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We are off to the races.
If you thought Trump's opponents were mad when he won, just wait until you see their reaction now that he is actually starting to do things.
Besides not one but two inauguration speeches, one after the other, and three inaugural balls, one of which I attended, if I look and sound a little bleary-eyed, President Trump spent yesterday issuing dozens of executive orders,
hundreds of executive actions, and the most dramatic policy reset, for the better, but just period, the most dramatic policy reset for our country in perhaps 70 or even 80. I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
Joe Biden spent his final minutes in office pardoning his entire family.
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So many executive orders, so many executive actions to get to a deep significance that I haven't really heard a lot of people talking about.
But it's an amazing policy reset for our country for the better.
Some of the best stuff we have seen in upwards of a century, certainly since the Second World War.
But before we get to any of that, I think a guy on Twitter summed up the mood in Washington and in the whole country right now.
President Trump had about a billion events yesterday.
But after one of them, at the big rally that he held, he introduced the village people.
Trump at his rallies, he plays the YMCA and he does the Trump dance and everything.
But he brought the actual village people on stage.
Just take a listen.
Now that clip alone is great, but But the best part of it, it was summed up by Elder, the Icelandic gay guy, who says, this is how genocides begin.
First, they ban tampons from men's bathrooms.
Then the iconic gay disco band sings for Hitler.
That's it.
That's it.
Everything they tried to throw at Trump has collapsed.
Everything.
He's Hitler.
He's a threat to democracy.
We're standing for the rule of law.
No one's above the law.
All of it.
The libs have been proven wrong on all of it.
Joe Biden exits office in complete disgrace, even within his own party.
Trump vindicated on everything, on literally everything.
Unlike 19th century tariff policy, like everything, everything he was vindicated.
He wasted no time getting started.
50 some odd executive orders.
Executive orders, of course, are legally binding.
Initially, President Trump was planning on 25 or something, but the number went way up.
He's got to make...
And one Trump official said, quote, this is a massive record-setting, unmatched first wave, the most extensive list of executive actions in American history, all guided by a relentless commitment to deliver on the campaign promise.
And this is important.
He's not just racking up EOs so he can put another notch in his belt and set another record.
But it's all for a distinct purpose.
This was my biggest takeaway from his inauguration speeches, two of them.
This is my biggest takeaway from policy on day one.
It's coherent.
This is not scattershot.
He's not shooting from the hip.
It is all in service of Trump's political vision for the country, which is not only coherent, it is more coherent than the policy vision of basically any, maybe any president in my lifetime, not even just any Republican president.
So what did he do?
Declares a national border emergency to effectively close the U.S. southern border.
There's a cynical way to use national emergencies.
The Democrats have sometimes threatened this on things like climate change, which is not a real national emergency.
In this case, though, when you have, what is it, 8 million or more, 11 million border encounters under Joe Biden's watch, that is actually an emergency.
And these illegals are killing Americans.
That open border is poisoning the country.
Hundreds of thousands of people killed by fentanyl.
So it's legit.
I don't even know how a Democrat could tell you it's not a national emergency.
That's number one.
Number two.
A potential citizenship order that could end birthright citizenship for the children of illegals.
This was promised years ago by Trump in a video he posted May of 2023. This will certainly meet massive legal challenges.
It could upend constitutional precedent going back to Wong Kim Ark, an 1898 Supreme Court decision that really has its roots in the common law and even in British jurisprudence.
But there's this problem with birthright citizenship granted by the 14th Amendment.
The people who wrote the 14th Amendment, the people who ratified the 14th Amendment never foresaw that this provision to bring former slaves into the American political order would be used to incentivize foreign nationals to just come into the country and have anchor babies.
No one predicted that.
And so while there is some argument for...
The right of the soil, the notion that if you're born within the jurisdiction of a political order, that you are subject to that political order.
You could even become a citizen.
This has just become so extreme.
It's been taken well out of the realm of prudence or any serious limit for it.
So I think this is a really important thing.
I'm very much on Trump's side here.
I hope the court agrees eventually.
Government to end offshore wind leases.
So that's on hold.
Trump wants to drill baby drill, as he said, and the wind farms aren't doing very much.
He then also ends the electric vehicle mandate for automakers.
He's withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord.
He's pointing out that federal workers can now be fired for political insubordination.
This is really important.
In Trump's first term, he passes all this policy, certainly from the executive branch, but even from the legislature.
And then he's undermined by his own employees because you have this federal bureaucracy that's going to be there.
Even if a president serves two terms, the president's come and go, but these bureaucrats remain the same.
So if the bureaucrats are not going to get on board with the political agenda, if they're not going to follow orders, then they're out.
That's how it would work in the military.
That's how it would work in a private corporation.
That's how it should work in the government too.
This is another issue that goes back to the 19th century.
What Trump is doing is in many ways resuscitating and revising policies that have been In place for a very, very long time now.
This is a deep political vision.
People mock Trump for supposedly having a shallow view of politics.
That's not what I see.
I see a deeper grappling with politics than any Republican politician in my lifetime.
He's digging in and he's getting a lot of pushback for it, as we might expect.
But even beginning 1881 with the presidencies of James Garfield and then certainly Chester Arthur.
You saw a shift away from the spoils system that would give political jobs just to cronies toward a civil service.
And at the time, that was considered a great reform because the spoils system had been corrupt.
However, the civil service has become corrupt.
This is something that happens in a fallen world, is that systems and institutions become corrupt.
And so you have to refresh them.
You have to reinvigorate them.
You have to adapt.
Politics is adapting eternal principles to changing circumstances.
It's not enough to just repeat the same slogans, be they from 1984 or 1884 for that matter.
You have to recognize that...
That circumstances are changing.
You gotta keep up with the program.
A lot of never-Trump Republicans, they refuse to keep up with the program.
They refuse to acknowledge that a policy that might have been good even in the 80s or in the 19th century and the 17th century might not be good anymore.
So this reform of the civil service, of the bureaucracy, to bring them into line with the political winds, that's a good thing.
That's not dirty.
That's not necessarily corrupt.
We have a system where the people are supposed to be able to control our own government.
And so if bureaucrats are refusing to go along with the political realities that the people want, then the corruption lies there in the civil service.
Trump has also said that bureaucrats will be hired based on merit.
He's also going to end work from home.
So he's going to make them come back in.
COVID's over.
Okay, you got to come to work, actually.
This focus on merit is really important.
Now, there are some problems with the merit talk, because merit is one of these words that sounds very clinical and scientific and objective, but it actually smuggles in all sorts of philosophical priors.
It smuggles in a whole conception of justice.
We were talking about this during the H-1B debate.
When you say we want a merit-based system, what does that mean exactly?
Some people will argue.
That we need a merit-based system, and therefore we need to import a ton of Indians to do tech jobs.
Because they deserve it.
They're smarter than the Americans.
Well, hold on.
Other people are going to argue, as they did in the other side of the H-1B debate.
They'll say, hold on.
Americans deserve, they merit special consideration in their own country.
They deserve, they merit more consideration from their politicians than foreigners do.
So what do we even really mean by merit here?
Trump is using this language, and I agree with the way in which he is using it.
We have to be aware of our own propaganda a little bit, too.
There is a conception of justice that is filling in here, and Trump has told us what his is.
His is America first.
Good, that's a good way to guide our understanding of justice moving into the Trump era.
Let's not allow those words to be twisted, just like freedom's twisted by the libs, equality is twisted by the libs, merit, justice is twisted by the libs.
Then major, major news on pardons and on further executive action.
There's so much more to say.
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Plans for sweeping pardons have been reported for every person arrested in connection with January 6th.
Sorry, sorry.
My voice is a little off after a few days in the Imperial Capitol.
January 6th, the worst day in the history of this or any republic.
That could encompass 1,625 people across all 50 states, over 465 people in prison.
Then, an order to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
President Trump spoke about that.
And then also to declare a national energy emergency.
This is perhaps less tangible, less visible to people than the national emergency at the border.
But we do have an energy emergency.
Energy can dictate the fate of great nations.
I was speaking to my friend Alan Estrin, the executive director of PragerU.
He said, you know, by my analysis of great powers rising and falling, it pretty much all comes down to energy.
And the left has sought to destroy America's energy, to stop us from drilling, to stop us from fracking.
To stop us from building nuclear power plants, to stop us from using any energy that actually works.
And what do they want to do?
They want to sing Kumbaya around the windmill and put some solar panels in a few parking lots, and that's that.
Not going to cut it.
Here is how the New York Times covered, in particular, the birthright citizenship executive order.
Get a load of this.
If the New York Times were not now largely irrelevant, this would bother me.
Now I just want to laugh.
They say, Declare an end to birthright citizenship, a guarantee granted by the 14th Amendment for the children of undocumented immigrants.
The president cannot change the Constitution on his own.
So it's not yet clear how Trump plans to withhold the benefits of citizenship to a group of people born in the United States.
Did you catch that?
Did you catch that because you were listening to the show yesterday?
The president cannot change the Constitution on his own.
One of Joe Biden's final acts as president was to try to change the Constitution on his own.
That was one of the last things he did.
Other than trying to pardon his corrupt family members, to protect himself, a corrupt politician, from being investigated and facing consequences for selling state influence for his personal enrichment, allegedly.
Biden tried to single-handedly ratify the...
So-called Equal Rights Amendment, this feminist nonsense that would have transed our culture 50 years before anyone was really talking about it.
It failed.
The Equal Rights Amendment failed its first deadline in the 1970s.
It failed its second deadline in the early 1980s, 1982. It's done.
They needed to get 38 states to ratify this amendment.
They only got 35. It's done.
But then, a couple years ago, a few years ago, Virginia decides to ratify it decades after the deadline.
And then years after that, Joe Biden says, okay, I now declare it the law of the land.
So you got one day, Joe Biden single-handedly trying to change the Constitution.
New York Times, all supportive of it.
They either keep mom or they support it.
And then days later, two days later, Donald Trump offers a legitimate interpretation of a contentious question pertaining to the meaning of an amendment that's already been ratified.
And the New York Times up in arms.
Just totally ridiculous.
Now, Trump gave two inauguration speeches.
That's how fired up he is.
We covered it a lot yesterday.
We were live from the Capitol.
Right now, I've got the Capitol behind me.
But yesterday, I was suffering the freezing cold.
And it didn't even feel like suffering because of how great the speeches were.
President Trump made a lot of very particular claims in the speech.
Inauguration speeches are very often high-minded, soaring rhetoric, 30,000-foot view, and Trump's had that as well.
But what was distinctive about Trump's inauguration speech is he tied the high-flying rhetoric to particular policy proposals.
Notably, On American territory itself.
And above all, China is operating the Panama Canal, and we didn't give it to China, we gave it to Panama, and we're taking it back.
The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.
And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars.
Our manifest destiny.
The manifest destiny is an old term going back to the 19th century.
You're noticing a lot of 19th century coming back.
A lot of America's greatness, these eras of expansion, growth, coming back in the person of Trump.
And manifest destiny is the American iteration of an ancient concept called the Translatio Imperii.
That the empire, the power, the authority of the governing body moves.
Why does it move?
The idea of it comes from Troy, actually.
That when Aeneas leaves Troy, the Translatio Imperii moves westward.
It moves from Troy to Rome.
And the founding of the Roman Empire.
And this is actually why Emperor Constantine is sometimes criticized, because Constantine moves the empire in the wrong direction, starts moving it east from Rome to Constantinople.
It's this notion that we're moving, we're growing.
It is actually part of the logic of history that the empire is to expand, and to expand westward.
So when the early United States...
Existed as merely 13 colonies on the east coast of the continent.
The notion of manifest destiny, he wrote, that we were supposed to conquer westward.
Go west, young man.
And then at some point, after 1959, I guess, we just decided that America could not expand anymore.
We shouldn't take on new territories.
Everything had to be perfectly fixed.
In part, this is because after the Second World War, We adopted a liberal fiction that borders were going to remain exactly fixed forever.
Now that of course doesn't make sense because people grow and people contract.
We have a problem in the West right now that we don't have any children anymore.
So if you stop having children, you're going to lose your borders.
Your country's going to contract.
Countries rise and countries fall.
And so it's not merely an injustice, a fact of the fallen world, that national borders change and that some countries grow and some countries shrink.
It's actually a necessity.
It's a political necessity because people change, because time goes on, because history moves.
And Trump's saying time is moving on, and we want to make sure that we continue to grow, that we continue to be great, that we're not left behind by history.
Trump might be insinuating an expansion eastward.
He might be talking about Greenland, as he's been discussing in recent weeks.
Or to follow the logic of Manifest Destiny, the Translatio in Paris, and take it into, I don't know, three dimensions, four dimensions, I don't know, to take it onto another axis.
He's talking about expanding even into outer space.
I guess we'll go back to the moon, but we're going to go to Mars.
We're going to keep exploring.
We're going to keep growing.
This is going to surprise some people who view Trump as a rigid nationalist.
You've heard this from the liberal media, warnings about Christian nationalism.
I always tell people, if you're worried about Christian nationalism, just wait until you discover unchristian nationalism.
That's going to be a lot worse, trust me.
But here even.
I've hesitated to call myself a Christian nationalist.
Beyond a practical way that, you know, perhaps Christianity is better than the alternatives.
I am a Christian.
I believe Christianity is true.
If you don't like Christianity, just wait till you hear about the alternatives.
And nationalism is good.
It's better than liberal globalism.
But I sometimes say, no, I'm not a Christian nationalist.
I'm a Christian imperialist.
Because the empire traditionally is considered to be the ideal form of government.
When it goes bad, it can go really, really bad.
The liberal globalist empire is really awful.
Trump here, I think, is shifting away a little bit from a nearly nationalist perspective, a 20th century perspective, into a more classical and older perspective of expansion, of growth, of recognizing that America is the global empire.
It just is.
We just are.
You might like that.
You might not like that.
We have a lot of foreign dignitaries who flew in for this inauguration from countries all around the world.
People don't fly in for Tibet's elections.
Does Tibet have elections?
People don't fly in for the changing of the guard in Liechtenstein.
But they do fly in for the American inauguration with the global empire.
Trump says, we're going to be strong.
Especially when he talks about the Panama Canal.
We don't have the Panama Canal so that we can sell it to China.
We're taking that back.
We're taking that back.
That's ours.
That's right.
That is ours.
That is strong.
That is just.
That's in America's interest.
And it tells the rest of the world, China, you think we're going to contract and you're going to expand?
No.
Actually, you know what?
Some of the stuff that you've taken as you've expanded, we're taking it back.
And if you don't play your cards right, we're going to take a little bit more, too.
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Trump then speaking of the 19th century brings up in his first inauguration speech in the modest inauguration speech.
He brings up McKinley president and mountain.
A short time from now, we are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and we will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley where it should be and where it belongs.
President McKinley, Made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent.
He was a natural businessman and gave Teddy Roosevelt the money for many of the great things he did, including the Panama Canal, which has foolishly been given to the country of Panama after the United States.
The United States, I mean, think of this, spent more money than ever spent on a project before and lost 38,000 lives.
So, so true.
We invested not only money, but lives into building the Panama Canal.
We're going to take it back.
We're also going to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
Why can't we do that?
Why can't we do that?
And as we rename Mount McKinley Mount McKinley, we're also going to look at McKinley's policies, the policies that did make America rich.
We're going to start talking about tariffs.
Which Democrats and Republicans have been loath to talk about in recent years, as there has been a uniparty consensus on things like free trade.
And Trump is saying, no, it's actually a more complicated story.
And maybe pursuing a policy of freer and freer trade, maybe that was good for a certain time, but we're in a different time now.
And we need to adapt to changing circumstances.
Then, President Trump, speaking of foreign affairs, speaking of Latin America, It gives a little warning to the drug cartels that are poisoning our country, literally poisoning our country, and sending millions and millions of foreigners into our country illegally.
Under the orders I signed today, we will also be designating the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
And by invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, I will direct our government to use the full and immense power of federal and state law enforcement to eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks.
bringing devastating crime to U.S. soil, including our cities and inner cities.
As Commander-in-Chief, I have no higher responsibility than to defend our country from threats and invasions, and that is exactly what I am going to do.
We will do it at a level that nobody's ever seen before.
I'm going to translate that for you.
A bunch of cholos with face tattoos are about to get a visit from U.S. Special Forces.
That's what that policy means in practice.
In practice, to declare that the cartels are foreign terrorist organizations, It means that we are, as we fight the global war on terror and its continuations and its permutations, we're going to start targeting them.
Okay, we're going to go get jihadis in the Middle East.
That's good.
It's good to get jihadis, I guess.
But we have a threat that is much closer to home.
And that threat is the cartels at our border.
And all of a sudden, the same guys who are just blowing the heads off of jihadis in Syria.
They're going to start showing up in Guadalajara.
They're going to start showing up a little closer to home.
If I were a Mexican with a face tattoo right now, I would go into hiding.
I'd put a lot of makeup on, I'd cover that up, and I would get out of Dodge because Trump is signaling things are going to get very, very bad for them.
And it's a reminder.
That we still have political power.
The way the libs talk about the border, they say, oh, there's nothing to be done.
I know the majority of Americans not only want to close the border, but want to drastically reduce all immigration.
But, you know, it just, it can't be done, you know, isn't that so sad?
And Trump's saying, no, it can easily be done.
You just need to have courage and will.
You have to come to a smart conclusion, a correct conclusion about the problem.
Then you have to have will and courage to actually do something about it.
It's really easy, though.
U.S. special forces are unbelievable.
They're the most lethal fighting force ever in the history of the world.
They can blow the heads off some Mexican gangsters.
They're not that tough.
We just have to have the will to do it.
Trump's saying he will.
And, speaking of those face-tattooed, actually Satan-worshipping, in some cases, Mexican gangsters, President Trump makes a big point in that first speech to talk about God.
Just a few months ago in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin's bullet ripped through my ear.
But I felt then and believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason.
I was saved by God to make America great again.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
It's a clear statement.
And it's one that Trump gave with, I think, sincerity, but with a clear amount of humility.
This is where moving inside for the weather or maybe because there was a security threat, the latter I think is more likely.
This is where this I think helped Trump.
Because he could speak real close up to a relatively small number of people who And speak, I think, quite clearly from the heart.
Either the guy's a better actor than Brando or he's speaking from the heart.
I think if you have a bullet go through your ear and only miss the back of your skull because of an inexplicable last second jerk of the head.
Inexplicable by natural means, jerk of the head.
I think you're going to get religion and I think that's going to humble you a little bit.
And he says, I was saved by God.
None but the most hardened atheist.
Could look at what happened in Pennsylvania, look at Trump's survival, and not say that it was God.
It was providential.
It's a priest friend of mine, Father Ruttler says.
It's a wicked generation that seeks a sign and wonder, and it's a stupid generation that ignores signs and wonders.
He says, I was saved by God for a purpose, to make America great again.
He wasn't saved by God just so that he can go play more golf, I don't think.
I don't think that would make sense.
He says, he certainly doesn't think that.
He says, I was saved for a purpose.
And that purpose is to make America great again.
Beautiful first speech.
Then he goes downstairs in the Capitol, and he gives an impromptu second speech.
Off the cuff.
And in this speech, he says off the top, he says, hey, alright, I want to talk about a few things.
When I wrote my speech for up there, I had a great speech.
And Melania and JD told me that I couldn't give this speech.
They said, it's such a great speech, but you got all this mean stuff in there, and you're settling scores, and you're going after people, and you're being, and, you know, listen, Don, just come on, take that stuff out, please, sir.
And he says, okay, for the one upstairs, the formal official one, I'll keep it basically high-minded.
Trump settled his scores in the second one.
This speech was great.
And he's telling you this in the second speech.
He's saying, so this is what I did.
And they told me I shouldn't talk about this.
Okay, I won't talk about this.
But it was like, I was saying this to Jeremy.
He and I were talking about it on the show yesterday.
It felt like a post-game interview.
You know, you get the Yankees manager comes up to the cameras after.
He goes, yeah, look, this was all right.
This we should have done differently here.
Back up, actually, in the fourth inning.
I was thinking about doing this, but I ended up doing that.
That's what you get from Trump.
And so the second speech had this air to it that was a little bit more, I don't know, casual.
But it was, to give you one little taste of it, here is Trump discussing, even deciding to give the second speech as he's walking with Melania.
And then we went out to the helicopter just prior to this and said goodbye.
And it's a custom.
And the wind is blowing like crazy.
And with the hat that she's wearing, she almost blew away.
We almost lost off her.
She was being elevated off the ground.
She almost blew away.
No.
So we all appreciate it.
Because you've been a great First Lady.
A beautiful and a great First Lady.
And they love our First Lady.
You know, J.D., whenever I make a speech, I see hundreds of times, we love our first lady.
And they do.
And they should.
She's great.
So he has his experience.
He's walking out.
He sees Biden off.
I was sitting there.
I saw Marine One flew right by us.
I waved goodbye to Joe Biden.
See you later.
I was considering a one-finger salute, but I said that wouldn't be dignified.
So I did a five-finger salute.
But then he says, I'm going to go in and I'm going to give this speech anyway.
And some people will say.
I know people are saying this, that it was a mistake for Trump to give the second speech.
The first was so successful.
It was brief.
It was beautifully written.
He shouldn't have given the second speech.
What that criticism misunderstands is that this is what sets Trump apart.
Joe Biden doesn't give off the cuff speeches.
Obviously, he could not do that now.
He probably couldn't read a written speech.
Kamala Harris certainly can't do that.
Bill Clinton can do that, but he won't.
Bill Clinton is a pretty scripted guy.
Barack Obama, very scripted guy.
Trump, he does the thing, and then he does commentary on the thing.
This is why Trump is not only a political figure, he's a meta-political figure.
This was true in the first administration, too.
He does politics about politics.
And the first administration says, look, I get up here, they tell me I'm not very presidential.
They tell me, this is what they say, I gotta do, I gotta say this, I gotta comb my hair this way, I gotta do, but I don't wanna do it like that.
He's breaking the fourth wall.
I don't know what other theatrical metaphors one can use.
But he's a showman.
This is a guy who's been in movies.
He's been in hit TV shows for years and years.
He's a real showman.
He is doing a kind of politics.
That is, in another dimension.
He's doing the actual politics, these issues, for these reasons, with this history.
But then he's also doing a politics about the politics, which is why President Trump has this effect on our polity, which is that he's the guy who points out that the emperor has no clothes.
And that gives him a great deal of freedom.
Freedom to radically change the Republican Party.
Or rather, I think, to say...
To restore the greatness of the Republican Party.
Because he's not within that system, the guy can be elected to a second term, a non-consecutive second term.
He's now dominated GOP politics for a decade, and yet he's still kind of like an outsider.
That's what you got in the second speech.
That's the magic of the second speech.
That's part of the magic of Trump.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Rigged Up Gaming.
Says, Love the glasses, Mr. Knowles.
Thank you.
Here you were not talking about my Rachel Maddow lesbian glasses.
I think you were talking about my sunglasses.
I was wearing shades on the show yesterday.
We were sitting outside.
And the future is so bright that one must wear shades.
The liberal media, you will be unsurprised to hear, did not like Trump's speech.
Either of them.
Even the first one, which was extremely presidential and really quite beautiful.
They hated it.
New York Times was talking about how dark and divisive and how he presented a grim view of America.
No, he presented a very bright view of America.
Starting today.
Sorry, starting yesterday.
America has gone through very dark moments, but it's looking bright.
It was a bright, sunshiny day yesterday.
Meanwhile, Biden was absolutely bitter.
This is according to CNN. You don't have to take my word for it.
CNN spelled it out on Inauguration Day.
The final hours of his presidency were spent, reportedly, in a dark mood.
All of our reporting, talking to sources in recent days and weeks, really suggests that the president is in a bit of a dark space when it comes to just his headspace in these very final days.
We are told that he never really stopped feeling angry about the fact that he believes he was forced out, this pressure campaign to drop out of the 2024 race.
And then, especially since Election Day, when his vice president, Kamala Harris, was defeated.
He has grown increasingly embittered, we are told by sources, at the blame that he has gotten for Donald Trump's eventual return to the White House.
And one thing, importantly, that President Biden has been absolutely consistent about is this belief that he believes that had he stayed in the race, he would have defeated Donald Trump again.
Now, all of this adds up to, I would say, a mood of sadness and sort of this sense of tragedy here at the White House, those around him believing and actually hoping that when history judges President Biden years from now, that it will be a little bit more forgiving than how the president is that it will be a little bit more forgiving than how the president is being widely Jake.
History will not be more forgiving to Biden.
I'm willing to go with Biden a little bit here and say at the very least, I think he would have done better than Kamala, even after the disastrous first debate.
Because he might have done better in the second debate.
They might have shot him up with more adrenaline.
Presidents have won elections after bad debates, even though the Biden debate was particularly bad because he could barely speak.
But I think he would have done better than Kamala.
Here's my proof.
Joe Biden has consistently been a much more popular politician than Kamala.
Kamala could barely win a race in California.
Kamala never won a single vote in a presidential primary while she was running.
There's no evidence that Kamala can win any national election.
There's zero evidence for that.
There is a lot of evidence that Joe Biden's very popular.
He got elected to the US Senate before he was constitutionally eligible to run.
Okay, say what you will about Biden.
I think he's awful.
But he's been popular over the years.
He's certainly more popular than she is.
Even a drooling Joe Biden is more popular than, and also frequently drooling Kamala Harris, though she does not have the excuse of dementia.
Allegedly.
History will not judge Biden well.
Not because he didn't run or he tried to run and he got booted out or this, that or the other thing.
History will not judge Biden well because he's never accomplished anything.
He's never accomplished anything.
The one thing you could say Joe Biden accomplished would be when he was in the Senate, he spearheaded an important crime bill.
And that was the one thing that he ran away from because he was trying to suck up for the black vote.
And he mistakenly believed.
That turning on his one accomplishment, which is to actually put criminals in prison, that that would help him.
It didn't work.
That's it.
What else has he done?
Not only does he leave the White House and leave his entire political career without any notable accomplishment whatsoever over half a century in politics, but he leaves looking corrupt.
He leaves looking undignified.
He leaves looking petty and out for personal gain.
Joe Biden is a relatively wealthy guy.
He's a wealthy guy for having been a government employee his whole life.
And we have some speculation as to how he got that rich.
Because we know that his kid was peddling influence all around the world.
We know that Joe Biden was involved in Hunter Biden's business.
We know he was on a lot of phone calls with Hunter Biden's business pals who were shaking down foreign countries, peddling Joe's influence, getting money.
And we know from the Hunter Biden laptop.
That Hunter Biden at least said that he was kicking up 10% or even half of it to the big guy, Joe Biden.
So Biden is leaving not merely as a nothing.
He's leaving as looking like a dirty, sleazy politician.
I think that's why he's in a dark mood.
I think he's in a dark mood not because of the...
2024 election and how he really thought he could win.
And he said publicly that he had a sense that maybe he couldn't totally finish out a second term.
He's even admitting that now.
I think it's the reality of his career, which was pointless.
It was worse than pointless.
It was disreputable.
I think that's what's hitting him.
I think it's the telltale heart.
He's hearing it beat a little bit.
He's considering his own missed opportunities and his own sins, basically.
And by the way, here's my proof of this.
His last action as president was to pardon his whole family.
He pardoned the whole family.
We know that Joe Biden gave Hunter a 10-year pardon, blanket pardon, for any crimes that he did or might have committed.
Any crimes of which he was accused, and crimes that he wasn't even yet accused of.
And he just did the same thing for his brother James, for his sister-in-law Sarah Jones Biden.
For his sister, Valerie Biden Owens, for his brother-in-law, John T. Owens, and for his younger brother, Francis.
Pardons to cover any nonviolent offense from, and this is where it looks so dirty, from January 1st, 2014, until the day before Trump's inauguration.
Why did he have to do this?
The Trump team, the conservatives will say he didn't really have to do this.
Trump was not going to go after the Biden family.
There's no indication Trump was going to go after them.
Now, Joe might have thought that he had to do this because they were maybe guilty of crimes.
Maybe because, yeah, they did run a little family business called selling American influence to the highest bidder.
Yeah, maybe they did enrich themselves.
Yeah, maybe if they were investigated, there would be a lot of dirt to dig up.
The guilty flee when none pursueth.
That's it.
And I don't think Trump's talked about pursuing it.
I don't think he would have.
He was corrupt.
Joe Biden was a corrupt guy.
And he might not have even started out that way.
I don't know that he was corrupt in 1971. But at the very least, he became corrupt over time.
And that's how he ends.
That's the end of the Biden story.
A corrupt politician worked in government his whole life.
And he made some money, and he seems to have pretty miserable circumstances around him.
It reminds me, I talked about Chester Arthur at the top of the show.
We've been talking about a lot of 19th century American politics.
Chester Arthur wrote advice to his son after leaving the White House.
He said, don't pursue a political career.
It's not worth it.
And Chester Arthur had spent a lot of his career as a corrupt politician, though he reformed at the end of his career.
But he said, the sacrifices are not worth it.
It's really hard.
It's really, really hard, especially if you want to do it in a dignified way.
It's very, very difficult.
So Biden ends.
He accomplished nothing.
I guess he made a little bit of money.
And now that chapter's over.
And we have a new chapter from Trump.
And this feels bigger than just four years ending.
This feels bigger than a presidential term ending.
This feels like a massive shift in politics in the way America understands herself.
America has meant different things to Americans over time.
We like to think that America is just frozen in ember.
America is an idea and it just means liberty and low taxes or something.
That's not always been true.
And it feels like we're moving into some new self-conception of America.
And maybe, if Trump is right, that's going to be a golden age.
It was such a good day for Trump yesterday, I haven't even gotten into how he became a crypto-billionaire.
And how now something like 85% of his net worth, 89% of his net worth, sorry, is in crypto.
I guess I'm going to have to get to that tomorrow.
There's no member block today because I'm in D.C. and I have to come home.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you all tomorrow.
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