring speech in many ways.
But Trump is grounded.
Okay, and frankly, if you want to be Pericles, you've got to be kind of grounded too.
That's what allows you to soar.
To use a similar metaphor, Chesterton says the angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.
Trump takes himself lightly here.
And so he goes from this really, really inspiring rhetoric, he goes, and they say they're going to stop MAGA.
Are you going to stop MAGA?
What do you mean?
It just means make America great again.
What's the matter?
You know, it's like a punchline for a standup comedian.
Really, really.
A great speech.
If it went on too long, I don't think it really matters because all that matters from these speeches are the clips that go around.
All that matters from the speeches are, well, rallying the delegates immediately.
Trump had already done that.
And the clips, they can be used in commercials.
I think it achieved its purpose.
I do wish Trump had taken the stage earlier.
I wish that this had been seen more in prime time.
There was some delay, half an hour, 45 minutes.
I wish he'd taken the stage a little earlier so that more people could have seen it in real time.
But I bet plenty of people are going to see this.
This is the craziest election cycle of any of our lifetimes.
The Trump rhetoric is so good.
This is how you know it's so good.
Not just obviously I'm a supporter of his, but you don't need to just take my word for it.
Even the Biden campaign is using his rhetoric.
Here is Democrat Congress Lady Joyce Beatty, a Biden surrogate at a Biden-Harris campaign event.
Listen to her rhetoric.
So yes, this November we're going to make America great again.
I mean, Biden, the other day in the Oval Office address after the assassination attempt, Biden almost made the same mistake that his campaign surrogate just made.
He's reading, obviously, from the teleprompter.
And just before he makes the mistake, Biden actually seems to have been a little quicker witted than his flax.
So tonight, I'm asking every American to recommit To make America so, make America, what, think about it.
What's made America so special?
And that's why I'm asking all of us to make America, what?
Think about it.
Why is America cool or whatever?
You know, nevermind.
Who put that in my prompter?
Who put the Trump slogan in my prompter?
And this is the last thing the Biden campaign can do in defense of whichever speechwriter put the Trump line in the mouth of the surrogate and almost in the mouth of Joe Biden.
The best chance that the Biden campaign has right now to beat Donald Trump is to just run the Trump campaign.
Biden wants open borders.
Trump wants to close the border.
The American people want to close the border.
The best shot Biden has is just to run on closing the border.
The Biden campaign is running on transing the kids.
Trump doesn't want to trans the kids.
If Biden wants to improve his poll numbers, he should just adopt the Trump position.
On so many issues, they got nothing.
Which is why there is all of this talk about Biden potentially dropping out of the race.
There's a report out from Axios right now.
Dem sources say Biden will likely bow out.
So this is from Axios, a Lib publication, saying, the most likely scenario is Biden bows out and endorses Harris, but also flicks to letting the delegates sort it out if the party feels otherwise.
That would aim to diffuse any criticism that the Democratic Party was being undemocratic.
Okay?
Take it seriously.
Harris would be hard to stop, perhaps impossible, if the Obamas and Clintons joined Biden, Representative James Clyburn, and the Congressional Black Caucus in backing her.
It's not clear if the coordination would be so fast and clear, however.
Okay, now Mark Halpern, who is a very prominent journalist, has a lot of access to liberal sources, wrote that book Game Change back in 2009, 2010.
This is breaking news.
Multiple sources outline the apparent state of play on Biden at this time.
First, plans to announce withdrawal from nomination as early as this weekend, with Sunday most likely.
Two, Jon Meacham, who's this awful liberal historian talking head pundit guy, polishing up his remarks.
Will not resign the presidency.
Biden will not endorse Harris.
Open convention with Harris and about three others.
Superdelegates will not be allowed to vote on the first ballot.
Superdelegates are the Democrat party elites that are not sent by the voters in the states to go choose the nominee.
They're just their party elites who get to put their their thumb on the scale.
So they won't be able to vote on the first ballot.
Harris is vetting at least four possible running mates including Andy Beshear and possibly Shapiro.
Shapiro being the A Democrat governor of Pennsylvania.
Wow, that's weird.
Those are conflicting reports.
And Axios is credible talking to the left.
Mark Halperin is credible talking to the left.
So what is it?
What's going on?
I still don't buy it.
I'm not saying, look, if Saturday or even this afternoon, if it comes and Biden says, I won't run again, I won't be really that surprised.
But if you asked me to make a bet right now, put a gun to my head, some small amount of money, I still think there is a very good chance Biden just remains the nominee.
No, I think maybe the sole voice left in politics who is saying, not that he will be the nominee, just that there is still a very good chance that he's the nominee.
Because he wants to be the nominee.
He's wanted to be president forever.
It's very difficult for him to drop out of the race and not resign the presidency.
This ain't LBJ in the 60s.
This ain't LBJ saying, I will not seek nor will I accept my party's nomination for president because I won't win.
Because the Vietnam War destroyed my ability to win re-election.
That's not what's going on here.
Because external circumstances have harmed my political odds.
No, this is Joe Biden saying my brain turned to pudding, and so I'm not mentally and physically able to do the job.
Well, if you're not able to do the job starting in January, then you probably aren't able to do the job now, right?
So how does he drop out of the race without resigning the presidency?
Very difficult to do that, if you're him.
Also, I don't think Joe Biden likes Kamala Harris, because Kamala Harris' whole campaign was about how he's a big racist.
So I don't think there's any love lost between those two.
What does Biden have to gain by dropping out?
What does he have to lose by staying in?
Not very much.
Biden's got the delegates.
He can stay in if he wants to.
And here's the other reason why, look, maybe this decision hasn't been made yet.
Maybe Biden's leaning one way or the other.
If I'm the Democrats, I see no reason to believe That anybody else would really do better.
There's a new A-plus poll out, it comes from SurveyUSA, pitting Trump against Biden, against Harris, against Gavin Newsom, and against the fever dream of Michelle Obama.
This is Republicans' favorite fan fiction to write.
Oh, Michelle's gonna get in, and Michelle's gonna win a zillion states, which I don't buy for a second.
I don't think Michelle Obama wants it, and I don't think she's particularly popular.
Her husband was popular.
She's not very popular.
She's a woman who said she was never proud of her country until it elected her husband.
She's not that likable a person.
Well, here's what the poll says.
Trump beats Biden, and he beats Harris, and he beats Newsom, and he ties Michelle.
Forget Michelle wins 50 states, even Michelle is tied.
And by the way, the moment any of these people actually get into the race, their poll numbers will drop.
Every candidate looks stronger Before they run.
Hillary Clinton looked a lot stronger.
Her poll numbers, her approval rating was way better before she declared she was going to run in 2016.
So if now, at the highest point that these people are ever going to have an approval rating, even in this crazy election cycle where I guess nothing is really predictable because we haven't seen anything like this before, I just don't see any mojo for any of these people.
So if you're Biden, you're going to get out of the race because you need to make way for a woman who also loses to Trump?
Or you gotta make way for a man who, it would be hard for him to skip over Kamala Harris, but Gavin Newsom, who gets destroyed by Trump according to this poll.
He's losing to Trump by 11 points according to a pretty reliable poll.
Or for what?
Even Michelle Obama?
The Hail Mary play?
Who ties Trump?
You're gonna get out for that?
I don't think so.
If I were Biden, I would stick it out.
That's what I would do.
And I'm not even saying that because I want Biden to stay in because I think it's kind of funny and helpful to us and predictable, at least.
That's what I would do if I were him.
And that's why I'm trying to put myself in his shoes.
Why would he get out unless he just really can't wake up anymore?
Why would he get out?
He might still do it because he's not in command of his faculties, but if he's got any command left, Joe, come on, don't subvert democracy.
Give the people their choice.
This week, we witnessed history, obviously.
Failed assassination attempt, President Trump throwing his fist in the air, and then last night he appears to accept the GOP nomination to become the 47th President of the United States.
As motivated as we are, this election is not over.
Join us in the fight for truth and a better America at The Daily Wire.
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Speaking of Trumps...
This week I sat down with Donald Trump Jr.
for his first long interview after the assassination attempt on his father and the miraculous moment that saved President Trump's life.
Check out the teaser.
I got a call, you know, 6-15, whatever it was, your dad's been shot.
I got a hold of my father and, you know, surprisingly calm in the hospital.
You know, by then I'd already gotten seen the video and sort of him coming up defiant in the face of actual fire.
It was sort of amazing and he just sort of said, you know, Hey man, you're the, you're the biggest badass I know.
head because I genuinely believe that.
Watch that episode now at the Michael Knowles YouTube channel and subscribe to watch the ad-free version on Daily Wire Plus.
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Take it away.
Good morning, Mr. Knowles.
My name is Zach.
I'm 26.
I live in St.
Paul, Minnesota.
I just got sober nine months ago.
I was a heroin addict for seven years, and I'm working on a speech currently to present at NA and AA meetings in my area.
The speech is comprised of four sections.
The first section is defining your goals.
The second section is creating a vision for the future.
The third is setting goals to work towards that vision.
And the fourth section is application how to bring all that together.
For my value section, I am confronted with a question of how do I know that my values are good and correct?
And for that, I am referencing Emanuel Kant's categorical imperative and his moral philosophy of moral absolutism and David Hume's moral philosophy of moral relativism, and I'm trying to combine the two by way of Aristotle's philosophy on virtue and the disposition of virtue and the transformation of one's desires and towards the good through that virtue and disposition to virtue.
My question is how would I go about doing this?
I'm not exactly stuck, but I could use some input as someone as educated as yourself.
I'm an autodidact, and I'm just now learning all this stuff, so anything you would have to say about this would be much appreciated, or if you think I'm completely wrong and should do something else, I'd love to hear any input you have.
Thanks for all you do, and congratulations on the new kid.
Thank you.
Hey, that's great.
And congratulations on all of your achievements, obviously, that you're now going to speak about and try to help other people.
I don't think you're completely wrong.
I think you're just making it too complicated, much more complicated than it needs to be.
So you're bringing up these thinkers from modernity Like Immanuel Kant and Hume, and you're trying to bring in the categorical imperative, which is Kant's way to try to work up some moral criterion in a secular world, in a post-Enlightenment world.
But you don't need any of that because secularism's dumb and the Enlightenment got many things wrong.
You actually give yourself the answer in your question which is I'm trying to meld that with Aristotle a little so okay good if you're going to give a speech based on Aristotle's understanding of virtue and the good and great I think that's what you should do.
I think Aristotle is much to be preferred to Kant and Hume.
I think the ancients and especially the ancients read through the scholastics and through through the real development of Christendom is much to be preferred to our modern secular liberal kind of dumb age.
So, don't worry about it.
Forget about Kant, forget about Hume.
I mean, you know, they're good to read and everything, but just focus on Aristotle.
And then you can read, obviously, the Nicomachean Ethics.
It might help you to read, well, you should read the other Aristotle writings, too.
I mean, there's really good stuff.
De, what is it, De Anomalis?
My titles are a little weak here.
But, you know, you can read Aristotle on the soul and on the other animals.
You can read Aristotle's Poetics.
You can read Aristotle's Politics.
And then what I think is Really good to do is read the scholastics, the Christian writers in the Middle Ages who are, specifically St.
Thomas Aquinas, who are reading Aristotle through the lens of Christianity.
And I think that's going to guide you a lot better than a bunch of, you know, secular maniacs in modernity.
Next question.
Hey Michael, I had two questions for you.
The first is, do you think that Donald Trump will pick Nikki Haley to be his Secretary of State if he wins this coming November?
The second is, I was thinking of starting my own political podcast to share some of my own unique ideas on politics and discuss areas that I feel are getting overlooked by Most everyone.
But did you have any suggestions or tips to help me out?
Thanks.
Yes.
I don't think he's going to pick Haley to be the Secretary of State.
It's possible, I guess, but he has no reason to do that.
Haley ran a very tough campaign against him and stayed in a long time.
So they've kissed and made up, and she was able to speak at the RNC, and I think that was mutually beneficial.
But, you know, Trump can sometimes be a little rough on his former competitors.
So I don't really see that happening.
If I were Nikki Haley, I would advise against going to any dinners with photographers to discuss that job.
As you remember, Trump humiliated Mitt Romney that way.
After Romney had attacked Trump for a long time, Trump said, OK, well, Mitt, you want to be Secretary of State?
Let's go talk about it over dinner.
There's this awful dinner where Romney looks totally weak and sheepish.
Trump is grinning like the Cheshire Cat, and then of course he didn't give him the job.
So, you know, they've kissed and made up.
They're both You know, tough people with thick skin.
Maybe Nikki would play some role in administration, but I don't see Trump giving her a tough spot.
As for a political podcast, every white man between the ages of 16 and 55 has a podcast, and I think is by statute obligated to have a podcast these days.
I don't know when that happened.
But I would recommend, if you have a perspective, that is not being represented in the political media space, then that's good.
There's your first step.
You don't want to start a podcast if you're just parroting everybody else.
But what I would recommend is start with a tweet, and then maybe move up to a column, and then maybe do an Instagram reel or a TikTok, and then and only then maybe move to a podcast.
There's an old line which is that most books should be essays and most essays should not be written, and I think that holds true for audio and video as well.
You know, a podcast, what's that going to be?
Minimum 20-25 minutes could be 45 minutes or an hour or two or three hours.
Do you have that much to say?
I don't know.
Most people who have a podcast don't have that much to say.
But I would test it out first.
Okay, I think I've got this great 45-minute podcast worth of insights.
Let me just distill all of that down into its most concentrated form, put it out there in a tweet or in a short TikTok or Instagram reel.
Let's see if that gets traction.
Let's see if that goes viral.
You do enough of those, people are going to ask you to start a podcast.
Then you're in a good position because you've already got a built-in audience and you're not going to have to try to To make this massive lift of convincing people who've never heard of you to give up an hour of their day to listen to your thoughts.
That's going to be a lot harder, especially if you don't have a ton of money to invest in marketing and advertising to get it started.
Next question.
Hey Michael, I have a question for you about political strategy.
Specifically, you recently defended the change in the Republican Party platform as an expression of credential judgment in order to help candidates get elected.
I understand that, but my question is, you've also expressed concern about the social truce of the Tea Party era, and even raised questions about the fusionism of the Bill Buckley era.
How is Trump distancing himself from Project 2025, or J.D.
Vance, expressing openness to the legality of the abortion pill?
Or the changes in the party platform, substantively different from the social truce or the fusionism of the past.
Why are you critical of those compromises in the past, but defensive of these changes today?
What is your means for evaluating political strategy versus principle?
Thanks.
I love the show.
Great question.
It's a difference between doing and saying.
That's the difference.
If by social truce you mean, as many people meant during the Tea Party era, we're not going to touch abortion, we're not going to defend marriage, we're not going to protect unborn babies, we're not going to defend our national traditions and makeup and our borders even.
Which is, that's quite a social policy you would say, mass migration.
If that's what you mean, By social truce, then social truce is awful and it's not going to win you any elections anyway and it wouldn't matter if it did because you wouldn't really win anything.
But if by social truce you mean...
We're just not going to talk about it quite so much between mid-July and November, every two to four years?
Well, that I think actually has something to recommend it.
A good example of how to walk this line on the social truce was the governor of Indiana who was rumored to be running for president, Mitch Daniels.
Mitch Daniels was, in some ways, a social trucer.
But even as he's talking about how we're going to de-emphasize the social issues for a moment as the election season's ramping up, he also defunded Planned Parenthood in the state of Indiana.
So that's kind of what I'm recommending.
If Trump had come out and said, we support abortion now, we support weird sex stuff, we support whatever, all these liberal social policies, I would say that's very bad.
That's going to hurt us in the end.
But if all he's saying is, hey, we're going to de-emphasize it a little bit in some tough election cycles, after the Dobbs decision comes down, that fundamentally reorders how we can even campaign on abortion in America.
But hey, listen guys, I'm still your pro-life guy.
I'm the first sitting president ever to show up to the March for Life.
I'm the guy who got Roe v. Wade overruled.
You think, okay, Well great, let's do that because then you can get elected and do more pro-life stuff.
That's the distinction to me.
If we can speak in a prudent and restrained way and then do the most conservative stuff, we can.
Great.
Project 2025.
Project 2025 is a database of potential personnel for an administration.
It's great.
I was sitting down with the head of it the other day.
He's a genius.
It's a great idea, and I can't wait for it to be put into action.
But if Trump comes out and says, I'm really not directly involved in this thing, I haven't agreed to do anything with Project 2025, that's a true statement.
And then he gets into office, and he hires some great personnel.
And if some of those great personnel are in the Project 2025 database, I assume a good number of them will be.
There just aren't that many professional, conservative politicos in the country.
Well, all the better.
We can be prudent.
You know, that is actually the chief political virtue.
