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Nov. 10, 2022 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:34:10
20221110_trumps-next-move-desantis-future-and-pences-op-ed-
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Senate Ticket Selection Problems 00:14:08
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
Well, it's Thursday now, and we still don't know who will control the Senate or the House, and you should get used to that feeling.
In the Senate, we are waiting for results in two races.
We know that George is going for a runoff.
In Arizona, Blake Masters is down 95,000 votes to Mark Kelly, but there is still, still, somehow, 30% of the vote to be counted.
Meanwhile, Carrie Lake remains 12,000 votes back in the governor's race, same number as we were giving you yesterday.
Outstanding votes there are expected in the state of Arizona to favor the GOP.
We explained yesterday, these are mailed-in votes that actually are physically dropped off by voters on the day of the election, which they say tends to trend Republican, but it's all tarot card reading.
Then there's Nevada with Adam Laxalt ahead by 15,000 votes with 83% of the vote in.
Well, Republicans might be feeling good about that.
15,000 votes ahead, 83% of the vote in.
It's pretty high percentage.
He actually said this morning we expect the remaining male universe to fall well below the percentage she, his opponent, Catherine Cortez-Masto, needs to catch us.
Or actually, that's she's over it.
But in any event, meaning he expects to win.
He expects to win.
But the remaining vote is actually said to favor the Dems.
So he may be wrong.
And Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report says, based on the male ballot trend, there's actually, quote, an excellent chance Laxalt's Democratic opponent will be victorious.
If that happens and the GOP loses both of these states, who cares about Georgia?
It's done.
Dems control the Senate.
Georgia's mildly interesting, and that's it.
In the House, the GOP is still expected to win, but it's not over.
It's not over.
Incumbent MAGA candidate Lauren Boebert in Colorado could be the deciding seat.
She's behind by 64 votes as of this moment.
My God, you ever have that moment where you just don't vote?
Because you're like, who cares?
My vote doesn't matter.
Think about the people in her district right now on both sides of the aisle.
Your vote mattered.
It mattered a lot.
President Biden held a press conference late yesterday, and the GOP, well, late for him, 4 p.m.
And the GOP media is turning on Trump by the droves, but it's, for the most part, people who didn't like him to begin with.
So there's a lot to get to.
Joining me now to cover it all: our friends from the fifth column podcast: Michael Moynihan, a correspondent for Vice News Tonight, Matt Welsh, editor-at-large for Reason Magazine, and Camille Foster of Free Think Media.
Guys, welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Howdy.
Amazing.
Never been better.
It's fantastic.
Oh, wow.
Wow.
So, so excited.
Wait, I'm so excited.
Is that facetious or is that real?
I think it's slightly facetious having been following people on the campaign and watching the unbelievable skill with which the people of Arizona can count ballots.
Yeah, it's all slightly depressing and distressing.
Was it one of you?
Somebody tweeted out this morning: are they counting votes out there with an abacus?
I mean, let's not sleep on California.
Last time I looked an hour or so ago, California has already counted 45% of their ballots.
And that's where the House races might come down to because there's like a half a dozen contested seats out there.
So high-five California.
And I love the people who say, look, they're just taking the time that it takes to get it right.
You know, it's really bad of you to try to question any of that.
It would have been great.
And Camille says this all the time, and he's right.
It would have been great if in the last two years, instead of just shrieking all the time about how fascism is going to take over the country and our democracy is doomed, you might have worked on making elections run a little smoother.
I'm just like spitballing here.
Just do it.
However, Florida does it.
Just look at the Florida model.
It's not going to make you into a red state.
It's going to make you in an efficient vote counting state.
Just do it the way they do it so we can have results on election day.
Is it so hard?
Well, the way they do it is they have a governor who wins in 2018 by half a point and then wins by 20 points.
So the counting is a little easier because they're just like at halfway through.
They're like, he's just winning.
Let's just give it a because it was such, I mean, the red wave that didn't crest across the country certainly did in Florida, which where I've been for the past five days following the DeSantis campaign around.
And the enthusiasm was really amazing.
And then, you know, during all of this, on election day, we broke away and went to lovely Palm Beach to watch the president vote.
And it was a pretty kind of small crowd.
There were maybe like a handful of people there to see him vote, you know, real diehard Trump people.
But that was a pretty interesting contrast to the DeSantis events that I went to, which were shockingly raucous and people were really, really excited.
I mean, I've been to a million campaign events in my life.
This was probably the most engaged I'd seen people.
Are you saying that Trump was low energy?
He was low energy dump.
That's his new, yeah.
I mean, I guess it was because the nickname that run to sanctimonious didn't really stick.
But I was in Mr. Trump's defense.
And I was like, but who gets excited about following the former president to cast his vote?
I mean, DeSantis was on the ticket.
But this does get to, you know, the biggest issue of the day.
I want to do Santis, DeSantis, and Trump in a second, actually, before we get to that.
Can you believe the House is still in question?
I listened to the New York Times podcast, The Daily this morning, and they were laying out exactly, you know, the question.
It is not certain.
I listened to Steve Cornacki.
You know, I try to take in the news from both sides on MSNBC laying out the districts in California, in Nevada, and elsewhere that could definitely still go blue.
And it's, this is, they have a road.
It's a slim road.
The GOP has more roads, but the Dems have a road.
I mean, it's, it's crazy.
70% of the country is unhappy with the direction of the country, and yet everything could wind up being the same.
The Dems could be in control of both houses.
Like it's, it's, there's, there's no way that you can screw up this election this bad, and yet the Republican Party managed to find a way.
It's, it is really remarkable.
You can't, there's, there's no precedent for this.
The closest that we get is 1998, which wasn't a first midterm.
And then there was an impeachment.
There'd been a sex scandal.
People were kind of tired of that noise.
There's just no precedent for what we've seen.
All the conditions in favor.
And Bill Clinton's popularity, I think, was over 60%, weirdly after Lewinsky scandal.
So yeah, it was a different, different set of circumstances.
I mean, Mark Thiessen, you guys probably know him.
He's over at Fox News.
I would like to take a moment to give myself credit for Mark Thiessen.
I am the person who made him a star.
He came on the Kelly file.
Actually, it was my daytime show.
And he was a little nerdy guy with his little clipper clipboard.
And Roger was like, why am I just going to sit there?
I'm like, give him time.
He's brilliant.
Just needs to get better at TV.
I'm sorry.
I just had to have a moment because I did see his greatness early on.
But that's just a random, I thought that was going to be just randomly giving yourself credit for Mark Thiet.
That's it.
Just complimenting myself.
Okay.
I just wanted to make sure.
Yeah.
I'm like, he's really nerdy.
He's a very smart, nerdy guy.
No, I want you to make sure that you understand how brilliant I was in seeing him.
Here's Mark Thiessen on Fox News the other night.
I don't have the sound bite cut, but he says this night was an absolute disaster for Republicans.
Quote: We have the worst inflation in four decades, the worst collapse in real wages in 40 years, the worst crime wave since the 1990s, the worst border crisis in U.S. history.
We have Joe Biden, who is the least popular president since Harry Truman, since presidential polling happened, and there wasn't a red wave.
That is a searing indictment of the Republican Party.
That is a searing indictment of the message that we have been sending to the voters.
They looked at all of that and looked at the Republican alternative and said, no thanks.
I mean, it's pretty, pretty powerful, Kamir.
Camille, he's nailed it.
Well, he's not wrong.
And I'm also thinking a lot about the fact that these are just very close races, really, really close.
And the outcome is going to be that one side wins and the other side loses.
And you're going to either get a sort of, you're going to get dramatically different government in those two circumstances, which makes one wonder if we shouldn't be looking at other approaches to how we conduct these elections.
I mean, should we do ranked choice voting?
Do we need more people running in these races so that we can get, say, more moderate candidates, perhaps?
If we know that the razor-thin margins by which these elections are being decided are the difference between you getting, you know, a government that you completely and utterly hate and have contempt for, and one that your next door neighbor would completely or utterly hate and have contempt for.
It seems like there is a lot of complicated conversations that we ought to be having about our democratic processes.
It's been interesting to me to listen to the dissection.
And what I'm gathering is, you know, I take in my news from a wide variety of sources because I just am determined to not let anybody control my brain or my thinking.
You know, I don't want to be turned into a hardcore MAGA supporter.
I don't want to be turned into a member of the squad.
I don't want to be turned into somebody who could work for the New York Times.
And I don't want to be turned into somebody who could appear regularly on Steve Bannon's war room.
Okay.
So you have to fight against that.
Everyone's trying to manipulate you into their corners.
And as a news person, it's really important not to allow that to happen.
So I'm taking in my news from all of them now to see what's the spin.
And I realize that the big narrative in the GOP circles right now is Trump is toxic.
Look at the post today, the New York Post.
Okay.
This is the New York Post, Trumpty Dumpty.
And the headline is, Don, who couldn't build a wall, had a great fall.
Can all the GOP's men put the party back together again?
So the Post is definitely turning on Trump.
I get it.
The article's written by John Pedoritz, who I love, and I listen to commentary all the time.
But he's always been a never-Trumper.
He hates Trump.
So it's like he feels validated in his pre-election Trump hate.
And a lot of the people blaming this on Trump fall into that same general field.
They hated him before.
They hate him now.
They feel that like you look for the thing that's going to make you have been right all along.
Well, I would like to figure out what it actually is.
And my take so far, and I haven't totally digested it, is it's a little bit of a lot of things.
Trump's bad candidate selection and push.
Yes, I think that was a factor in some of these races, in particular at the House level.
You had some guys like out there talking about how like the Democrats were like Satan worshipers, like drinking the blood of children.
Like that shit actually happened and those candidates got on the ballot.
Okay, I could see that being a candidate selection problem.
But I look over at the Democratic side and they elected Federman.
You know, they didn't have any problem with him.
There are a couple other races where the Dems got in where you're like, I mean, look at Joe Biden.
Joe Biden got elected.
He can't even put two sentences together himself.
So it's like, I'm not sure how important Democrat or candidate selection is on either side.
I don't totally get it.
Now I hear people who have been very anti-election denialism saying it was all about that.
All candidates who denied the election was legit.
Those are the ones who got bounced.
Maybe.
I don't know.
Carrie Lake was like a rising star.
Everybody was gravitating toward her.
She outdid the Blake Masters candidate who was less of an election denier than she was in Arizona.
Why is that?
Like you can't find a consistent theme in each of these races.
Some people were upset about abortion.
Some people were upset about the January 6th election denialism.
Some of the candidates sucked who had been handpicked by Trump in favor of more mainstream Republicans who probably could have gotten in states like Pennsylvania and Georgia.
I get that.
But I'm just not seeing the clear explanation.
And I wonder whether you guys are.
I think there's more of a candidate selection problem maybe than you do, especially in Michigan and Pennsylvania, right?
These are swing states by every definition, and yet both of them just experienced a blue wave.
I think it's because the top of the tickets, especially Tudor Dixon, Mehmed Oz, and or Doug Mastriano, actually, were so vociferously MAGA, so much about it's not just that they checked the little box saying, yeah, I'm a little bit suspicious of the 2020 election.
They were loud and proud about it.
And so when you have people at the top of the ticket who are really bad in swing states, suddenly you have Democrats saying, wow, blue wave in Michigan, you know, Gretchen Whitmer should be on the ticket in 2024.
No, she was a really bad COVID lockdowner.
She should have lost with a credible opposition.
I think she would have lost.
Lee Zeldon, I think, might have won actually in New York, and he already did better than anyone's done since George Pataki.
I think he might have had a puncher's chance if he had not voted against certifying the election in 2020.
Other people may disagree, but he ran on crime and he ran on COVID and a bunch of other things besides.
And Hochwell is very annoying.
I think candidate quality mattered in those cases.
The fact that Zeldon ran a really good campaign is going to might be end up being the decisive tip in the House races because we've flipped a lot of cases here.
So in that sense, I think it does matter.
But the caveat is let's not forget that Pennsylvania elected a dead man.
Yeah.
They did.
In their defense, he only recently died.
He only recently died.
New Hampshire Election Stolen Claims 00:15:49
I would say, Megan, on the New York Post thing, it's actually interesting.
And you're right.
It is John Putthurts from Commentary, who has been firmly in the anti-Trump camp since 2015.
But that's an editorial page piece.
For sure, the merchants are turning.
And that's the second in a row.
I mean, the first, yesterday, two days ago, it was DeSantis cover that it said the future with a picture of him.
And obviously people have been peeling off from Fox News and going to Newsmax and OAN and all these other places because Fox has kind of backed away from Trump.
I mean, that is a kind of institutional decision.
Rupert Murdoch, obviously, is an Australian in places where newspapers used to in England too, make decisions about candidates in a very specific way.
We're no longer supporting this guy.
But I mean, one of the things that, you know, I think Matt's right about all this stuff and particularly interesting in New York and, you know, all this the kind of minor red wave and places like upstate New York.
And, you know, Cuomo won by, what, 20 odd points when he won the governor's day.
I mean, Kathy Hochul won by four or five, right?
I mean, it's terrible.
It's really critic on this.
It's really impressive in a way.
And I think the January 6th up did hurt Zeldon.
But one of the things that I think is really interesting, because you say, and you're right to say that there's no one thing, there's no silver bullet.
It's a grab bag of a bunch of different issues.
But, and I know they're going to talk about this in a bit.
And, you know, it's obviously in the top of my mind because I've been in Florida.
You know, the thing about DeSantis is he ran a very, very disciplined campaign about issues.
So I don't know what Dr. quote unquote Oz believes.
I know what Herschel Walker believes.
I know that they mouth the sort of MAGA platitudes, but you have a guy like DeSantis getting up on stage every single night doing 30 minutes on COVID, 10, 15 minutes on the response to the hurricane, like what he did in Florida, what made Florida a quote unquote free state that nobody else is doing.
Whether or not you agree with that is irrelevant.
It's that he ran a very disciplined campaign about ideas.
And everybody I talked to was like, he was amazing on this issue.
We moved to Florida because he was great on COVID.
This is a man that has actually done something and says, I want to do this on a bigger level.
And that's why people put him on the front of the New York Post and want him to take over because it's no longer sniping and like, you know, crappy nicknames and stuff like that.
It's somebody who's smart and focused and has a kind of flavor of MA to him.
So I think that that's why Florida's been so impressive and Trump less so.
Is there a refinement there, Michael, with respect to DeSantis and whether or not he was running on ideas or if it's the practical implications of his policies during COVID?
And I think that is actually the thing.
When I look across the country at all these different races, like, what are the salient policy proposals that are deciding these elections?
And in a lot of instances, I can't find them.
You'll hear a lot about abortion because it is a salient policy issue and people want some specific outcome.
But beyond that, these are elections that seem to be about contempt.
Who I have the most contempt for at the moment, who's failed me the most profoundly.
And in rare cases, you have someone like someplace like Florida, where the governor of Florida made very good decisions throughout COVID, the COVID situation.
It's interesting to imagine what this race would have looked like had COVID never happened, if he wouldn't have had a much closer race in that case.
But, you know, that is a defining characteristic of that race.
And in many of these other cases, all you know is you're choosing between two candidates you hate or a candidate who you absolutely hate and a candidate who doesn't seem to have the mental faculties to actually be able to do the job.
We'll get to the, we'll do more Florida into Santa in one second, but I just want to stay on the Trump situation because I want to be honest about it.
I actually want to take a hard look at this.
I feel like one of my advantages as a journalist is, and I've said this before, I'm not under his spell, but I don't have Trump derangement syndrome either.
So I feel like I can see this guy clearly.
And I am very open-minded to Trump forced out the right candidates and blessed the wrong candidates because they bent the knee to him.
And I can see that that did happen in some circumstances.
You know, it seems like we would have had a different candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania if he didn't think that Trump was going to be such a nightmare, that that would have happened in Georgia, that that would have happened in Arizona, where the governor there was term limited and would have run for the Senate seat, but just didn't want to deal with Trump, attacking him at every turn, right?
Because Arizona, these are all states that became relevant in the 2020 story Trump was telling.
And he decided that they were turncoats if they didn't take on the election was stolen story.
So he definitely had a massive role in forcing, I don't know if you want to call them mainstream, but just sort of more not hardcore MAGA candidates off the national scene and out of these races.
And then there were primaries that were ugly, and you really had to bend the knee to Trump to get the nod in some of these.
And so maybe even once that, you know, best-suited candidate was removed, the best candidate didn't win, right?
It had to be the guy on his knees saying 2020 was stolen.
That's not great.
That's not great.
And I really think like the Republicans, I mean, I have been somebody all along who has said the 2020 election was not stolen.
And I get a lot of feedback from some of my audience members saying, you're an idiot.
Pay attention.
Take a closer look.
Well, I have.
I have looked at all of it.
I'm not persuaded.
And I think the election does show most people are not persuaded or at least want to move on from this other than Trump, other than Trump, who like that was the litmus test for him.
You saw the tweet he sent out just the other night about the guy in New Hampshire, right?
Who's like, he backed me, Boldick, he backed me and he said that the election was stolen.
And it wasn't until he switched on that that he started to fall.
You know, he went down because he switched and stopped denying that the election was stolen.
I mean, so I don't know.
I mean, John Boldick shows the problem with a king maker like Donald Trump.
I mean, you have a guy like that running in New Hampshire.
That should have been a pretty reasonably easy get for Republicans.
And you have a guy who's talking about 2020 in the election and is also a little bit unhinged.
I mean, obviously New Hampshire has been live free or die and has a sort of libertarian ethos.
But, you know, I'm from Massachusetts.
It's been people moving for, you know, to not pay property taxes and things for state tax in moving to New Hampshire.
So it's a different kind of electorate.
Now it's very purple in its way.
And it's just the wrong candidates.
You have one person anointing people.
You're not looking specifically at what Republican candidates work in certain places.
I mean, Mehmed August like, you know, a carpetbagger who, you know, I didn't, I can't even imagine what it is about him that is Republican in any sense.
I mean, not even MAGA, just Republican in any real sense.
So, you know, it's been strange.
I mean, Pat Toomey should have been running again.
I mean, this is a thing.
Also, by the way, let's also say in Pennsylvania, Democrats who just piss on Republicans all the time, Connor Lamb would have been the much better candidate there.
I mean, he's an interesting guy.
He's a centrist guy.
He's a smart guy.
And they go with John Fetterman.
And this is, you know, pre-stroke.
But even after, I mean, how the Republicans, let's just stop for a second.
I'm going to break my train of thought there.
They lost to John Fetterman.
They did.
No offense to John Fetterman.
I feel bad for the guy and everything, but they lost to John Fetterman.
I mean, this is astonishing.
Blame whoever you want, but you have a TV doctor.
And the thing is, this is the thing about Trump.
You know, you said, you're right, Megan.
He's going backwards.
And, you know, we can't have a future unless we look backwards about 2020.
This is a man who won the election in 2016 and questioned the numbers.
This is a man on, you know, his inauguration day questioned the numbers.
In 2020, he's always looking for more in this sense, and he just can't let this go.
And it's like, we don't need somebody like that who is obsessed with the past.
It's not even about MAGA policies because you have people that can pull this off, that can do versions of MAGA and realize that the Republican Party is a more populist place now.
It's less, you know, unfortunately of a free trade, free marketplace.
But, you know, that's kind of the vibe in Republican politics now.
You can do that without grievance politics.
And that's what the Republican Party has to learn.
And, you know, I think the lesson of this election is not MAGA in general.
It's the grievance stuff about elections.
It's the grievance stuff about a whole bunch of other things.
You know, talking about the media endlessly gets boring to people because I've talked to people about this and they're like, enough.
We like him, but enough.
And that happens a lot.
This honestly comes up a lot.
It's like, we'd like him better if he wasn't so rough around the edges.
It gets a little tedious and tiresome though.
I mean, speaking of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu had a good quote yesterday, I think, on Fox saying voters, and he sailed to victory.
Voters, they want us to fix policies, but first they want us to fix the crazy.
And that is kind of what's happened.
It's worth looking and highlighting the independent vote, which John Puthorts does in the New York Post story.
Independents always swing against the party of the incumbent president in the first midterm.
There's no exception to that rule.
2002 after 9-11 would be the only other one that I could think of.
In this case, independents by one or two percentage points favor Democrats.
I wouldn't even say actually favorite Democrats.
They chose to vote for the Democrat because they saw crazy.
And if you look at all of those individual races, Herschel Walker, Mastriano, some of the more out there people, Independence swung against them by 20 percentage points, not one or two.
One race that I would highlight, Megan, talking about, you know, you're contrasting with Arizona.
Joe Lombardo has a decent to an excellent chance of winning the governorship in Nevada to flipping it from an incumbent Democrat, Steve Sisilak.
Even if Cortez Masto ends up winning the Senate, he has a good chance of being the governor.
Why?
Well, in his primary, which was a jungle primary, they had a super Trumpy person who then, like after he lost, denied that he lost all kinds of lawsuits.
He was as trumpy as could get.
Lombardo, who's the sheriff of Clark County and, you know, likes Trump and got his endorsement, but didn't run on that and didn't run on stopping the steal and all that kind of stuff.
He ran on COVID because Steve Sisilak was a big lockdown guy in a state that absolutely positively needs tourism dollars.
They're all looking at the beaches in Florida being open and the strip was closed.
He ran on this.
He's probably going to win on this.
And he won by not being as full of a 2020 election focused person as he could have been.
That is the path.
It doesn't mean that you have to be John Pod Horitz or Jonah Goldberg or other people, all of whom are lovely and friends of ours, but who staked out a very strong anti-Trump, as did Rupert Murdoch back in 2015.
Let's not forget the state.
No, there's a way to do this and to be respectful, but also be talking about policies that actually affect human beings.
And people are really mad about the policies that Democrats have been doing.
So there's a great opportunity here.
And again, Republicans just blew it.
All right.
I have a couple of points to make.
I don't think there's any way the New York Post would be running headlines like this if it hadn't been blessed by Team Murdoch.
There had been some sort of, you know, it can be, trust me, I've worked at the organization.
It could be something as simple as like, Rupert really likes DeSantis.
You know, just it could be a passing comment like that.
People think that that was said to me before I had my contentious, you know, moment with Trump at that dispute at that debate.
It's not true.
No one had ever said.
I had no idea where the Murdochs stood.
It was just a debate where I wanted to give everybody a tough question.
But to me, it seems clear they've moved over to Team DeSantis.
If you watch Fox, if you see the New York Post, one point from Pedoritz's piece in the New York Post on the independents, you raise a good point.
It's pretty shocking.
He writes, in the past four midterms, independents chose the party out of power by double digit margins, all right?
By double digit margin.
Independents like divided government.
I'm an independent.
I like divided government.
In 2018, independents went 12 points dem.
Trump was president.
In 2006, they went 18 points dem.
There was a Republican president.
In 2010 and 2014, when Obama was president, Independents went Republican 16 and 12 points, respectively.
This week, they went 49 to 48 dem, completely reversing the historical trend.
They didn't even go for the party out of power.
They went for the party in power by one point.
I mean, extraordinary.
So they clearly, and one of the things that's really irritating me is none of this was reflected in the majority of polls we were watching.
When you looked at the independents and how they were polling, they were definitely leaning right.
We'll get to the polls in a second too.
That's also on our agenda.
But before I do that, let me give you one other thing because Trump has just commented yet again.
He's truth socially.
He's truthing.
This is like the Inflation Reduction Act.
This is like the Inflation Reduction Act.
I do not think the name reflects what is actually happening.
Okay.
He sends out just now, Clark County, Nevada has a corrupt voting system.
Be careful, Adam, as do many places in our soon-to-be third world country.
Arizona even said, quote, by the end of the week, end quote, they want more time to cheat.
Kerry Lake must win.
Now, we've all been complaining about the time, but here he is once again.
It's corrupt.
It's a third world country.
Kerry Lake must win.
You know, it's kind of like an or else.
It's, you can't move the immovable guy.
No, and it's the language of a third world country too, actually, to talk about elections and talk about, you know, how disastrous everything is.
I mean, I have been very, very vocal and denouncing people on the left who say that we're in the midst of a fascist takeover and a fascist moment and a Weimar moment, that democracy is dying and it dies in darkness and is probably going to die on Tuesday, or there is going to be violence.
I mean, this is both ways.
And I mean, of course, that I think it's been a lot worse on the left recently, but you have these things.
And like, if you see those numbers that John Potter has puts out there, and that doesn't cause a little bit, just a little bit of introspection.
And I'm going to steal from something from Matt Welch, but I'm giving him credit right now.
He said, you said something this morning, but it reminded me is that people coming out now, rather than being introspective, because the MAGA movement isn't a very introspective movement, right?
I mean, that's probably not very surprising, but there's something Marxist about it when it says, when there's people coming out and say, you know, well, no, no, no, it's actually true MAGA has never really been tried.
I mean, that's what happened after this after the fall of the government.
Well, actually, that wasn't real communism.
And it's like, instead of doing that, the raw numbers, it doesn't mean, again, and I want to stress this, that it doesn't mean that the party doesn't have to back away from things that people liked.
There was a change that happened in 2016, and it was speaking to, you know, what was called in the New Deal, the forgotten man, that people that came out for Trump in a way that they hadn't come out for Republicans before, because there was a messaging in a way that talked to working class people.
Is the Republican Party going to remake itself as a working class party?
It's trying to do that.
It doesn't have to do it in a MAGA way.
And I think that the problem with Donald Trump and why he's kind of like a millstone around their necks is that it takes the focus away from, I mean, all this, having a conversation on Truth Social, you know, in the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea, the name of Truth Social.
I mean, it doesn't, this is not helpful.
Nobody cares about this stuff.
It is exactly what the blue check mark idiots that live in Brooklyn do.
They're talking to themselves.
Remaking the Republican Party 00:15:04
There is a MAGA bubble happening.
And when you go out and talk to voters, they're like, yeah, yeah, maybe they'll even agree that there was some anomalies or something.
There's some really hardcore people that have seen a D'Souza, you know, 48 million mules movie or whatever it's called.
But it's not many.
It's mostly people that are annoyed that X and Y are happening in their pocketbooks and they can't pay for things.
I mean, like, you know, interest rates.
There are people that I talk to have adjustable rate mortgages and it's up 7.5%, the highest in 91.
I mean, these are real issues.
Nobody gives a shit about what happened in 2020 at this point.
That's grievance politics.
It's in the past.
Look to the future and be solutions oriented.
And if the Republican Party could do that, they could win easy elections if they're losing.
There was that Adrian Vermeel tweet that one of you guys shared in our persistent iMessage thread earlier today.
And before we come on the show, that's fun.
You essentially, you can't expect better from progressives who are in a cult and will vote for failing progressive candidates, even at the expense of like their own lives, which very much sounds to me like what's the matter with Kansas.
It's the same sort of construction.
These people are voting against their own interests.
We're not the problem.
If voters aren't choosing us, it's because of something that's wrong with the voters.
Either it's white supremacy or it's what woke derangement.
And I do think that there is something very, very pernicious that makes you far less introspective when you have this kind of fundamentalist thinking that guides your politics and that informs the way that you organize your party.
And at the moment, I mean, conservatives in particular, I think, are more at risk of this than Democrats.
Democrats, for the most part, have been telling you over and over again, things are not as bad as you suspect.
What inflation?
There's no inflation.
Everything is fine.
And also, democracy is going to end unless you vote for our party.
But Republicans, on the other hand, are just kind of gesturing in the direction of progressives and saying, look at them.
They're making a mess of things.
Aren't they terrible?
Maybe you should vote for us.
And it's just not a very compelling argument.
Well, they wanted to make it a referendum on Joe Biden.
And the conventional wisdom was that that would work.
That was a smart thing to do.
And maybe those progressives are not gettable.
You know, maybe that tweet is correct and they're not gettable.
Their team, you know, Dem, same as a hardcore right, is team Republican.
But the independents are gettable.
The independents, as I just, you know, listed, they're gettable.
And the real question here is, why didn't you get them?
That's what the Republicans need to be figuring out.
Why didn't they come to you?
And there are a lot of possibilities.
Abortion, Trump, candidate selection, which is kind of related, election denialism, all those things are related.
I think a lot of us were like, oh my God, shut up with the January 6th hearings and like the constant focus on like, he's an election denier and he's an election denier.
I would say as somebody who watches Republican politics closely, I just kind of became used to it.
I'm like, they all have to say that because they have to kiss Trump's ring.
That's the price of admission.
We know they don't believe it.
Then once they get, you know, past the primary, they all wind up being like, well, you know, there are questions, right?
And they move past it.
But I think for a lot of voters, they were like, oh, no, we're not doing that.
We're, you know, there will be some accountability for people who refuse to say that Joe Biden won.
And who were those people?
Independents.
That's just one of the many, one of the many.
You know, again, like the guy saying that there's a blood cult in the Hillary, in the following Hillary Clinton.
That's not going to fly with the people who have an eye after their names.
Let me stand you by quick break.
God, we've got a lot to get to.
I'm glad we have you for the full show.
More with the guys from the fifth column right after this.
All right, a word on candidate quality because I'm thinking in my head.
All right, because the Democrats didn't have some stellar roster either, right?
But they managed to win.
Maggie Hassen, in all, in any sane world, she would have gone down.
Katie Hobbs, I mean, right, exactly.
That wooden table in front of you has more of a personality than she has.
Kathy Hochl, my God, horrible with the big eyebrows and the vax necklace.
I mean, what independent wants to vote for her?
And then there's John Fetterman, okay?
John Fetterman, who, as we know, is incomprehensible now.
He's unable to comprehend and he himself is incomprehensible.
And yet, listen to the talk about that guy now.
I give you Katie Terr of MSNBC.
Fetterman, as a nominee at some point for president, I know there's some variables, obviously, just a few.
But I just, you know, what he did in the super red, deep red parts of Pennsylvania and the way that he ran ahead of Biden, as you were saying, ran ahead of Trump.
I mean, it just makes it makes you wonder about his future.
Does it?
This reminds me of a similar approach that they had towards Tim Ryan.
They're showering praise on Tim Ryan's campaign in Ohio, which he lost to JD Vance.
Let's remember.
I think that there is this sort of Admiration that media lefty Democrat elite New York coastal people have once they encounter a semi-blue collar person being successful as a Democrat in the wild.
Wow, he talks like a oh, he talks like a trucker or something.
That's thrilling.
It's kind of, it's kind of, it's kind of gross.
And I like Katie, but clean, articulate, clean and articulate is the phrase that comes.
Well, that's the thing, Camille.
I was going to say this.
Do you want to say it?
And I just want to say, first of all, I really like Katie.
She's a great person.
But that was very Trump who's a great person.
But Camille, you can say it.
This is what Republicans do.
What Matt was saying about working class people, it's what Republicans do with black candidates.
You got to take it from me because I can't talk about this.
You have to.
You said this is what Republicans do with black candidates?
Yes, of course.
Well, not just Republicans.
That was Joe Biden.
Joe Biden.
Oh, he's so clean and articulate.
That was Joe Biden on Barack Obama.
You know, that's amazing, too.
I totally forgot that he had a vice president.
I completely forgot about her.
Wait a minute.
He hasn't been on talking about yellow school buses at all recently.
Camille, it wasn't just Obama that Joe Biden said it about Barack Obama, but did you hear him last week speaking at the gotta get the acronyms right?
The HBCU.
He was speaking to.
He went to.
And he was like, you know, you don't have as big of an endowment as like Harvard, but you're just as smart.
You're just as capable.
Honestly, it was so humiliating.
It's like you could, the unheard statement was, even though you're at an all-black college, even though you're black.
Oh, my God.
That's the thought that always comes to mind.
Here gets away with it.
I think corn pop went there.
Corn pop.
Come on.
Knife in his shoe.
Yes.
No, but the tokenism is real.
And I get the instinct of somebody in a way to be like, oh, finally, we have somebody who's working class or feels like a working class candidate.
Because, you know, the issue with all these people, it's the same thing in media.
Anybody in media, you just look up their LinkedIn.
They all went to Columbia Journalism School.
Everybody did undergraduate at some elite school.
And that is kind of annoying to people.
And you have somebody who even feels a bit authentic.
And I get the idea of like, maybe we can run him because, you know, and the thing we're not supposed to talk about, because we're going to talk about it in a bit in Florida, is that, you know, you do have somebody who went to an Ivy League school, but, you know, seems to connect with working people.
And that's something that Democrats, you know, that's FDR.
That's great society, LBJ.
That's not today.
And they're not doing that.
I get the kind of desire to find someone that's even classic.
Biden isn't supposed to be that, right?
He's supposed to be lunch bucket Joe from Scranton.
He takes the Amtrak.
He's set up, but he takes the Amtrak.
The part of it does seem to be that there's this kind of contempt for people who don't have cosmopolitan sensibilities.
And they seem to be amazed by the fact that you can go to conservative places, to deep red places and talk to people and not insist to their faces that they're racist monsters who are deplorable and are beyond contempt.
If you just don't do that, hey, yeah, you've got a shot at persuading them.
So it doesn't make you a genius.
It makes you a decent human being.
And unfortunately, some of these people have forgotten that that's even a possibility.
Yeah.
I mean, it's crazy because Ron, I mean, John Fetterman is not going to become president of the United States.
Maybe if he runs against Dr. Oz, maybe if he runs against Dr. Oz again.
And that's the thing about Dr. Oz.
Like, Dr. Oz is a nice guy and he's a super smart guy, but he was never a good fit for Pennsylvania.
He was a carpetbagger and they knew it.
They knew it.
You know, Hillary Clinton got away with doing that here in New York, even though she wasn't from New York.
She didn't live in New York.
She claimed she was a New Yorker because this is a blue, blue, blue state that was like, okay, we'll take her.
She's our coin.
And but he, Pennsylvania wasn't like that.
Pennsylvania's got a healthy Democratic population.
And they were like, no, no, no.
And you can't drink wine at a tailgate and you can't not know when the Steelers are playing.
These are like baby blood.
No, I'm just saying that's a rumor.
That's what I heard.
I can't confirm it.
All right, let's talk about DeSantis now because he, you were saying, you know, he has he went to Harvard, Harvard or whatever.
I think, I think he did double Harvard.
In any event, he was in the military too.
And he's from Florida, right?
Like, I think he's born and raised Florida.
So this is not a guy who's like, he's not from, look, forgive me because I'm in Canadian.
I'm from Connecticut.
You're like, my kids will be.
He's not, he doesn't sound like an elitist snob.
He like, yes, he's always in a suit, but he's a little bit like disheveled about him.
I don't know, like an endearing way, in an endearing way.
He doesn't like look like a Mitt Romney who's like perfectly quaffed all the time where you're like, eh, or even Dr. Oz, right?
So you tell me, having spent all this time with him, Moynihan, like what, what's the magic?
Like when you observed him, how do you describe the magic?
Well, the first thing is I think people make a mistake about, you know, I don't, I kind of sometimes do it too, and it's easy to kind of slip into that, is that if you went to Harvard, if you went to Yale, it doesn't make you, I mean, and you actually can use the word in a pejorative way and call people elitists.
I mean, remember, the person who was, you know, a quote unquote traitor to his class was FDR, one of the kind of richest men in the country from a pretty illustrious family and became the kind of avatar of the working class during the Depression in the 30s and the 40s.
So I don't think it's difficult to do that, provided you actually don't act like it and you actually really try to understand and try to focus on the needs of working class people.
But, you know, I think the thing that people misunderstand is that they spend a long time comparing DeSantis to Donald Trump, you know, as just as a stage presence, which is the wrong comparison.
I'll tell you what to do.
You watch him and there's always opening acts, right?
You see him and there's going to be local people.
There's going to be people in the state Senate.
You know, none of them are very good.
I mean, there's some of them are smart people.
Some of them are interesting.
And DeSantis goes up there and just, you know, blows the house down because he just, he gets what, you know, the applause lines, he understands.
Trump would work out an applause line and make it policy.
You know, he would say, build the wall and be like, oh, you know, until we find out what's really happening.
And he was like, oh, that was a good one.
And like literally advisors, people said this in books that like he would then make that policy.
It's much more, you know, applauded with DeSantis, who understands the issues that voters care about.
And you notice at the end of this, by the way, that the cheers you get, which is really something else for COVID stuff, where I mean, you understand at the end of this who won the COVID debate, because who took an opposite position of Florida and Ron DeSantis is running on COVID?
Zero.
You're not going to get a single person.
No Gavin Newsoms of the world at the French laundry, you know, violating their own mandates.
And no one is doing that.
Ron DeSantis is, because he actually has a pretty solid case.
And so when he goes out there, he has a very, very good mix of kind of culture war stuff, but applies it pretty specifically to the state, right?
But forward-looking, we want to stop it here as the kind of to borrow from FDR, you know, this is the kind of laboratory of democracy in Florida and we're going to push this out.
But it's really interesting to see the applause lines that are actually, here are things that I did.
Not, you know, good lines, not funny bits.
He does a little funny bit about Joe Biden and the rest of it.
But the stuff that people go really crazy about is like, yeah, I know you did that.
That's why I live here.
And that's why Florida is a great free state.
So it was really interesting to watch people respond because I'm always watching people respond to like a good speech.
This is someone saying, here are my achievements.
And people are really excited about it.
I think that there's a misperception that, or an underratedness, let's say, of COVID.
If you look at the exit polls that came out, I think today, asking people what's their most important issue or what issue they think is most important in the country, which are two different questions.
And COVID is like 2%.
It's not there.
But Michael Brennan Doherty, I think, makes a pretty good case over National Review that the issues that people do care about a lot right now are like directly downstream from COVID.
Inflation.
You know, we threw a ton of money into the system right then and also before then, to be honest, both Biden and Trump.
But we threw a ton of money, unprecedented amount, and it led directly to inflation, crime, right?
That all like the summer of 2020, it just shot up in a whole bunch of cities directly.
Education, which is animating a lot of people.
So all of those come from there.
DeSantis was not anything like a nationally viable politician four years ago.
No.
Barely beat a guy who was showing up in weird situations in a hotel room.
Literally on drugs by half a percentage point.
The thing that changed was the way that he managed COVID.
And this also helped Brian Kemp in Georgia.
It helped Jared Polis in Colorado in a very strong way.
So I think that that issue has more salience than people are giving credit for.
Yes, abortion was a much bigger issue, I think, than people realized before this election day, but COVID lasts.
And people remember the stuff that people are mad about right now that I'm mad about right now, living in New York and it motivated my vote here is COVID-related policies.
So I think that's a strong base to build.
It's not going to evaporate because people are going to remember and apply it in different ways to their lives, even if they don't name it as their top mind issue right now.
You know, that's interesting.
Because in New York, they kept Hochl, but she wasn't really in charge during COVID for most of it, as we all know.
COVID Policies and Abortion Votes 00:02:14
It was Cuomo.
And she was, you know, she moved up once he got bounced.
And New Yorkers are mad.
New Yorkers did make them pay at the polls this time.
And New Yorkers had the advantage of an overzealous Democrat party that tried to gerrymander the state in a way that was so unfair.
The court struck it down and said a special master, an independent third party, had to redo it.
So that was redone in a fair way.
So Republicans had a fighting chance and they were mad and they got to express it.
And there's a 100% chance it had to do with COVID.
It was mostly Long Island, which tends to be more red than, let's say, New York City.
And she was made to pay.
In Michigan, I think the same thing could have potentially happened, but abortion was a much bigger issue there, much bigger issue there.
It was on the ballot.
It was a very smart move by them to put that prop three on the ballot because in the same way Karl Rove got the gay marriage initiatives on the ballots in 24 to 2004 when George W. Bush was suffering.
He got people to the polls.
He got him to vote Republican.
That's what they did in Michigan with that prop three.
But yeah, I think you're right.
There is the downstream of COVID things did appear in this election cycle, but just in an unexpected way.
Go ahead, Camille.
No, I was just going to say that I heard Ron give a talk, maybe it was like summer of 2001 when or 2021, when things were starting to open up.
And it was interesting, it contrasted with the things you heard him saying, Michael, like most of those talk, most of the talk focused on wokeness and culture war stuff.
At the time, he could talk about COVID and the response to COVID a bit, but it was still somewhat up in the air, whether or not he would be right.
I think the fact that he has so decisively been proven right on that issue has allowed him to put it front and center.
And that is all to his advantage.
But also, Camille, he was probably speaking to your group as a national group as opposed to running for a local state.
This was in Georgia.
Yeah.
I mean, his signaling and the stuff that he's done, I've been against it.
I think it's bad, like trying to punish Disney, trying to punish woke things.
I don't like this education bill.
Not necessary to argue about all of it right now, but I don't like those.
But all of those things, for the most part, with the exception, I think, of like trans athletes and schools are like him putting on his national face, especially when he was, I think, more worried about Trump than he probably is right now.
Mike Pence's Disloyalty to Trump 00:08:54
It's such a joy just to see somebody take on these battles.
It's like so many Republicans roll over about it.
They'll give up lip service.
They don't know how to fight it.
Standby, much more with the guys from the fifth column after this.
An update because Trump tweeted that thing about Nevada and its corrupt voting system.
And now John Ralston, who is like the political reporter for Nevada, who we're all following from both sides of the aisle that we follow this guy, responds as follows.
He says, I want to pause here and say this.
And I hope all Republicans on the ballot and listening will disavow.
Trump just put out that Clark County has a corrupt voting system and needs, quote, more time to cheat.
This is the kind of garbage that he and Laxalt put out in 2020.
There is zero evidence of any of this.
And all campaigns knew about the mail ballot rules from the start.
None of this is a surprise.
Neither is Trump's mendacious muling.
Are there any Republicans left in this state who will stand up for the integrity of Nevada's vote?
We'll find out.
Mendacious muling.
I like that.
Muley.
Muhammad.
Can I take you to the Trump, I mean, sorry, the Pence op-ed in the Wall Street Journal?
Yeah.
Wow.
Wow.
Speaking of January 6th and election denialism, it's like, when I heard it, I started to feel like a sadness for Donald Trump.
You know, I really, I do feel sad that he had his first term ruined by all these bullshit allegations about Russia and just like the press never let up on him.
They were determined to ruin his presidency.
And to his credit, he kept fighting.
You know, he did fight and he got a lot of great things done.
But the thing about election denialism was like a, I don't know, like a robot malfunctioning.
Like you just can't get it to stop malfunctioning.
Like that chip went wrong and you just can't write it.
He couldn't see it.
He's so averse to losing and losers.
He just wasn't able to say, this one got away.
I made history in 16.
The country's in a different mood and I lost this one.
Couldn't do it.
And Mike Pence, for the first time, describes in this op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, the extraordinary exchange that they had right after January 6th on Capitol Hill.
I'll give you a couple of highlights.
I met with the president on January 11th.
He looked tired and his voice seemed fainter than usual.
How are you?
He began.
How are Karen and Charlotte?
I replied tersely that we were fine and told him they had been at the Capitol on January 6th.
Of course, this is when Trump had antagonized Pence.
His supporters were screaming, hang Mike Pence.
Trump had tweeted out aggressive tweets about Mike Pence at this time.
Mike Pence was in danger that day.
There's no question.
And it was in part, in large part, because of Donald Trump.
So Trump's telling him my kid and my wife were with me at the Capitol.
Trump responded with a hint of regret.
I just learned that.
He then asked, were you scared?
No, I replied.
I was angry.
You and I had our differences that day, Mr. President.
And seeing those people tearing up the Capitol infuriated me.
Those are strong words from Mike Pence, who is like a soft-spoken guy, especially in his dealings with Trump, reportedly.
He started to bring up the election, saying that people were angry, but his voice trailed off.
I told him he had to set that aside.
And he responded quietly, yeah.
I said, those people who broke into the Capitol might have been supporters, but they're not our movement.
And he went on from there.
With genuine sadness in his voice, the president mused, what if we hadn't had the rally?
What if they hadn't gone to the Capitol?
Then he said, it's too terrible to end like this.
It's sad.
It's sad because Trump did a lot of good, you know, for all the personal problems he had and so on.
He fought and he did a lot of good.
And he's recognizing in this moment what just happened and how he's tarred his own legacy by this nonstop election denialism talk and so on.
Then it goes on from there.
He seemed discouraged.
So I reminded him that I was praying for him.
Don't bother, Trump said.
As I stood to leave, he said, it's been fun.
A privilege, Mr. President, I answered.
Yeah, with you, he said.
Walking toward the door leading to the hallway, I paused, looked the president in the eye, and said, I guess we'll just have to disagree on two things.
What? said Trump.
I referred to our disagreement about January 6th, and then I said, I'm also never going to stop praying for you.
He smiled.
That's right.
Don't ever change.
That whole thing makes me so sad.
Mike Pence was this loyal soldier.
He, more than probably anybody in the White House, was loyal to Trump, wouldn't publicly criticize Trump, didn't resign after Jan 6 like some of the administration did.
He tried to do his best for this guy, personally and professionally, and for the country.
But saying that the election was fake was a bridge too far.
And not certifying the count was not an option, contrary to what Trump and others told the world.
He didn't even have the power to do what Trump wanted him to do.
And still, Trump did sick the mob on him.
And he was in danger that day along with his wife and child.
And here they are.
This is the moment.
This is like the chance when they had to address the total disloyalty Trump showed Pence.
And Pence in this moment is a classy guy, as I think he usually is.
And Trump himself seems to be wrestling with his own behavior and the fracture of this relationship, which I do think was somewhat important to him, recognizing how bad it was.
It's too terrible to end like this.
My God, what do you guys think about it?
I mean, you're full of sadness.
I'm filled with anger.
That makes me super angry, assuming that the whole thing is true as written.
Because, all right, he felt a sense of a tinge of regret.
And then what did he do in the weeks and months and years since then?
He aggressively pushed for people who believed in the thing that he said maybe shouldn't have happened to win elections and primaries in specifically divided states.
So a bit crocodile tears for me.
I appreciate Pence absolutely turning the other cheek in this situation.
I'm a very mild-minded person.
I would want to kick the guy in the nuts.
You endangered my wife and my daughter.
Fuck you.
I mean, there's a lot of that in there too.
Like, no, I mean, you can, if as it's rendered, is again, if, if, if that is true, it's so hard to imagine Donald Trump having tinges of regret like this.
And I'm not trying to sort of dehumanize him in any way, but this has happened with so many people.
So many people who have been loyal to him, who have been by his side and tried to do right by him, that, you know, one or two things went wrong.
And then he just, I mean, you have to be like him to accept that.
So if you're Steve Bannon and I've spent some time with Bannon, you know, Bannon was booted out of the White House very, very quickly.
Right.
And then he starts denouncing him, calling him sloppy Steve and the rest of it.
And then Bannon comes back because they're very similar that way.
It's a bit of a, you know, a kabuki theater, a bit of, you know, professional wrestling that that's okay.
But for people like Mike Pence, who, you know, you can hate him, you can dislike his politics, whatever, seems like a pretty genuine and a pretty sensitive guy.
And he's, you know, put in a sort of impossible situation here.
But, you know, on that day, it's, it's just, you know, had he walked that back and gone to your point and publicly said this was something that was wrong.
Um, as you know, like, I mean, you see guys like Kevin McCarthy come denounced January 6th and then walk that back.
If Trump had gone out there and said and given the signal to these people and just said, look, you know, these people have a right to protest.
They have a right to be angry.
I'm with you.
I understand it.
But we cannot have this kind of violence.
You cannot be shouting that my vice president should be hung up on the gallows in the ellipse in front of the Capitol is madness.
But, you know, Trump's thing is that at the end of it, I've always thought this, that the overwhelming thing in his brain, the thing that washes over any sense of reason, is, as Megan said, this idea of winning.
And I'll give you a brief example of this.
I think this has been reported, but a friend of mine worked for Donald Trump for many, many years.
And he told me a story that, and it was during The Apprentice.
And he said that every time someone would come into his office, he had a stack, and this is, I think this has been reported, a stack of the ratings printed out next to his desk, a stack of them.
People would come in and ask nothing.
He would sign them and give them to them.
And they'd be baffled.
They're like, what?
Trump's Personal Sense of Grievance 00:04:01
What?
And he'd be like, it's the ratings.
We're number one show.
And just that mentality of constantly winning, constantly being richer than you are, constantly having more voters than you actually had, more people at the inauguration than you did.
There's some kind of mental block that it wreaks havoc on everything else.
Because I understand Megan's point, too, is that if you are somebody who is a devoted MAGA person, it's like stick to the things that you did and you did well.
You know, the New York Post is right in the cover today, didn't build the wall.
But if you're somebody who likes, you know, some of the regulation stuff, that's pretty interesting.
I'm not a fan of the trade stuff, but the guy did things during his presidency, but it's all overwhelmed by this personal sense of grievance and also this personal sense of that, that if he's not, you know, on top of everything, then there's something wrong.
You know, it's, it's, so I get in the sense that I think it's sad in that way, because I think there's, there's something just slightly defective about the way he thinks about everything, you know?
Yeah.
Well, I think if you thought there was room for a different, a different legacy, you know, for people to see once Trump exited the scene and took his, you know, big personality to be charitable in the in summing up Trump's tweets with him, that maybe people could just see the policy, you know, like look at how strong the economy was.
Gas was at 240 when he left office.
He had stood up for America on the world stage.
It wasn't that our allies were loving us more than ever, but he was right about NATO and these other countries not paying their fair share.
He took out some terrorists.
He got the Supreme Court in a 6-3 balance.
He fought he didn't abandon Brett Kavanaugh when virtually any other president, Republican or Democrat, would have run for the Hills after what was done to him.
I think about the restoration of due process for young men accused on college campuses, which was very ballsy and he took a lot of incoming and he stood for it.
He's the one who signed the Anti-Sex Trafficking Act.
I mean, you could keep going down the list.
Operation Warp Speed, Warspeed, Abraham Accords.
That's right.
Why did I forget that?
Exactly.
So I'm sorry.
It's sad to me because his own, like his own, there's like a piece of mental illness almost, you know, that chip that can't get straight with a loss that wound up ruining part of his legacy.
Some would argue his entire legacy.
I don't think that's true, but some would.
And it continues to overshadow him, to loom in American politics.
And I think I understand the case that it's actually cost the Republicans, what, three elections now, you know, not 2020, but like just Trump's personality, his unwillingness to sort of regulate himself, 2020 and 2022.
So I guess two elections now.
Go ahead, Camille.
that imploring us to have some empathy is always important to remember that these people are humans.
And there's a very real sense in which there is an unfair standard that national political leaders are held to, but there's a sense in which it's kind of unfair.
There's an asterisk there.
Your lack of self-discipline, your poor leadership, the lack of courageousness, the duplicitousness, all of the things that were important qualities of your quote-unquote leadership throughout your presidency.
They have something to do with how things go badly on January 6th um, and how you've continued to conduct yourself after that um, and I think it's it's fair to focus on and talk about those things.
And I say that as someone who, in a number of instances where it was decidedly unpopular, have found it um necessary, at least for me to be honest about the, the mistakes that were made and the mistakes that weren't made when it comes to like, characterizations of what Trump said Post-Charlottesville, for example, which I think is widely misconstrued and misunderstood, and you know he's getting slagged for racism, when in fact he was just a little sloppy um in in with respect to his statements.
Unnecessary Media Scandals Explained 00:02:23
But I do think there's something materially different here, and you know I, I too read the Pence thing and I had some somewhat complicated feelings about it, but mostly like just kind of uh, a bit of revulsion, because you've continued to do this thing, which apparently you know is reprehensible.
Well, he came close, it was like a moment of seeing the sun, you know in private, and then, and then no, and then we haven't seen that side again.
A tip, a tip to people in politics.
I think it should be rather obvious.
But this is what happens when you have an outsider in politics.
Donald Trump, after he was elected, very click quickly, I think was then went to Langley and made this kind of crazy speech at the CIA headquarters, denouncing the CIA and saying, you know these, these stoppo tactics, I think was yeah, Gestapo tactics and all this stuff, and it's like okay, maybe don't do that right away and antagonize them at the exact same time.
By the way, you can do it privately.
That's what Nixon did.
He didn't do it publicly and then, at the same time, you have a media that's not going to treat you fairly.
I don't think that anyone, even media, would say that he got a fair shake.
But when you don't set your own legacy and this is to your point Megan, talking about writing your legacy, it's you help write that legacy, in a way yeah, and when you are constantly attacking the media and saying that the enemy, the people, they're this, that you're just not making a lot of friends and you just can't.
I'm not saying that this is good or bad.
I disagree with you.
There's no media.
I mean the CIA, I see your point, but the media no he, they were his enemy, for sure, and no doubt, no doubt, but don't, I mean, they are the ones who are going to help write your legacy.
And some of those people, like I don't know, I don't agree with that at all.
Some of those people, like Megan, were just doing their job and yeah, he created a ridiculous, unnecessary scandal because of his preposterous conduct.
True true, but taking me out of it, like I I, the media at large right, and you can argue a specific case, me or whomever, but he had to take them on.
He had to.
They were out to get him from the from the minute they realized he actually was going to win or did win, which was election Night.
They were completely determined to take him out.
And there was no way forward but to get them.
And Donald Trump did us a favor with the media because he exposed them.
He's the reason CNN has fallen.
He's the reason CNN Plus had no chance.
He's the reason that people now know when they turn on CNN in the airport.
It isn't quote the news.
It is left-wing news.
Same with MSNBC.
Their colors are flying.
Fox News was forced to really readjust and sort of get more honest about where it stood.
Endorsements and Losses Discussed 00:03:29
And that was a good thing.
People understand where the New York Times.
They don't believe the democracy dies in darkness bullshit from the Washington Post.
They've exposed themselves.
All that happened because of him.
So I understand he may believe me.
I understand he went too far in some cases.
Trust me.
But I think on a grand scale, what he did with the media was a benefit.
Can I just give you one quote?
Same New York Post from today.
By the way, if you're not reading the New York Post, you should.
Piers Morgan has a piece.
He's not a Trump fan.
His love kind of goes with whether he's getting along with the president or not getting along with the former president.
Exactly.
But he does tell an interesting story, which I think I've heard before.
He says, in the fall of 2008, I interviewed Donald Trump in a vast Beverly Hills mansion he had recently bought.
And he admitted the crucial importance of success to his brand.
America loves winners, period, he said.
You got to win.
That's what it's all about.
You know, Muhammad Ali used to talk and talk, but he won.
If you talk and talk, but you lose, the act doesn't play.
And that is why we're getting tweets, truths from Trump today.
Like, let me find it.
He's basically saying he's still one.
He's talking about, okay, let me find the numbers where he's talking about, maybe my team can help me find it, but he's talking about how overall his record was really good.
Oh, all right.
Here it is.
Now he says, while in certain ways yesterday's election was somewhat disappointing, from my personal standpoint, it was a very big victory.
219 wins.
He's talking about his endorsements and 16 losses in general, in the general.
Who has ever done better than that?
Trump asked.
Now, of course, this is padding.
He jumped in in a lot of races like DeSantis's at the last minute.
It was like, I endorse.
So, okay.
And the ones, those 16 are the ones that the whole election was about, right?
It's like for the most part, it's like, yes, those were the ones that you really needed to get right.
Those are the ones that would determine the balance of power.
Then he goes on and writes, Now that the election in Florida is over and everything went quite well, shouldn't it be said that in 2020, I got 1.1 million more votes in Florida than Ron D got this year?
5.7 million to 4.6 million.
He inquired, saying, just asking.
Now, this is crazy.
It's crazy for, among other reasons, to compare a general election, which he ran in, to a midterm election, which is going to have way less turnout.
And the Daily Wire actually took a look at this and said, okay, we should take a look at the margin.
Let's take a look at, you can't compare numbers, but you can control, you can take a look at margins.
And they said the margin of victory in 2020 for Trump in Florida, he won by 3.3 points.
DeSantis won the state last night by 19.4 points.
So it's just so petty.
It's so petty.
It's unnecessary.
He clearly wants DeSantis out.
And he's already threatened before Tuesday night that he's going to reveal some secrets about DeSantis that he allegedly knows if DeSantis takes him on in the primary.
And he is maintaining, Trump is, that he's going to make his quote big announcement on November 15th, even now, even now, even with people like Kaylee McEnany, his former press secretary, saying, please don't wait until at least after the Georgia runoff.
Schwarzenegger Criticizes Trump 00:02:41
But Trump is Trump.
Does anyone believe him?
Does anyone think he's actually going to make this announcement?
I don't.
I don't know.
I feel like he's got to.
Now that people are telling him not to, he's got to.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's true.
I've been, you should never make predictions.
And my one prediction that I've broken my own rule with is I don't think that he will ultimately run for president this time around.
I mean, partly it's because of the winning thing that you talked about, Megan.
You reminded me in your windup.
I had written at the beginning of his presidency a column that both stands up and fell apart that compared Trump to Arnold Schwarzenegger and his run for governor because they had a huge falling out in 2016, 2017.
Schwarzenegger took over his show, right?
The Apprentice for a little bit and his ratings were terrible.
And then Schwarzenegger said that Trump is reprehensible, whatever.
During the Billy Bush episode, Arnold taped a big thing against him.
But I talked about their similarities.
They both came from outside of politics.
They both have just a preternatural sense of in ways that just defy all logic.
There are outsiders who everyone said, you can't possibly succeed in this way in this field.
Maybe Schwarzenegger can succeed in bodybuilding, but with that accent in Hollywood, are you crazy?
And he totally succeeds and like has a sense of a connection with the public that politicians just can't and don't have.
But Schwarzenegger, what happened with his governorship, he's so concerned with the people, as he would always say, that when he suffered setbacks after his first year of being governor, had a series of ballot initiatives to try to tweak public sector unions.
They all lost.
At that moment, he pivoted so hard in the opposite direction because he was worried about pleasing people and that he was losing and that he would personally change direction because of this.
What I got wrong in the column was thinking that Trump would ever change direction.
He is so narcissistic, even more than Schwarzenegger.
Schwarzenegger has a natural empathy with people that's pretty famous and interesting.
He's not just all about himself, although obviously he has a huge ego.
I think Trump is so self-centered with this that he has to tell himself, to Michael's point, stories that somehow absolve him from the fact that he lost the popular election.
Not that that matters too much in 2016, but it matters to him, right?
And he lost the popular and electoral college election in 2020, and he's been a wipeout worse and worse for the Republican Party.
Trump Refuses to Change Direction 00:10:16
Here is the thing to watch is will his very, by now, very evident lack of winning, like people are tired of not winning right now if they're Republicans that are associated with Trump.
Is that going to break their spell?
I found it very interesting that JD Vance in his election speech, victory speech, did not mention Donald Trump.
He thinks 34 people.
Trump was not one of them.
Yes.
There's a guy, one of the flips in upstate New York, I think it was, from Democrat to Republican, was on, I think, TV just today or yesterday saying, you know, it's time to move on.
And this is New York.
This is New York where Republicans generally like Donald Trump because he's from New York.
So if those people start to say, okay, look, we're not winning and it's because he can't let it go because of his personal sense of being wounded at not winning, then a tide could turn.
But we've been here three or four times in the past and Republicans have always come back to him.
Can I ask you this?
So the party naturally is looking at DeSantis, who by any measure is today a winner, the biggest winner of Tuesday.
Not only did he get the numbers we discussed in Florida, but his chief rival for the nomination, we presume, if DeSantis decides to get in and if Trump decides to get in is, of course, Trump.
And Trump did not have a very good night, notwithstanding his tweet, his quote, truth.
So you and I both know that the media, they'll hold their fire a little bit on Death Santis for the moment.
They were all over him during COVID.
They'll hold it for a moment because the Democrats slash media would love nothing more than for Donald Trump to be the nominee.
So they're just going to keep quiet about DeSantis right now.
But what happens next?
Like if he throws his hat into the ring.
And actually, on that note, let me bring in a caller who has got thoughts, I think, on this.
Patty in Michigan.
Hi.
Thanks for calling in.
What's on your mind?
Hi.
That's what I wanted to say: I wanted to just point out the fact that the media is going to start the machine as soon as Trump or whoever, DeSantis, they're going to destroy him the way that they destroyed Trump and his family.
I just don't want to see it again.
They're going to turn him into.
I think.
I know exactly.
Just the way they've been doing probably my whole life with every Republican, the Bushes, Reagan.
We had a governor here, Brick Snyder.
They did the same thing.
A lot of it was based on lies.
It's just a machine.
And I think Trump can take it.
I don't know about DeSantis.
I'd like to see DeSantis maybe when Trump is done.
But so you're a Trump voter who hasn't abandoned Trump.
You'd still like to see him run in 2024.
I do want to see him run.
I think he deserves it.
Okay.
What about all this talking and dying to talk to somebody like you?
But what about all this talking?
Yeah.
Like he's to blame.
And, you know, what about that?
Well, look what they did with January 6th.
It exploded into something it wasn't.
I mean, and that's the media.
That was the politicians.
That's Hollywood.
That's just one itty-bitty thing.
How do you mean?
How do you mean?
Because I mean, I understand it wasn't 9-11, as the crazy media said.
Like, it was not worse than 9-11, but it was bad.
And police officers were hurt.
But it wasn't any worse than the 2020 riots.
Don't look at this, but let's see this.
We never hear anything about, what is it, the Ashley Babbitt?
Or is that her name?
We never hear anything about her that died.
She's the protester who was killed.
Yeah.
Yeah, we never hear anything about that.
And it's all spin doctors.
It's all, it's, I'm just, it's frustrating.
It's everything is spun a certain way.
And I think that Trump can take it.
I feel bad for his family, but because they, you know, one by one, they pick everyone off.
And he deserves way more credit and acknowledgement than people are getting.
I understand other politicians don't want to, they kind of want to distance themselves, but it's the same old thing.
It's just the same old politics as usual.
We're politicians.
We turn the other.
They're going to do what they're going to do.
Patty, thank you.
Thank you for calling with your POV.
We appreciate it.
That's your question.
It's already started with DeSantis.
I mean, it happened before with Death Santis, but you see people like New York Magazine are like saying he's MAGA, that the Trump fascists are now obviously rooting for DeSantis to win.
They want to make an absolutely seamless transfer into saying that he's exact this person who is a unique threat to democracy, the likes of which we've never seen before.
We all have to do everything to put out the stops of this Putin stooge.
Oh, yeah, by the way, the governor of Florida is exactly like him.
You're absolutely going to see this.
And maybe Michael can speak to this.
He has been very combative with the press.
It's part of his shtick there.
And it seems to me like he's been slinging it pretty good.
He slings it up.
Yeah, I think he can take it.
It's a lot less like the Chris Christie.
I mean, you remember when Chris Christie came on the scene and he was doing these press conferences and everyone's kind of tuning in because they were a bit professional wrestling too.
I mean, the difference with Donald Trump, which I find, and I take Megan's point earlier that, you know, the existence of Donald Trump sharpened everybody's kind of minds when they were looking at the media, right?
So democracy dies in darkness.
They're actually wearing it on their sleeves now.
And I've said this before, and I might have even said it on this show that the language of media changed with Donald Trump.
So they're all of a sudden, and I'm bang on about this all the time, is the phrase that popped into every news story was without evidence.
Donald Trump said X, without evidence.
That seems to have disappeared.
And you're not going to try to tell me Joe Biden or any politician in the House, Senate would say, are saying things that are always true and always larded with evidence.
No, that thing disappeared because they thought he was a specific existential threat.
So it did.
And to Megan's point, it did allow people to understand that the media in certain times says, okay, now this is our duty.
We really, really have to rile ourselves up here.
But the problem was, was that Donald Trump, when he, somebody would, you know, be giving him a hard time, Jim Acosta, who would be good, and he would look at him and be like, sit down, fake news, fake news.
You watch DeSantis and he mows them down.
I mean, he actually has policy debates with them.
And I think they're going to be a little more reluctant to get into those conversations rather than, because Trump would give them clicks.
He would give them the moment they could put on Twitter, could on MediaIte, et cetera.
That's what those people were looking for.
They weren't looking to kind of clarify issues.
They were doing things that were performance themselves.
DeSantis is a little different in that sense.
Well, I would really like to see that.
I would enjoy a DeSantis-Acosta exchange greatly.
You know, you're really whetting the appetite.
Yeah, I think it'd be good together.
I think they'd give it both to each other pretty good.
Yeah.
I mean, I think the caller is certainly right that there is a profound degree of determined unfairness.
But the kind of self-immolation that took place repeatedly is important.
And I think it's fair to draw comparisons between January 6th and a lot of the other instances of sustained political violence that we saw and unrest over the course of 2020.
But it's important to do that in a way that does not take away the culpability of Donald Trump in helping to precipitate the madness of January 6th.
And I think it is, if you're a fan of his, so be it.
But there are failures there.
And some of those failures are profound and they're personal and they have something to do with the leadership qualities or lack thereof of the man himself.
And it's fine to look at the determined unfairness of a number of people in the press to look at the bias that is there now, the demand that there be moral clarity and actual judgments of whether or not it's, you know, the particular policies are racist or not racist in like every article.
It's fine to decry that and to be concerned about it.
But I think at the same time, there are ways to respond to that thoughtfully in a sophisticated way and brashly and irrationally.
And I think far too often Donald Trump chose the latter.
And that is to his detriment.
The big question is, if the GOP did not abandon him after the actual January 6th, right?
Remember how hot everybody was back then?
I mean, Republicans and Democrats were outraged by those scenes.
And they were, in fact, outrageous.
But the GOP did, while while angry for a time, went back to him.
They all did.
That's the reason why they were all bending the knee and kissing the ring, trying to get his endorsement in running in these races.
So if the actual January 6th did not end the affiliation or at least force the GOP to say we're moving on, will the losing to the extent they believe that lingering thing, the threat to democracy, election denialism, just what happened on Jan 6th, all that's in the same cloud.
If they believe, as the conventional wisdom is unfolding, that that actually cost them this election, that those independents who they must have, they cannot win it with just Republicans.
Will that be enough to end the relationship?
Possibly.
The difference with January 6th is that we were on the air in our podcast on January 6th, and we were all kind of shaking our heads saying, this is, you know, astonishing.
The very next week, we were like, wait a second, did Chuck Schumer just compare this to Pearl Harbor?
Tribal Politics Destroying Relationships 00:04:53
And so it becomes tribal almost immediately that you know it's bad.
You know, this stuff shouldn't have happened.
You watch the videos of like cops being beaten up with like, you know, thin blue line flags and you're like, God, this is just doing my head in.
But the thing about it was the response to it, the committee, et cetera, it became such a partisan issue that people start retreating to their tribal corners.
And, you know, I'm not in either of these corners, but the rhetoric from it was like, this is 9-11.
I was like, you mean the place with 3,000 people died and precipitated a war in Afghanistan and Iraq, et cetera?
Same thing, really?
Yeah, they were saying, yeah, no, it's the same thing, same thing, same kind of effect on America.
Whereas this retreat to your corner.
You see that your corner is now being destroyed by irresponsible politicking.
There's no one to protect here.
It's actually you're not being protected.
And that's the thing that I think this could precipitate it.
I mean, who knows?
I mean, he has created so much loyalty over so long of a period of time that he is kind of like a, you know, the dawn is a dawn in a way that people go and express their fealty to him.
But it could be that this would be, I mean, this is the closest thing that I can think of that will actually shake people out of this.
That's what we heard from our audience yesterday.
We took calls and, you know, person after person kept calling in saying, I'm a double Trump voter and I'm done and I'm angry about what happened.
One guy from Pennsylvania was saying in my state, others said, it's time, like it's just time to move on.
He's about grievance.
We continue with you and the guys right after this.
Let's take a caller, Gabriella from Louisiana.
Hi, Gabriella.
What's on your mind?
Let me just tell you, I agree with that woman.
There are millions and millions and millions of Americans that want Donald Trump to be the president.
I cannot believe that no one sees the obvious that the media is trying to divide Republicans, Trump versus DeSantis.
They're just trying to divide us and make us get angry and argue and get us all, you know, chaos.
We want folks like, what about folks?
Because it's not just the media this time.
It's Republicans, like the Daily Wire.
And the Daily Wire is not Rhino, but they're not hugely pro-Trump.
But like Daily Wire, Commentary Magazine, New York Post, and so on.
I think they're scared that Trump won't get elected.
And so they think DeSantis is a safe bet.
He's younger.
You know, he's successful in Florida.
He doesn't have as much, you know, controversy.
But like the other lady said, as soon as DeSantis were to say he was going to be president, want to run for president, the media would attack him even worse.
Donald Trump is a warrior.
He can withstand the media.
He does not care about hurting people's feelings.
He speaks the truth.
He wants the best for America.
There are millions of us that are still on board 100% for Donald Trump.
Well, it's an interesting point she's raising, guys.
Thank you for the call, Gabriella.
She's basically saying they're going to Trumpify.
They're going to Trumpify DeSantis.
Will be just as evil as Trump in two seconds, thanks to the media.
And so, where is the real argument for moving on from Trump?
Go ahead, Camille.
Sorry.
No, I was just going to say that Gabriella is bypassing, I think, the most important point, which is that Donald Trump is the one who's going after Ron DeSantis here.
He's been drawing the comparisons.
He's been denigrating him and calling him names and effectually talking about how well he's doing and how well Ron isn't relative to him, which is absurd.
And has generally been hostile to other people.
They're indication that he's trying to push him to not get into the race.
So, to the extent someone is calling for this and trying to contrive a conflict here, I don't know that it's fair to suggest that the media is principally responsible for this.
I think Donald Trump is doing this.
And it's not as though it's the first time we've seen him go after people who are somewhat affiliated with him.
Yeah, and I would say that what's on the ballot here, if it's between in a primary for 2024, would be, and this is actually the interesting question, it's a MAGA kind of conservatism versus a, you know, basically what conservatism was in 2015.
Not so much problems.
It has some more MAGA elements to it, but it is much more in the traditional kind of American Enterprise Institute vein from 10 years ago.
And, you know, that's a significant difference.
It doesn't matter what those differences are to certain elements of the media that are going to attack Ron DeSantis.
But I think the difference is that he will treat it in a different way.
And I think, you know, not wage a war against the media.
Kind of, he kind of sort of ignores them and attacks them back when they need to be attacked.
So I don't see, I don't think it would be that much different.
And I think the college is probably right in that, that there's going to be elements of the media that are not going to like Ron DeSantis.
They already showed that during the COVID stuff.
DeSantis vs The Media War 00:09:57
But, you know, look, the interesting thing about being in the media is to never have to say sorry.
I mean, how many people in the past two weeks were promising us the violence today?
I don't know if you can hear it, Megan, but there's massive rioting outside the windows right now because of the election and people are burning things down.
And it's like Venezuela here.
No, people who say this constantly, fascism, democracy, it never happened and they just move on.
The same thing with DeSantis, Death Santis.
There's one, actually, one mainstream media that I saw that went back and looked at it and said, you know what?
He was kind of right about that.
And I think it was CBS, but that's not really that common.
So there's really not an incentive to not bullshit about this stuff.
There's not an incentive to not go out there and attack somebody with about Catholic knowledge, but you should have, because at the end of the day, who's going to make you say sorry?
You just plow ahead.
And that's going to happen.
Politics means never having to say you're sorry.
Let's go to Franco in California.
You know, when you guys are talking about, you know, January 6th, bad.
The riots, bad.
But the Democrats didn't carry the way on the riots.
You know, Pelosi said, oh, people are going to do what they do.
Well, this is America.
And that was a problem.
I saw it as a problem because history is history.
You know, good or bad.
It is our history and we have to figure out to go forward, not backwards.
And then my partner, you know, we drive together and we were saying, you know, it's funny, during the middle of the riots, where they're like, we were going to some of the riot places, you know, and delivering our load and doing our thing.
And we said, you know what, what happens if, you know, they go to the Capitol and it happens there?
What's going to happen then?
And then it happened.
I was like, oh, I mean, I felt bad, you know, but we, but we said it and it happened.
And look what happened.
You know, like, oh my gosh.
But Maxine Waters, Chuck Schumer, they all and Adam Schiff can all spew anything they want to say and no consequences are on them.
But when Trump says something, I know he was the president, but when he says something, there's consequences.
So it doesn't make sense to me.
January 6th should have never happened.
I totally agree with that.
But 2020, everything that happened in 2020, you know, with all the riots, that should have never happened either.
It should have been squashed.
And it didn't happen.
And everybody's talking about that.
These are a lot of good points, but let me ask you our bottom line on it because we're searching for answers on, you know, Trump supporters.
Are you ready to move on from Trump and go with somebody like DeSantis or you're not ready to move on?
My opinion, I wasn't a voter and then I voted for Trump for the first time.
And then I never watched politics.
I never cared.
And then after Trump was a president and things were coming out, you know, on a lot of things.
I listened to CNN and MSNBC and Fox.
I listened to all of them.
And then I, you know, did my opinion from there.
And then when the facts finally came out on a lot of things, I was like, well, this, you know, this one side.
All right, but now, but now we're short on time, Franco.
Give me the bottom line.
Now, how are you feeling?
Trump or DeSantis, I'm fine with either.
I like Trump with his policies.
The policies are great, yes.
But his legacy can be charged.
Thank you.
So there you have it, guys.
Like this is, this is one of the reasons why I said recently, I just don't think there's any way to the GOP nomination that requires one to go through Trump.
Like Trump's got to get out of the way for DeSantis to ascend because he does have diehard supporters even now who are just not going there.
Not Franco, but like our first caller and Patty, who are team Trump, period.
They're not going to vote for DeSantis.
And some wouldn't vote for him if he steamrolled over Trump and Trump said, stay home like he did in Georgia.
This reminded me, and the caller's right, and this is something we've talked about on our podcast a whole hell of a lot.
And Michael went to Wisconsin and Kenosha the next day after it was burned to the ground.
Our listeners helped the guy rebuild his business or at least begin to start trying.
So it's something that we care about deeply.
One of the really bad results on Tuesday was the governor, the Democratic governor of Wisconsin, Tony Evers, got re-elected.
That's someone who should have lost.
His opponent Lee Michaels, I believe his name is Tim Michaels, was campaigning on COVID in Kenosha over and over again.
The man had abdicated his duty in many ways.
Michael knows the story and Camille, both of them know it better than I do.
But the candidate was not a great candidate.
Again, super Trumpy, talking about 2020 and the election and all these kind of things.
That should have been a gimme for the Republican Party.
And it makes me upset that a sitting politician who did a bad job during an important thing in which bad, bad things happen.
I want those people to be accountable.
I want them to lose.
As an outsider in the political process, the only joy I get is like voting yes on recall elections in California back when I lived there.
So I want that person to lose.
They didn't.
Part of the reason they didn't win was because it was poor candidate selection too tethered to Trump.
Quickly on the caller's point, I mean, he was kind of tracing the etymology of his own political awakening.
And this is on Democrats and this is on liberals in a lot of ways, is that when you go back, there is a category difference between what happened in 2020 and what happened with the George Floyd stuff and what happened at the Capitol.
You know, particularly because this is the president egging it on and they're saying we want to stop the certification of an election.
It's a pretty big deal.
At the same time, everybody I ever talk to, when I walk around talking to voters, everybody who's on the Republican side or leaning Republican or just started voting for Donald Trump, they always point out the kind of incongruity of these things.
It's like, wait, didn't she give to a bail fund that Kamala Harris?
Didn't they just say, well, you know, this is actually, you have to understand why this is happening.
No one's saying you have to understand this side.
They're having to understand that side.
And this is far more destructive.
It's going on for days, weeks in places like Portland for months.
People get really annoyed and alienated by that.
And, you know, that was one of the things that I saw, particularly with Hispanics.
You know, you have DeSantis, the most popular politician in Florida amongst Hispanics.
Exit polls show that he gets about 60% of the vote.
And you talk to people like that and they say, well, you know, we don't think that you should be able to just walk into the country.
Why is it okay?
Why do I have to wait in a passage?
Someone actually said this to me.
Why do I have to wait in a passport line for two hours to get back in the Miami airport when I'm coming from to visit my aunts and uncles somewhere else?
And people just walk across the border.
They see these things as incongruous and hypocritical.
And that's what draws people to Donald Trump.
They want to know where did this guy come from?
Like when you see what happens in those in the riots and then you see what happened in the Capitol Hill riot, et cetera.
Yes, I get that.
But it's different.
I understand the difference.
I totally have to trade it seriously.
I get it too.
The Black Lives Riots matters were, they did far more damage than January 6th did.
Far more lives were lost and injuries were caused to innocents that day.
If we need to get into a comparison, that's how it went.
However, the lingering election denialism is something else, right?
It's like, I get why people are like, just stop lecturing me about January 6th when you didn't care at all about BLM, but it's the lingering election denialism that I think is costing people at the polls.
Let me get another caller and let's go down to Richard in Alabama.
I don't hear from people in Alabama that much.
Hi, Richard.
What's on your mind?
Hi, Megan.
Great show today.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
So I wanted, yeah, just the DeSantis Trump thing.
I think Ron DeSantis, and I live on the Gulf Coast of Alabama, right?
Butted up to the western panhandle of Florida.
So we get a lot of Florida news here.
And the performance I've seen from DeSantis, I think he is maybe uniquely qualified to beat Trump in a primary.
I think the country, especially Florida, may be a little tired of the revenge tour prelude that Trump is kind of out there trumpeting.
That's the way I see it.
And now, full disclosure, if Trump makes it through the primary, I'll vote for Donald Trump.
But my preference would be Rod Sales.
Wow.
Thank you for that.
I appreciate it, Richard.
It's so fascinating, right, to hear from actual voters and Trump supporters who are kind of all over the map.
They have another new, exciting option.
And that option has somehow got to remove the 800-pound gorilla from his path.
We only have a few short time left, guys.
What do you think?
I think DeSantis is a good idea.
Revenge tour is good.
Richard, you should know you cracked up all three of the guys when you said that.
Do you think in the limited time we have that he can do it?
Can DeSantis take Trump out?
I think so.
I think he probably could.
I think he could.
It's a question of whether he wants to at this point.
And that's actually not clear.
I mean, according to Gabe Sherman, and I've said this before, he's wrong.
Literally 50% of the time, he just makes it up.
I mean, but he had a report out last week that DeSantis is getting ready not to run, that he's telling donors he won't run.
He's going to wait until the next four years.
But that was a fairly long time.
I heard from a reliable source that that wasn't true.
Exactly.
Well, my sources tell me, and by that, I mean Abby sitting over there.
Anyway, you guys, such a good discussion.
This is exactly the discussion I wanted to have today.
I'm so grateful to all three of you for your thoughtful commentary.
See you again soon, I hope.
Thank you, Megan.
All right, guys.
And I'm so grateful to all the callers, too.
I hate leaving people on the line.
So we'll do it again tomorrow.
Okay.
Call me back tomorrow and we'll resume the discussion.
It's really fun talking to all of you.
Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no
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