The Megyn Kelly Show - 20230831_mcconnells-alarming-freeze-bidens-decline-and-elit

All Episodes

Previous Next

Plain Text

Aug. 31, 2023 - The Megyn Kelly Show

01:36:08

20230831_mcconnells-alarming-freeze-bidens-decline-and-elit

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
Power and Responsibility Concerns 00:14:52
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
	And now, two prominent TV doctors begin to weigh in on what might be happening to him.
	Joining me now, Glenn Greenwald.
	Glenn is the host of Rumble's System Update.
	Glenn, great to have you.
	The McConnell tape is disturbing, and I have to say, I know he's controversial even within Republican circles because Trump doesn't like him.
	I think this is a man who served the country very honorably for his term, and he has done more for Republican politics than most in the GOP, including when it comes most especially to judges.
	So I take no pleasure in any of this, but the fact is, he doesn't seem well enough to be a sitting U.S. Senator anymore.
	He just doesn't.
	And you know, if we're going to call out the John Federmans and the Dianne Feinsteins of the world, we're derelict if we don't do it to the Mitch McConnell's of the world.
	He's not being open about what's happening to him.
	It's very clearly something.
	For those who missed it, I think we've got the tape of him yesterday speaking and then pausing.
	And here's what happened.
	What are my thoughts about what?
	Running for re-election in 2026.
	Did you hear the question, Senator?
	Running for re-election in 2026?
	All right, I'm sorry, you are going to need a minute.
	Senator.
	Okay.
	Somebody else have a question.
	Please speak up.
	Okay, just a couple points.
	Number one, um, God bless that aide who was very professional, had his back, was navigating a tricky situation, and she never let us see her sweat.
	Um, number two, for the listening audience, I mean, he just froze, sort of in the way you ever had a situation where like your eyes get into a stare and they kind of fixate on an object and you're kind of off in space for a second.
	That's how he looked.
	He clearly was no longer connected to the audience in front of him.
	And my third point, Glenn, is amazingly, though he did go back to the audience after this.
	The first two questions they didn't ask anything about this.
	What happened to you, Mr. Minority Leader?
	What, what, what just happened?
	Um, and he isn't really offering an explanation, though.
	Sanjay Gupta and Mark Siegel, doctors on CNN and Fox, are both speculating.
	That looks like a Parkinson's episode.
	So, what do you make of it?
	Yeah, I think we had to remember this is the second episode like this that he has had.
	I think the last one was maybe six or eight weeks ago, very similar, where he just froze, was obviously disconnected.
	I'm not really comfortable with certainly, I'm not comfortable speculating.
	I'm not really comfortable with doctors who haven't examined somebody speculating either.
	I think it's a little bit irresponsible, but I guess it's informative in some way.
	I think it's always a tricky and delicate issue because, first and foremost, I hope we are all human beings.
	We all have had grandparents or parents who have faced the infirmities of old age, and this is something we're likely to face ourselves, every person, every person we love.
	And so, you want to be very kind of understanding and empathetic about it, just for being human.
	On the other hand, this is not just some ordinary citizen trying to work into his life to the end of his life because he enjoys it.
	This is somebody with a great deal of power and responsibility, and therefore, it is a concern of public matter, much more so than it would be for a private citizen when we have people like Dianne Feinstein, like Joe Biden, like Mitch McConnell.
	There are others too who are clearly staying in power longer than their capabilities and physical conditions permit.
	And there is a term for this, Megan, called gerontocracy, which is something we used to criticize the Soviet Union in the 1970s very harshly for being governed by an age of like Leonid Brezhnev and all the Soviet leaders were in their mid to late 70s.
	And there were all kinds of valid critiques.
	If you go back and read those, about why governments and citizenships are very poorly served when people just cling to power for as long as they can, well past the time their capabilities permit.
	I think that clearly is the case with Mitch McConnell, Diane Feinstein, Joe Biden, and others.
	And I think it's starting to become a big problem to the United States.
	Yes, it's, I mean, we don't want to kick any of these people out.
	We don't want to kick them out.
	We want them to go gracefully into the sunset with our thanks, our salute.
	I say the same about Dianne Feinstein.
	You know, I don't share her politics, but I respect her.
	I respect her service.
	She's had some fierce moments that have been fun to celebrate over the years.
	Just don't make us see you like this.
	Don't make us watch you deteriorate to the point of incapacity while you're a sitting U.S. Senator to where we have to fire you.
	We have to boot you out with in an indignant flare.
	You know, I mean, that's what's happening.
	And I do wonder, I mean, look, I think it's a fair question.
	Where is Jill Biden?
	Where's Elaine Chow?
	Where's Dianne Feinstein's partner?
	I don't know.
	Like the family, let's say.
	Giselle Fetterman.
	Where are they?
	Because I know, God forbid this ever happened to me.
	My husband would say, honey, you're the bomb, but it's going to be super fun for us to travel the Grand Canyon and the great parks of the United States together at this point in your career, right?
	This is what we're going to do.
	It's going to be the fun next phase of life for us.
	And maybe it's time to step away from the lectern in the U.S. Senate or the microphone in the case of somebody like me, right?
	Where are they?
	Yeah, you know, look, I actually just had this personal choice, this problem, you know, this kind of dilemma myself.
	And as you know, my husband was hospitalized in the ICU.
	He was a member of Congress, the Brazilian Congress.
	He was running for re-election, which was the choice that he had made.
	And we had to make the decision as a family without him because he wasn't capable of participating at that time whether to withdraw his candidacy.
	And we decided that we should, because even if he recovered, we thought he probably wasn't going to be able to do the job the way he would want to, the way the people who voted for him deserved.
	And it wasn't an easy decision because, you know, it's the person's career you're talking about, their kind of life work, their purpose.
	But at some point, you have to realize that, especially if you're holding that kind of public power, you do have a responsibility.
	It's not kind of just a theory or a cliche.
	Like you do have an obligation to other people to relinquish that power, no matter how much you want to hold on to it, if you're not capable of exercising it responsibly for whatever reasons.
	In this case, we're talking about health problems or old age.
	I do think we want to make sure that we don't just start throwing people away because they're over 80 or 85 or some arbitrary age.
	Like if someone's in their 80s and still capable of doing their job, I mean, look at Bernie Sanders as just one example.
	He seems a very energetic age.
	So many about to turn 85.
	He's like more on fire with more energy than we have.
	Exactly.
	I look at a lot of these people with some envy, exactly, that they seem to have more energy than oftentimes I'm capable of mustering.
	But the reality is that with old age, it's just a scientific fact that we're all going to face infirmities start emerging.
	Cognitive decline is very real without even Alzheimer's or anything else.
	And when it becomes visible like this, it's incredibly sad.
	It's uncomfortable.
	It's embarrassing.
	And I do think there's a responsibility, even if they're not capable, as you said, for their family members to step in and intervene.
	And I think that one of the reasons they don't is because a lot of times the people in those families are prioritizing their own interest and their own ego and their own sense of self that comes from these titles and these positions above the interest of anybody else.
	And that's what makes it kind of interaging at the end of the day.
	Yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	I mean, the odds of Dr. Jill Biden giving up her status as first lady voluntarily.
	As you said, just Alfred Man.
	You know what?
	I don't actually want to be the wife of a senator anymore.
	So in the interest of the people of Pennsylvania, we're going to go ahead and resign.
	Or Hunter Biden voluntarily, you know, pushing the dad to step away from power.
	So now we've got a very aged 80-year-old president.
	And you're right to point out there's a difference between various 80-year-olds.
	You know, there's a guy across the street from me here at the Jersey Shore.
	I met him last summer, 91.
	He was so vibrant.
	He was fit.
	He looked great.
	I never did get his secret out of him.
	But I'm just saying there's a difference, right?
	You could be 91 and like that.
	You could be 80 like Biden.
	And now NPR is just finally noticing that this president is an aged 80.
	He's an infirm 80, finally deciding it's okay to report on how he's using the short stairs to get on Air Force One, something that has been in at least the conservative press now for months.
	If you were paying attention at all, you noticed that they shifted his entry on board the plane and his departure to the middle of the plane and their shorter stairs as opposed to the long stairs because he continues to fall up them.
	And of course, the article is complete with quotes from people like David Axelrod saying the voters don't care.
	You don't measure presidents by their ability to navigate steps.
	You elect presidents based on their ability to navigate problems.
	To me, I read this and all I can think is he just doesn't want Obama to stop being the secret president.
	He's like, just keep him, right?
	Just keep him in there.
	I mean, the thing about it is, you know, there's some areas and topics that require expertise and people feel intimidated by if they don't have that expertise.
	If you talk about medicine or law or, you know, any number of fields that require actual expertise to participate fully.
	But people are very capable of seeing when somebody else is impaired because as I said, it's a very common thing that we all deal with in our lives and our families and our friends and everywhere else.
	And people could see with their own eyes that Joe Biden is a completely different person than he was even five years ago, let alone 10 years ago and 20 years ago.
	And he's a very impaired person in the way that an older person becomes very slowed down, very kind of just often lost and incapable of navigating.
	themselves physically and mentally.
	It is not just physical impairment.
	It is mental impairment.
	I always go back to the fact, Megan, you can go and watch some amazing clips from MSNBC in particular.
	In 2018 and 2019, Democratic insiders, those kind of strategist types that go on cable, were very concerned that Joe Biden was going to get the nomination, primarily due to the fact that he was the most known figure for serving at Obama's side for all those years and that he's been around forever because they were saying he's in cognitive decline.
	He is not capable of withstanding the rigors of a campaign, let alone the presidency.
	These were Democratic insiders saying that.
	And of course, once Biden got the nomination, it became prohibited to say it any longer.
	It was immoral and cruel or whatever.
	But they were the ones saying it first.
	And that was five, this is 2018.
	And you can see the difference visibly just in these four to five years.
	So if they think they're going to hide this from voters, polls already show this widespread concern.
	It's not something you need expertise to detect.
	It's extremely visible.
	There's no lying your way around it.
	And I think Democrats are in a gigantic amount of denial about the problem this is going to present to them.
	I really do.
	Oh, they think this is going to pass.
	This is going to appease us.
	Listen to Corrine Jean-Pierre talking about this to CNN the other day.
	It is hard for us to keep up with this president who is constantly, constantly working every day to get things done and making sure that we are delivering for the American people.
	And that's what, and I think that's what matters.
	I get it.
	I get what you're asking me, but the record matters too, Jake.
	Cognitively, it may actually be hard for Corine Jean-Pierre to keep up with Joe Biden.
	I mean, I'm not going to doubt her on that.
	She's not a smart person.
	Sorry, she's not.
	But this is a lie that all the aides keep planting in all the magazine articles and the newspaper articles about how they can barely keep up with him, Glenn.
	We know it's a lie.
	I think one of the reasons why this is such a danger for Democrats is because this is something I think people feel confident in their own abilities.
	They don't need to be told what to think about this.
	This is something people feel very comfortable in assessing for themselves.
	And I think what this is, is not just ineffective, it's like an aggressive insult to people's intelligence to try and tell them to believe something that with their own eyes they know is a lie.
	And it's also disrespectful, classic gaslight.
	And it's also disrespectful because they're essentially saying, we know that you can see this person is not capable of running this country, but we're going to continue to insist that he stay in power anyway.
	It's the ultimate entitlement syndrome.
	Even if people aren't wondering yet who's really behind Joe Biden, who the real president is, which I think is going to start becoming the question.
	I just think it seems very disrespectful to Americans to tell them that this person is just somehow divinely entitled to remain in power, even though everyone can see with their own eyes that he's not capable of doing the job.
	Yes, that's so well put.
	That's exactly how I'm feeling.
	Because they're not honest about it.
	In the same way, I have to say, McConnell's office is clearly not being honest about whatever medical issue he is struggling with.
	And we have a right to know.
	We have a right to know because these people have very important positions.
	Now you have Biden after 10 days of terrible coverage since last Monday when he went finally to Maui and stepped all over himself and referenced his house fire from years ago that he exaggerated and lied about and talked about how his Corvette almost got damaged and maybe he almost lost a cat.
	You know, we've gone over the numbers.
	He does it again.
	He talked about it again from the White House yesterday.
	Listen here.
	I didn't know anything like that, but I lately struck my house.
	We had to be out of that house for about seven months.
	I was prepared because so much damage was done to the house and half the house almost collapsed.
	Oh, my God.
	Stop doing that.
	There's no way they haven't told him to stop doing that, but he can't remember.
	No, this is the thing, Megan.
	I mean, I think this is the other danger for Democrats.
	Whatever else you want to say about Joe Biden, I've never obviously been a fan of Joe Biden.
Character Flaws and History 00:15:33
	His ideology is politics, quite the contrary.
	He has always had a certain kind of political talent.
	Like, there's no denying that.
	He has the sort of ability to relate to people in a way that just makes them seem like an ordinary person, even though he's been in Washington since the age of 29 in the U.S. Senate, has had anything but an ordinary life.
	He has that kind of like innate political skill.
	And it isn't just his cognitive abilities and his physical resilience that are rapidly disappearing before our own eyes.
	It's also that ability to connect to other people and to make them seem like he understands.
	And Matt, I mean, that fire in Maui is horrific.
	You're talking about over a thousand children dead, you know, people's homes destroyed, their lives irrevocably wrecked.
	And for him to go in front of a camera after being very distant from this entire disaster, saying no comment that time at the beach and then claiming he didn't hear their question and trying to imply that he has had a similar sort of disaster in his own life because there was like a garage spark one time that almost burned down his car or something is just a kind of like tone deaf,
	you know, just like political disaster that I think you're going to be seeing more and more of because it's part of this decline.
	There was a Babylon B post the other day, the headline of which was, Biden comforts hurricane victims, meaning in Florida, by talking about time the urinal splash back at him a little.
	I mean, you know, he does, he always has had this propensity to just like pathologically lie.
	I think people have forgotten he had to drop out of the presidential race in 1988 when he got caught lying about like the smallest things, like his grades and, you know, where he finished in school.
	He's, he is a pathological liar.
	He has gotten caught lying and inventing like major stories about Nelson Mandela and his role in the civil rights movement and then much smaller things as well.
	So it is part of his character.
	But he, if you're going to be a liar in public, you have to be skillful about it.
	And he's losing that skill completely as well.
	It's like he's now just a bad liar on top of it.
	He's always been a fairly good liar.
	And I think, again, you look at this polling data and it is true that a majority of Americans don't want a Biden Trump race.
	That is true.
	But ultimately, I think the fact that Trump still seems perfectly vibrant and obviously very mentally present, you know, to say nothing of other Republican candidates.
	And then you compare them to Joe Biden for a lot of people, ideology and party does not rule their lives.
	They want somebody they believe is going to do a job that will improve their lives.
	And if they feel like somebody is basically like crippled mentally and physically or exhausted or whatever, I think that's going to make a difference for a lot of people.
	Okay, but now, meanwhile, elsewhere in the Democratic field, things are getting interesting.
	There's like a little smoke coming up in the ranks in the Dems.
	And I'm not speaking about RFKJ or Marianne Williamson.
	Bernie Sanders and Cornell West.
	What do you make of, well, get the audience up to speed on what they've been doing and why they've become a little bit more interesting as we look forward to 2024, even though we're assured, we're assured Biden's running for a second term.
	Well, so first of all, Cornell West is just one of the more interesting people in our cultural life.
	He's incredibly well-spoken.
	He's a learned person.
	He's been in academic institutions.
	I think he's extremely smart.
	I've talked to him a lot.
	I really believe that.
	He's been very widely respected his whole life.
	He wrote a book called Race Matters in the 1990s that's considered by a lot of people one of the most profound intellectual works on race.
	And aside from that, he was a very close friend of Bernie Sanders.
	He was a vigorous supporter of the Sanders campaign both in 2016 and 2020 when Bernie ran for president.
	Cornell West has always been a left-wing critic of the Democratic Party.
	He's never liked the Democratic Party, but he's kind of maintained like one foot inside of it, the way Bernie used to pretend to do.
	Now Cornell West thinks both parties are equally terrible, that he can't support either.
	And he's running as a third-party candidate with the Green Party, the way Joe Stein did in 2016.
	And one major problem for the Democrats is that he is a very respected black intellectual, very popular among a lot of black voters on whom Democrats rely in every election to win.
	But he's also somebody I think people are going to start to see who has this ability to speak to working class people in a way that makes them feel like they're not hearing stale left-wing dogma.
	He's exciting.
	He's charismatic.
	He's funny.
	He's very human.
	He produces music.
	He sings.
	He'll break into song in the middle of interviews like he did when I had him on my show.
	And I think he poses a huge threat to the Democratic Party because even if you take 2% or 3% from Joe Biden, that obviously can make a difference in the way our elections are run.
	And the amazing thing is, Macon, that Bernie Sanders, his entire life has prided himself on his independence from the Democratic Party.
	Literally, he's never been a member of the Democratic Party.
	Even now, he's an independent senator.
	He doesn't belong to either party technically, even though he caucuses with the Democrats.
	So for them to send out, of all people, Bernie Sanders to attack Cornell West, and for Bernie to be willing to do it, to attack his good friend, someone who supported him for many years, shows that there is no more internal dissent within the Democratic Party.
	I was in Milwaukee.
	Everybody who watched that debate saw the incredibly intense ideological and political conflicts the Republican Party has internally, which I think is very healthy.
	Democrats are in total lockstep, including the parts of the party that pretended for a long time to be defiant and rebellious.
	Bernie's patch phrase in 2016 was our revolution.
	The revolutionary, the radical revolutionary is now Joe Biden's chief party enforcer to the point of being willing publicly to exploit his old fake persona to attack Cornell West.
	And I don't know.
	I think that's going to alienate a lot of people more than it's going to persuade them.
	So interesting to hear you explain that.
	Okay, so here's a bit of Cornell West going on Charlemagne's show, The Breakfast Club, on August 7th, talking about Bernie Sanders.
	Take a listen here, Saadi.
	I love the brother.
	And, you know, even in love, people have deep disagreements about these things.
	But I think, again, he's fearful of the neo-fascism of Trump.
	People look at Biden.
	They don't really want to tell the full truth.
	He's created the best economy that we can get.
	Is this the best that we can get?
	You're going to tell that lie to the people just for Biden to win?
	Okay.
	And then, as you point out, out comes Bernie Sanders with a response directed at Cornell West.9.
	Where I disagree with my good friend, Cornell West, is I think in these really very difficult times where there is a real question whether democracy is going to remain in the United States of America.
	think we have got to bring the entire progressive community uh to defeat trump or whoever the republican nominee will be okay and then one more for you uh cornell west went on rising uh with you know the hill and uh had had an interesting pov that we should play take a listen it's hot 10.
	Brother Bernie's making a plausible argument, but I think deep down in his heart, he knows that the Democratic Party has no fundamental intention of speaking to the needs of poor people and working people.
	The AND A OC and the others are going to be, in a certain sense, window dressing at worst and, at best, people to appeal to every four years.
	So, Glenn He Cornell West is not persuaded by the Bernie message of we've got to get the entire Democratic Party unified and on board to defeat the fascist Trump.
	You know, I have to say Megan, like Bernie Sanders, it's sad to watch because he is a politician for whom I had personal respect.
	I think a lot of people, even people who don't like his ideology in Washington, will say, whatever you want to say about Bernie, he has integrity in the sense that he's always true to his principles.
	What he's doing now is so despicable because in 2016, this is exactly the argument that was made against Bernie Sanders was, look, we have this Hitler like menace in Donald Trump.
	This is not a time to have infighting within the Democratic Party.
	You're threatening American democracy by running against Hillary Clinton and damaging her and to this day, a lot of them blame Bernie Sanders for sabotaging Hillary Clinton in the general election and beyond that Megan, people don't want to face the fact in the Democratic Party that it isn't people like me saying this.
	It's people like Elizabeth Warren and Donna Brazil, the former chairwoman of the DNC, who said that in 2016, the Democrats cheated, they rigged the election in order to ensure that Bernie lost and that Hillary won and that she would win no matter what.
	And so to watch Bernie now turn around to the same party that refuses to hold any presidential debates, to declare Joe Biden the winner, even though he has two primary challengers before a single vote is cast, that cheated and rigged the election when he ran, and to pretend now that the Democrats are the only guardians of democracy, without whom we will no longer be a democracy, and not only that, but to do so by attacking Cornell West, someone who's supposed to be his friend, in such harsh terms, I think is really grotesque.
	And look, you saw Cornell West in that clip.
	I mean, it's not hard to understand why Democrats the last poll showed 20 of black Americans are saying they're going to vote for Donald Trump.
	Maybe that was an outlier, maybe that, but no question.
	Trump has attracted more and more non-white voters the more.
	He stayed in public life and if you have someone like Cornell West going and saying that stuff that he just said, Democrats don't care about the working class, they don't care about the poor.
	That is not something that Democrats want, and I don't think they believe they can persuade Cornell West to stop.
	And so they've launched this repulsive campaign, trying to depict him as a deadbeat dad, as a tax cheat like what's next drug dealer, and it really shows just how craven these people are.
	The Daily Beast had a piece up this month.
	Cornell West owes more than half a million in unpaid taxes.
	They went and pulled public records from New Jersey and California claiming he owes the IRS uh 543 000 In outstanding federal tax liens.
	I don't know what the circumstances of all this are, but they're happy to come after him because he actually may be siphoning votes off from their dear leader.
	And Joe Biden cannot afford to lose any votes, never mind votes within the black community.
	Why do you think he moved South Carolina up first for the Democratic primary?
	It's a reward to Jim Clyborne and for South Carolina for essentially helping him become the Democratic nominee.
	He cannot lose the black vote, period.
	But they are losing the black vote.
	I mean, there's going to obviously be the most unified and concerted push on behart of behalf of every powerful Democratic, every behalf of every powerful institution in this country outside of a few media companies and others, but in general, the entire power center in the United States is going to be united behind Joe Biden.
	The propaganda campaign launched against the American people will be unlike anything we've ever seen before.
	Remember, in 2016, the FBI concocted a fake Russia gate scandal.
	In 2020, the CIA lied to voters right before the vote by telling them the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, which was a complete and utter lie that the corporate media spread.
	That shows the extent, the lengths to which they're willing to go to try and win this election.
	So there's going to be a huge propaganda push, but I think a lot of black voters are coming to the realization that Democrats love black voters as long as black voters do what Democrats tell them to do.
	And that is not something that most people want to accept.
	Yes, this is from early August.
	The Trump campaign highlighted an Emerson College poll out of Michigan showing Trump and Biden tied, each with 44%.
	And when Cornell West was added as a choice, Joe Biden lost the state of Michigan to Trump.
	43% for Trump, 41% for Biden.
	West got 4% of the vote.
	They can't have it.
	They cannot, they cannot have it.
	He doesn't have it to spare.
	He did not win in any sort of a landslide last time around, meeting Joe Biden.
	He can't, he needs every single vote.
	And Cornell West could be a very interesting spoiler.
	You know, we'll see.
	Unlike this speculation about the third party and possibly running Joe Manchin, as you point out, Cornell West is already aligned with a Green Party that knows how to get you on the ballot and actually will siphon votes away.
	Yeah, and I have to say, Megan, you know, Cornell West is not Jill Stein.
	I have a lot of respect for Jill Stein.
	You know, I don't agree with her on everything, to put that mildly, but I think she's a good and decent person.
	But when it comes to political talent and charisma, Cornell West is in a different universe.
	And also, Cornell West is black and Jill Stein is white.
	And when it comes to black voters, I think Cornell West is going to have a lot of say.
	And if he spends the next months, even if at the end of the day he withdraws or endorses Joe Biden, whatever, but if he spends the next six months with that message that you displayed, and when he was on my show, I mean, he spent 30 or 40 minutes just bashing the Democratic Party.
	He agrees with the Trump position on Ukraine, which is kind of the DeSantis position, the Vivek position.
	He agrees with the Republicans on trade issues or the Trump side on trade issue.
	So if he's going out there and saying that sort of thing, the Democratic Party doesn't care about you.
	They have these rich people telling you how great the economy is, but that's because people like you aren't benefiting and they don't care about you, all of which is true and which he's extremely effective in conveying.
	It's going to do a lot of damage, though.
	It's the Trump message in a lot of ways.
	And Trump was the big middle finger to the establishment that had forgotten the working class.
	And Cornell West could be the same thing for those Democrats who wouldn't go so far as to vote Republican, vote for Donald Trump, but want to give the middle finger and badly.
	And so he's an option that they haven't had before.
	So it does get pretty interesting.
	Let me ask you about something that's been in the news.
	And we talked about it with Victor Davis Hansen earlier this week.
	The notion that's growing in some corners that Joe Biden's not, he's not going to run.
	This is, he's going to have to withdraw because of his infirmity, because of the scandal around Hunter and himself, and that, you know, he's going to stay on the ballot just long enough, but that he won't ultimately be the one running for the Democratic Party for all of these reasons.
	And they just sort of have to keep it going long enough that they can get some other comers in the mix and it won't just be handed to Kamala Harris, who they know can't win.
	What do you think?
	I mean, there was a lot of speculation like this in 2020 when the claim was that Michelle Obama was going to swoop in, or even Andrew Cuomo before his scandals was going to swoop in and become the real nominee.
	So I am always skeptical of this.
	I mean, I don't think the Democratic Party apparatus gets completely geared up and fired up and says Joe Biden is our candidate.
	There is nobody other that we're considering.
	Only they ditch him at the last minute.
	Because again, I think it gets back to that thing we were talking about at the beginning.
	And I don't know, maybe for people who aren't like this, it's hard to understand.
	But Joe Biden's entire life has been about holding political power.
	Before he won in 2020, he ran for president three times.
The Trump Political Strategy 00:08:13
	So this is their life goal, like to get this power.
	I don't think they're just going to voluntarily relinquish it.
	They need it for their self-esteem.
	They have no purpose without it.
	You know, it's sad.
	You should have a balanced life.
	Like, if you lose this, you have this in your life.
	They don't have this, Megan.
	This is everything to them.
	That's why they stay until they're 90 and 95 and lose their dignity.
	And I just don't see Joe Biden voluntarily relinquishing the thing that he spent his entire life pursuing.
	Yeah, I agree with you.
	It's the power crackpipe.
	There's Hunter with the actual crackpipe, and then there's the power crackpipe, which is even harder to put down.
	I think it's a harder addiction.
	Yeah, go ahead.
	There's a lot more to go through, including Vivek Ramaswamy in the news quite a bit having a contentious exchange with Sean Hannity the other night.
	We'll get to it.
	All right, so this just breaking via Axios.
	Well, I guess not just breaking, but came out within the past day or two.
	Trump pollster, Tony Fabrizio, is telling Republican donors that Nikki Haley is surging in Iowa right now.
	This is according to his polling.
	She's surging in Iowa and that she and Vivek are essentially tied with Governor DeSantis in New Hampshire.
	This is according to a polling memo that Axios obtained.
	He wrote that his latest poll, which is looking at likely Republican voters, that's what you always want to look for.
	Forget, just registered, likely Republican voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, shows Trump, of course, still far ahead.
	And he claims in this that DeSantis is flatlined.
	Haley has surged.
	And Ramaswamy is seen as last week's debate winner, saying that there was no bounce for DeSantis as a result of the debate.
	Now, DeSantis' polling firm, Public Opinion Strategies, released its own internal Iowa poll this week to Fox that also did find Nikki Haley rising in Iowa after the debate, but found DeSantis closer to Trump.
	Now, this is what qualifies as good news these days for the DeSantis camp via Trump versus Trump.
	The Trump pollster found that Trump was ahead of DeSantis in Iowa by 26 points.
	But DeSantis pollsters point out quickly, their poll shows Trump only ahead by 20 points in Iowa.
	I mean, in any other election cycle, having covered so many of these, Glenn, this would be a joke.
	Nobody touts.
	I'm within 20 points of him.
	That's a crusher.
	Seven points would have been considered a huge lead, you know, four or eight years ago.
	No one's like, it's only 20.
	It's not 26.
	So what do you make of this?
	It reminds me when Joe Lieberman ran for president, I think in 2008, and he was hated by the party base.
	The Democratic Party basically voted against him in the primary and he ended up being reelected as independent, but he ran for president and it was totally at the bottom of the polls.
	And then in New Hampshire, he came in fifth place, but he announced that he was so close that basically it was a three-way tie for third place and he was celebrating it.
	There were the media was kind of calling it Joe Momentum as a way of kind of mocking him.
	And that is kind of what you see.
	I mean, obviously, if you're Donald Trump, what you want is to divide the field as much as possible.
	That's how he won in 2016.
	He didn't get 50% of the Republican votes, but you had Marco Rubio and Jeff Bush and Ted Cruz and several others dividing the vote.
	And all he needed was 35 to 40% when every primary.
	And that's, he's, he obviously has at least 35 to 40% in the Republican voting base that is not going to abandon him no matter what.
	So if you're him, you want to make sure you don't have just one alternative and Governor DeSantis, but you play up every other alternative, Nikki Haley, the Beck Ramaswamy, Tim Scott, whomever, to divide them as much as possible.
	That's obviously the Trump strategy and not just strategy that makes political sense.
	I think the issue here is that, and I think this doesn't get appreciated enough, is that Donald Trump didn't win in 2016 simply because he was like a famous TV host or is charismatic or people like him in the Republican Party.
	He won because he had a very clear ideological message, which was to repudiate Republican Party orthodoxy on both foreign policy as expressed by the Bush-Chaning neoconservative worldview and even economic policy as expressed by Reaganomics, the idea that what we want are tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, even though he did that in office, that wasn't what he ran on.
	And that is an ideology that I think it is going to be very difficult for someone to compete with Donald Trump if you don't embrace that ideology.
	Nikki Haley and Mike Pence and Tim Scott, Chris Christie, don't believe in that ideology.
	They are violently opposed to it.
	And I think it's the problem for DeSantis is how do you make gains on Donald Trump when you seem a little bit afraid to really draw a sharp contrast between yourself and him because you fear alienating Trump voters.
	That is a real concern for DeSantis.
	I just don't know the way out of it.
	I don't think he does either.
	I think they're all running just in case Trump gets incarcerated and the electorate turns on him.
	Like there's or dies.
	I mean, truly, what, what other way is there around Trump at this point?
	Like it's kind of, okay, I mean, I guess we can just wait and see, but he maybe he took like a hit of two points in a poll or two for not debating.
	And now we're celebrating he's only ahead by 20 in one state, but still ahead on a national basis over 40 points.
	Like this is not a strategy.
	So it's got to be, these are not dumb men and not a done, dumb woman in Nikki's case.
	They've got to just be hoping he implodes with the electorate when the criminal trials pile on, when they actually get started, when people start to see it in the news every day and get sick of not seeing Trump ads as opposed to just Trump sitting in court or Trump rallies as opposed to Trump sitting in court.
	Or they're banking on him being 77 and no longer.
	I mean, honestly, I don't see the strategy beyond that.
	But to your point, Glenn, I want to say this.
	You hit it spot on because this Fabrizio memo shows that Team Trump is now emphasizing DeSantis' early struggles, trying to shift the campaign's narrative from Trump versus DeSantis to Trump versus everyone else.
	The more people wonder, like Trump is propping up Ramaswamy.
	Do you actually think Trump would let Ramaswamy live politically for one day if he thought Ramaswamy was a threat to him?
	He'd club him like a harp seal.
	So he's letting him live and ride on his coattails because it's good for him to have other people challenging DeSantis.
	Absolutely.
	I think it's smart politics.
	I think he's being well advised, honestly.
	Why would you go to a debate when you have a 50-point lead?
	The thing I think is so interesting, though, is there are four criminal indictments, as you know, two in the federal court system, two in the state court system against Donald Trump with possibly more indictments coming.
	And it isn't just that his support in the Republican Party is consolidating, not just despite that, but obviously because of it.
	A lot of Republicans see this as political persecution.
	And they want it.
	They don't want it.
	That's an existential threat for the rule of law and for some fundamental pieces of our democracy.
	It's more than just, I'm very angry about what you're doing to him.
	That's a piece of it.
	But it's also, it's a before and after moment for the country and we are going to fight.
	We're not crossing that line willingly or without going like he must win now in order to prove a point.
	Keep going.
	Totally, totally agree.
	And I don't think that is so surprising.
	I think, though, what is surprising to me, at least, maybe not to other people, is that you're not really seeing any weakening among independents or those kind of like non-MAGA people either.
	It's not like every time he gets indicted, Joe Biden moves ahead of Trump.
	I mean, Megan, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, being criminally indicted at any point in your life, let alone while you were running, would be instantly fatal.
	But there is so much distrust in the legitimacy of our institutions.
	I think validly so, that getting indicted at this point almost seems like a benefit.
	You know, like people have concluded that these institutions are being weaponized and they are.
	Every one of them, including journalistic outlets, have abandoned their core function for a politicized aim.
	People see that.
	And I don't know, I do find it surprising that even among independents and non-MAGA loyalists, Trump's support is not softening as a result of these indictments.
	If anything, it's strengthening.
Nuanced Foreign Policy Debates 00:08:27
	Yeah, it's somebody asked me, like, what can DeSantis do?
	And I said, get indicted?
	Could hurt.
	Okay, so let's talk about Vivek because Vivek is interesting to watch for a number of reasons.
	I confess, you know, I like him personally, but he's kind of annoying as a candidate in some ways.
	I'm kind of over the, I didn't say that.
	I didn't say that this is all a media attack.
	When he did say it, just like, fucking stand by what you said and then explain it.
	But it's Casa, if you look, I'm going to put one of these together so people can see what I'm doing.
	It's just annoying.
	I was like, I didn't say that, whether he's in front of Andrea Mitchell or Sean Hannity.
	And it's like, you got the quote right here.
	You did say it.
	Just go ahead and contextualize it, explain it.
	Or say you're new at foreign policy and you're figuring it out.
	Stop calling everybody a liar and then touting what a courageous person you are, which is what he does.
	If you go listen to his soundbites, I'm the only one with the courage to say this.
	I'm the only one who has the courage to say this.
	Okay, we get it.
	You're very courageous.
	Just ask you.
	This is what I'm finding annoying about him.
	However, there are a lot of things about Vivek I really like.
	So I just think his personal style is becoming irritating, notwithstanding that his message may be resonating, at least irritating to me.
	So full disclosure there.
	So he goes on with Hannity on Monday, and they start to get into the foreign policy stuff, including Israel, where Sean raises some comments that he made about weaning Israel off of U.S. aid by 2028 in a podcast with Russell Brand.
	Sean raises it.
	Here's what happens.
	You said aid to Israel, our number one ally, only democracy in the region should end in 2028, and that they should be integrated with their neighbors.
	I have an exact quote.
	You want me to read it?
	That's actually.
	Yeah, I can tell you the exact quote.
	What I said is it would be a mark of success if we ever got to a point in our relationship with Israel, if Israel never needed the United States' aid.
	Why did you say that Israel should not have preferential treatment from us?
	That's a direct quote.
	Sean, I understand.
	No, those are direct quotes from headlines summarized by opposition research fed to the fake news media.
	Abraham Akorzo 2.0 is my top priority, which is to get Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, into that pact with Israel.
	And foremost, to have a partnership with Israel that does something really important for the U.S., which is to make sure that Iran never, ever, ever has nuclear capabilities.
	So I don't read from the traditional GOP talking point binder that's handed to traditional candidates.
	That's true.
	That lends itself to being misquoted.
	Okay.
	So that's one example.
	Now, I know you have a different view on Israel in general than a lot of these core Republicans do.
	But this support for Israel has been like a must-do for any Republican candidate, including Donald Trump, even he didn't break that norm.
	So what's going on here?
	Yeah, well, and for every Democratic candidate, too.
	That's like the most bipartisan taboo there is.
	Though I will say, when one of the first ways, the reasons that neocons turned against Trump is because Trump came out in 2015 in an interview and said, I do think we have been too heavy-handed and on the side of the Israelis and are losing our ability to negotiate a peace deal with the Palestinians.
	We need to be more even-handed.
	And that will give us more credibility in the region to negotiate a peace deal to finally bring peace to that region.
	Something I think is very reasonable, but not something you're allowed to say.
	The backlash was immense.
	A month later, he was in front of APAC reciting the bipartisan consensus and sort of never gave up.
	In fact, went very far to the other extreme of being the most kind of pro-Israel president from the perspective of Israel you can find.
	In Vivek's case, I think he's raising reasonable points that absolutely are not popular among Republican voters, even MAGA voters who are not interested in intervention or in involving ourselves in other countries.
	Israel is a huge exception for religious reasons.
	I don't mean for Jewish voters.
	I mean for a lot of evangelical voters as well.
	Just geopolitically, it's been drummed into our head that supporting Israel is our moral obligation.
	And I'm glad there's somebody questioning that because I think all orthodoxy should be questioned.
	But as you said, if you're going to do that, if you're going to step forward and say, and it is true, he didn't say we should cut off aid to Israel.
	That's what Nikki Haley accused him of saying in the debate.
	And I think he was sensitive about Sean asking him about that because of that.
	That's why he said that's false.
	But what he's saying is a nuanced point, which is, look, it would be a better relationship, not just for us, but for Israel, if they weren't dependent upon our aid, if they were self-sufficient.
	Maybe some people agree with that.
	Maybe some people won't.
	It's a perfectly reasonable point to make.
	But if you're going to make it, as you said, Megan, go make it.
	Don't keep accusing everybody of being a liar because they're asking you and pointing out that you do have heterodox views on Israel.
	He does.
	And he should stand up and say, I do.
	And here's the reason.
	And I think that it would be a lot more respected if he did that.
	I hope he does start doing that.
	He admitted six months ago or so that he, actually, I'm not sure how long ago, but within the past couple of months, that he doesn't know much about foreign policy.
	And I don't think anybody expected him to know that much about foreign policy.
	You know, there's no reason to believe he would.
	And what's getting annoying, Glenn, is the way he speaks about it is as though he's been heading up the Council on Foreign Relations for the past 20 years.
	And everybody else is an idiot.
	And only Vivek has the courage to tell you the truth.
	And then he says something.
	And then as soon as he realizes he stepped in quicksand, he quickly tries to reverse it, accuses the media of making it up, and then slightly modifies it to make it less controversial.
	And he starts getting a little further.
	Same thing happened on Taiwan, right?
	Where he clearly said some controversial things to Hugh Hewitt about what's going to happen with Taiwan.
	We're going to ramp up our defenses of Taiwan.
	We're going to abandon strategic ambiguity on Taiwan.
	Instead, we're going to make it very clear to China, UF with Taiwan through now through 2028 until we have semiconductor independence here in America.
	It's on.
	It's hot war.
	We're moving destroyers over there.
	We're going to arm all the Taiwanese, which would be a massive provocation to the Chinese.
	But then in 2028, after we somehow magically develop all our semiconductors back here in America, which we have not yet been able to do, but we're going to somehow magically do it under Vivek.
	Then we're going to go back to strategic ambiguity with China.
	Like, just kidding, we didn't mean it.
	Our destroyers are gone.
	We're going to take back those weapons.
	We gave the Taiwan.
	This is absurd stuff.
	It's absurd stuff.
	I would much rather Vivek say, I don't have Taiwan figured out.
	I'm not sure anybody has Taiwan figured out.
	But here's what I can tell you.
	I am, unlike Donald Trump, I'm going to get the best people in there and I'm going to listen to them like I did as a business executive.
	That's why I have hundreds of millions of dollars and you don't.
	Yeah, you know, I think it's complicated.
	You know, I had a, I met Vivek, I think two years ago or so about a different project.
	And I remember walking away from the very first call I had with him thinking, I don't think I've ever interacted with anybody with as much tangible self-confidence as he has.
	Let's use just like a neutral term for that, self-confidence.
	He has a high amount of belief in his own abilities that has sort of been vindicated for him along the way.
	He got very rich, very young.
	He went to the best schools, et cetera.
	Constantly, this kind of reinforcement that you are the smartest, you know everything.
	You're capable of things.
	Other people aren't.
	When President, remember, like when President Obama decided he was going to run for the presidency in 2006, he had been in the United States Senate for all of two years.
	And before that, he was in the state Senate.
	He had no foreign policy experience, zero, none.
	But when Hillary Clinton and other people would attack him for that, and then when John McCain did as well, his had a very good argument, which is, you know what?
	I don't have foreign policy experience.
	And I actually think that that is a good thing because you people in the foreign policy community with all your expertise have messed up foreign policy to such an extent that I'd rather have someone randomly picked from the phone book running foreign policy than people with all these great credentials.
	There are ways to address this, but I do think a little bit of humility, even if it's fake, is necessary because at some point that can, with exposure, start to go from self-confidence to a very kind of unpleasant arrogance.
	You can't just go around announcing that everybody else is dumb and only you are smart or seem like that's your mindset.
	So he's very new at all this.
	Four months ago, Megan, nobody knew who he was.
Inflation Rates and Job Creation 00:10:08
	Nobody.
	And hopefully, I do think he's very smart.
	I interviewed him the morning after his debate in Milwaukee.
	I can see this kind of like, I get why people aren't have that.
	He has like this gravitational pull.
	I get that.
	I think he's going to, I hope he's going to figure out some of these like more nuanced aspects of being a candidate because I do think he's raising important political debates and I don't want him to alienate people with his personality traits.
	I agree with you.
	And if he were smart, he'd be listening to us right now because you don't want to be the annoying smartest kid in the class correcting everyone.
	You're wrong and you're wrong and the teacher's wrong.
	And I'll show you how it's actually supposed to be done when you're in fact saying some things that may or may not be correct at all, right?
	You don't actually have the stuff to back up these statements.
	Like the Taiwan plan is absolutely insane.
	In any event, that's grading.
	That's why the other Republicans don't like him.
	And he's got to find a way of wresting away their supporters without alienating the entirety of the GOP base.
	Glenn Greenwald, love talking to you.
	Thanks for coming on.
	Always great to be on Megan.
	Keep up the great work.
	Love your show.
	You too.
	We're heading into Labor Day weekend.
	Can you believe it?
	My God, summer's officially ending over.
	It is a day meant to celebrate the achievements and contributions of the worker.
	But these days, many Americans are feeling overwhelmed, saddled by high prices, and drowning under a record $1 trillion in credit card balances.
	According to the Real Clear Politics average of polls, just 38% of Americans approve of the job President Biden is doing on the economy.
	And yet you wouldn't know that if you listened to Joe Biden bragging about his economic policies, you know, Bidenomics, how it's going to really help him in the 2024 election.
	And it just might if the media does what it normally does.
	Well, and my next guest has a new book on a future where the elites will own everything and you will own nothing.
	And the book is called, You Will Own Nothing, Your War with the New Financial World Order and How to Fight.
	back.
	Carol Roth is with me.
	She's a former investment banker.
	She joins me now.
	She went to Wharton, Lafonse School of Business.
	Carol, it's great to see you.
	So Bidenomics, the president's leaning in.
	He's decided to own it in the way Obama leaned into Obamacare.
	I like it.
	He said, I like it.
	And here's Joe Biden just on Tuesday loving Bidenomics.
	Said 18.
	The Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, I don't think the amended as a compliment originally started referring to my economic policies as Bidenomics.
	Well, guess what?
	It's working.
	What would a Biden stop be without the creepy whisper?
	So is it?
	Is it working?
	It's not working, Megan.
	It's not working.
	I love it.
	I love the fact that just because he's put a little brand name around it and a trademark, Bidenomics, that all of a sudden that he could say that it's working.
	We have a war that's going on here, a financial war.
	And it's not between political parties.
	It's between the middle and working class and the elite.
	And the reality is under President Biden, people who are in the middle and working class have gotten crushed.
	They cannot keep up with the cost of living.
	We know that it's costing almost $8,000 plus extra dollars a year just for the basics.
	Wages haven't kept pace with it.
	People can't afford to buy homes.
	And the basic tenor of the financial situation is one where people are really struggling and they feel like the American dream is more and more out of reach.
	The challenge that we have in terms of Biden is that the media keeps telling him what a great job they're doing, that home ownership isn't important, or that people not selling their homes, coming out of their homes is the cause of why the economy is stagnating or why the Fed is being held back instead of pointing the fingers at the people who are creating these policies.
	The reality is that people know what's going on.
	They go to the grocery store.
	They try to keep up with their payments.
	And while the economy may not be having a broad recession, we are definitely seeing the signs of individual recessions where people are dipping into savings and loading up on their credit cards and killing their personal balance sheets.
	And at the expense of the American people, the economy is still quote unquote doing okay.
	Okay.
	So it's very true, according to every poll, that the economy is the number one issue for voters, Dem or Republican, number one issue.
	The real clear politics of all polls shows Biden's job approval on the economy is only 38%, almost 60%, 58.9%, disapprove of the job he's doing.
	So he's basically lost two-thirds of the American electorate's confidence when it comes to the economy.
	However, however, I listen to podcasts on the left and the right and take my news in from the left and the right, just so I'm aware of what everybody's saying.
	And about, I don't know, a month ago, The Daily, the New York Times podcast, it's their daily news podcast.
	It's called The Daily.
	They gave him the most glowing progress report on Bidenomics.
	And here are just some of the stats.
	Current U.S. unemployment rate is now 3.5%.
	It was 6.3% when Biden took office.
	Current annual inflation rate is 3.2%.
	It was 6.5% back in 2022 and flirted up even higher than that.
	And what they were saying on the daily, Carol, is it's worked that we had the inflation going up, And the Fed stepped in and started raising the interest rates and kind of pushed it and pushed it and pushed it and tried to thread the needle so that they wouldn't push it so much that they tip us over into a recession.
	And by George, they did it because the inflation rate has indeed calm down and we haven't gone into a recession.
	And despite all these credit rates now, the you know being so much higher to get a mortgage or get a car, get a loan, people are still borrowing and spending.
	So boom, there's the pigskin spiked in the end zone.
	You're welcome.
	It's working.
	I love the fact that, you know, Mark Twain once said that there's lies, damn lies, and statistics.
	And without context, you can make numbers say whatever you want them to say.
	So Joe Biden comes out and the media, like the New York Times, will run cover for this and say, look at all the jobs we've created.
	We've been this amazing job creator.
	You know, not mentioning the fact that it wasn't really creating jobs.
	It was reclaiming jobs because we shut down a third of the economy.
	So when you open those back up, those jobs came back online because they existed before.
	But it's not like he's had this amazing job creation program or environment that has fostered incredible job creation.
	So he wants to take credit for that.
	Something like the inflation rate.
	This is a head scratcher, but I knew they were going to do this.
	I tweeted about this multiple years ago because, you know, we are still having increased inflation above a sustainable level.
	The fact of the matter is it went up so high into the nine plus percent range that when you are comparing what's going on this year versus last year, sure, it's not, you know, as high in terms of the growth rate compared to last year versus last year versus the year before that, but we've still got another 3 plus percent on top of that.
	And that's if you even believe that inflation rate, you know, they've, they have reached.
	So this is like just to clarify, this is like when I go to the doctor and he says, you gained two pounds this year.
	And I say, what are you getting on me about two pounds for?
	Who gives a shit?
	And he says, you know what?
	If you gain two pounds a year for 10 years, guess how much weight you're going to be in 10 10 years from now?
	And he's like, at a point, 20, I'm going to be 20 pounds every year, which is a lot harder to lose.
	So if I gain the two pounds in this year and then I say, get off my back, but then I don't think about it.
	And then I go back two years from now and I've gained another three pounds.
	I can't just be like, it's only three pounds.
	He's like, no, you're five pounds heavier than you were two, right?
	So this is what you're talking about.
	Yeah.
	And I'm going to add another wrinkle to that.
	So it's basically like you gained five pounds last year and then this year you gained two pounds.
	You go, well, doctor, I'm doing so much better.
	I only gained two pounds this year.
	Okay, but you're up a net seven pounds.
	And that is the crux of the issue.
	And so we're still at a rate that is killing the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar.
	So every dollar that you're working for is purchasing less and less.
	And this is still at an unsustainable rate.
	And by the way, they haven't fixed any of the structural problems that caused many of these issues.
	So yes, we're in a period where things, the growth rate looks like it might be going down.
	You're now gaining two pounds instead of five.
	But what happens if next year you gain three because we haven't fixed our energy issues and we really haven't fixed the structural issues in terms of labor supply and we haven't fixed housing and we haven't fixed all the things that the Fed can't print.
	They can print dollars, but they can't print energy and they can't print housing.
	So we have these long-term structural issues that have been caused both by the Federal Reserve as well as by the Biden economic policies.
	And we haven't done anything to shift that.
	So we have a couple data points that, okay, yeah, we've gained two pounds instead of five, but it doesn't mean we're out of the woodwork yet.
	And either way, this is still real cost, long-term cost that you are going to bear unless there is a massive period of deflation that undoes things, which potentially comes with other bad scenarios like a recession or whatnot.
	You are going to be incurring those costs for the rest of your lives.
	And that is the fundamental issue here.
Anti-Business Government Interference 00:03:48
	And the American people aren't stupid.
	They understand that.
	And that is why so many people are unfavorable to the Biden presidency, even people who are Democrats and progressives, because they understand that the American dream is now out of reach and that the policies that he's putting forth, whatever he calls them, are not truly solving the underlying problem.
	He just seems so anti-business.
	I mean, just so anti-business.
	I remember when the Trump tax cuts passed, I was at NBC and a very senior executive there was talking about how much money NBC made as a result of the tax cuts and that they were going to be giving them back, like a large portion of them, they were going to be giving back to employees in the forms of bonuses and so on.
	So the workers benefited.
	The workers were thrilled ultimately at those Trump tax cuts because the corporations would trickle them down in the same way if you hike the corporate taxes, you're going to pay for that too as the employee.
	They're going to start laying people off.
	Well, Joe Biden, he's got exactly the opposite mentality.
	Just today, there's an article in Politico, new push from Biden administration to expand overtime pay.
	The Labor Department moved to expand overtime pay for millions, in particular for workers making less than $55,000 a year, saying they'd be automatically entitled to time and a half pay.
	This would impact about 3.6 million folks.
	But this to me is an obvious attempt at getting votes.
	And this is government interference with the way a corporation runs its business.
	Same thing we saw this week with the Medicare prices, the drug prices, these first 10 drugs now that are going to have to lower their prices in dealing with Medicare.
	It's a punishment of these corporations that have been, I know it's fun to hate on big pharma, but they innovate.
	They come up with, yes, the vaccines that are controversial, but also like our cancer drugs.
	And who's going to go find like the cures for Alzheimer's now if they realize every time they come up with one, you're going to have government stepping in to say, actually, you can't make your money back.
	You're going to have to lower the price because I, big government, have said it's not fair.
	Yeah.
	So on the Tax Cut and Jobs Act, they hate it so much that they didn't do anything to repeal it.
	And the reason they didn't do anything to repeal it is that outside of COVID, that after that was passed, they collected more tax revenue.
	This is proven to work time and time again.
	When you lower the taxes, they have increased the amount of tax revenue they collected.
	And they don't want to see that moving in the other direction, although it has a little bit this year.
	But so that's why they haven't done any movement to repeal this thing that was so awful that they hate so much that they decided to just leave it hanging out there.
	You know, on things like these central planning pushes to change worker pay and things like that, I obviously have a lot of sympathy towards the worker because as we said, Bidenomics and what the Fed's been doing over the last 15 years has crushed and frankly, in many cases, obliterated the middle and working class.
	So they do deserve to be making more of a wage.
	The challenge is that when you have government coming in to mandate something like that, it never works out.
	It's that good intention with that bad outcome.
	So if you now all of a sudden say, okay, at $55,000, if you work more than 40 hours a week, you're going to get time and a half.
	What are employers going to do?
	They're going to make sure you don't make the $55,000.
	They're going to cut your hours because with every incentive or disincentive is an outcome that is attached to it.
	And so you may have these great ideas that sound like they're being helpful, but we know the reality of how economics work.
Global Wealth and Human Nature 00:11:00
	You have to let the market basically sort this out.
	And that's the challenge.
	We've been having the Fed and the government and Biden administration, they're trying to tip the scales.
	They're trying to tip it in favor of whatever is going to benefit them and try and buy them votes.
	And it is creating these unequal outcomes in a non-merit-based way.
	You know, I'm okay with inequality when it comes from merit.
	Beyonce is the best singer.
	Michael Jordan's the best basketball player.
	Pay them more money.
	But if you have the government intervention, the one picking the winners and losers, whether it's at the corporate level or trying to buy votes or whatever, it always has bad, unintended outcomes.
	And so we have to find ways to remove barriers that allow American workers to make more, to allow people to create more wealth, to let them seize the American dream.
	But it can't be done by putting in more barriers.
	It just doesn't work that way.
	Well, this gets to your book and the title of the book.
	Like this, the belief that, you know, contrary to the Reagan mantra, government is the solution as opposed to government is the problem is all over the Biden economic policy, Bidenomics.
	And that's all over, I mean, every facet of it, that he thinks he's the answer.
	He thinks he can step in to fix things and everything he touches turns to gold.
	And that's his belief.
	And yet we have a whole host of economic data that proves exactly the opposite.
	So the title of your book, You Will Own Nothing, is tied to all of this because this is a mentality not only that we see in democratic leaders in our own country, but at the World Economic Forum and sort of these globalist leaders who think this is our future.
	Explain it.
	Yeah.
	So when I first heard you'll own nothing and you'll be happy, it's floating around Twitter.
	I just assumed that it was taken out of context because so many things floating around social media are.
	And when I knew what I knew of the World Economic Forum at that point in time is it's an organization that is tied to the business and political elite.
	So I was like, eh, there's no way that that organization with that kind of membership is going to be predicting the end of private property by 2030.
	And in this particular case, Megan, it took very little research to find it.
	In fact, you can go on their Twitter.
	I guess it's x.com now feed and find this video.
	And that is the number one prediction that they have.
	You'll own nothing and you'll be happy.
	And as somebody who has advocated for wealth creation opportunities for more than a quarter of a century now, I know that wealth comes from ownership.
	You have to own assets that have the ability to retain their value or to increase in value in order to gain wealth.
	So the idea that the people who are running businesses and running politics would be saying, we're going to remove that opportunity was incredibly frightening to me.
	And then I started to dissect the language.
	You know, the language is you'll own nothing.
	It's not will own nothing.
	The people who are making this prediction don't feel like they're a part of this wonderful outcome that's going to happen.
	So they're tipping their hand in just the way that they're putting it out there.
	And then the idea that you'll be happy, that you should buy into this carefree lifestyle where the government takes care of everything.
	Joe Biden is a man.
	He's going to take care of you, Megan.
	And if you buy into that, then it makes it much easier for them to affect.
	They don't have to put it on you by force.
	But as you well know, as a student of history, the people who haven't had property ownership, they have been very unfree.
	They have been very unhappy.
	In many cases, they have starved to death and lost their lives.
	So the idea that we're going to have some sort of utopia where there is no property ownership, it sounds like one of the isms.
	Pick your favorite one: communism, fascism, socialism, whatever it is.
	But it doesn't sound like a free market and it doesn't sound like the American ideal.
	Yeah, why can't I just move to North Korea or China?
	I don't have to wait.
	I can just have it tomorrow if I just pick up my suitcase and move.
	So what is the vision?
	I mean, explain it because this is stuff our mutual friend Glenn Beck talks about a lot, I know.
	But what is the vision?
	Why do they want us to own nothing so that they can control us, so that they can stop us from eating meat, they can save the planet, we will get rid of our SUVs.
	This is just a camel's nose under the tent to control everything.
	I think it goes back to the reality around history and human nature.
	The fact is that the United States has been the center of the global financial universe for about 80 years now.
	And so for all of us, excuse me, for all of us here, we can't think of anything else.
	It seems like we've always been through this period of prosperity and where we've had the upper hand and we've reaped the benefits.
	But it really is quite a recent thing.
	Before us, it was the British that were in that pole position.
	And before the British, it was the Dutch.
	So this is a cycle that changes throughout history on a every several generation basis.
	And so when you start talking about a new financial world order, which also sounds very conspiratorial, it isn't.
	It's sort of an outgrowth of history.
	And Joe Biden himself has mentioned this.
	He talked to the business roundtable, which is the CEOs of all the major publicly traded companies and biggest companies in the U.S. on March 21st, 2022.
	You can find this on the White House's website.
	And he says that the financial order shifts every few generations.
	And then he says there's going to be a new world order out there and we've got to lead it.
	And I'm assuming since he was talking to that audience, it meant that him as a representative of the political class and the business leaders and that they're the ones that are going to be in charge.
	So if you have a scenario, Megan, where the financial order is shifting on a global basis and you are people who are very wealthy and powerful, what do you do?
	Do you sit back and go, well, you know, I just hope that this works out for me.
	I hope that, you know, when things shift, I'm still on top.
	Or do you go, oh no, things are changing?
	We better ensure that we're on top, that we stay in power, that we retain all of this wealth.
	And if that comes at the expense of everybody else not having it, so be it.
	But we don't care about that.
	We just care about our own power, myself, my cronies, and locking that down.
	And so I really think that that's the catalyst here.
	It's not necessarily that you have a cabal of people who are sitting around like Dr. Evil with, you know, the, ooh, we've got to control everything.
	I think it's really driven by the basic human nature, that desire to hang on to the power and the wealth as things are shifting from a global basis.
	They see it coming and they want to make sure they're on top.
	What do you make of this bricks?
	Because this has been in the news lately, B-R-I-C-S.
	It's an acronym.
	It's for a group of the world's leading emergent market leaders, including our economies, naming Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa.
	This sort of group is getting together, got together recently and seems to be wanting very much to pose a threat to our role as the economic leader of the free world.
	So what should we be thinking about BRICS?
	Yeah, so this is really a ragtag group of individuals.
	I've sort of compared it to Dorothy and Oz working with the tin man, a cowardly lion, and a scarecrow.
	Go, how do these people all fit together?
	But what they were trying to do is they're trying to take down the all-powerful Oz that was controlling everything.
	And the BRICS, which was really an idea that came out of a Goldman Sachs research paper that came into this organization, they said they wanted to give themselves more of a voice and more power on the global stage.
	And what we learned out of their meeting that happened just over a week ago now is that they're looking to expand their group.
	So they have put out invitations to another sort of ragtag group of countries, which includes Saudi Arabia, Iran, the UAE, Argentina, Ethiopia, and Egypt.
	So they're really looking to expand their HET.
	And I do think that China is engineering a lot of this.
	Certainly countries around the world are frustrated with the U.S. because, as I said, we've been at the center of the global financial universe.
	We hold the global reserve currency.
	And with that, the Federal Reserve is supposed to hold that currency stable because it means that commodities around the world are priced in, like things like oil and food are all priced in dollars.
	And so if the dollar shifts wildly, it has recourse for those countries who are big importers.
	So the Fed, who sometimes has to make trade-offs between keeping the dollar stable for our economy here domestically and the world stage, has done the amazing job of doing neither, right?
	They've killed the purchasing power here in the United States.
	You know, your dollar is not stable against a bag of groceries anymore.
	And the same thing on the world stage.
	So you have these countries like China who are huge importers of oil and food going like, we can't do this.
	This is a threat to our own economic security and national security.
	And then you had something that the Biden administration, something that they undertook, that I think is really the point of no return here.
	And that's when Russia invaded Ukraine.
	The United States led a coalition to say, Russia, you can no longer have access to your reserves.
	And so if people are keeping money in dollar reserves, U.S. treasuries and the like, and the U.S. can then all of a sudden cut off your access at their whim, that is fully weaponizing the power of the dollar.
	And what countries want to give the United States that power to just be able to cut you off from the money that you're storing in their currency, which by the way, has given them a huge benefit in terms of cheap financing of the U.S. government?
	So there is this push coming from China to try to have less, not only reserves, but trade happening in terms of the US dollar.
	A lot of these countries have been loading up on gold as a mechanism to perhaps loosely back this trade.
	And the most significant development of the ones I just talked about is really Saudi Arabia coming into that fold, which I think has a lot to do with the green push.
	We're trying to move away from energy.
	Saudi Arabia has been our ally and has been agreeing to price everything in dollars.
	And they've been plowing their extra dollars, which are considered petro dollars from the oil, back into U.S. treasuries.
	If we are saying, well, we don't want to do this long term, and China's a big oil importer and some of these other countries, they want to get their footing secure.
Homeowners and Market Speculation 00:06:35
	Again, this is shoring up their own economy.
	So we continue to make these decisions, whether on a domestic basis or on the world stage that are just economic suicide for the country overall.
	But particularly, we know that that's going to fall on the middle class.
	Well, and I know that you've been drawing attention to the middle class and the struggle to get housing and get mortgages.
	And unfortunately, this is something that seems kind of part of the plan.
	Again, that to sound conspiratorial, but it does seem to be part of the plan that you will own nothing, including a home.
	And there's been speculation about homeowners.
	Well, there's been, there was an Axios report blaming homeowners and homeownership for some of the economic issues that we've had now.
	Like the greedy homeowners are the problem.
	What was that about?
	Yeah, how dare you hang on to an asset and it keep wealth for you and your family and don't turn it over to Wall Street or whoever else.
	I mean, the media has gone so insane in terms of their attempts to run cover for these ridiculous policies that like it almost seems like satire.
	Like the Babylon Bee couldn't make up some of these headlines that you're now saying that it's the homeowner's fault that the economy is going sideways or that the Fed is hamstringed when it was the Fed and the government who created this situation.
	I mean, the home ownership situation, you know, not only did we have the horrible situation coming out of the Great Recession financial crisis, where you had around 6 million people who lost their homes to foreclosures and short sales at the same time that Wall Street received a bailout.
	But then on the tail end of that, you had all of this cheap and available capital that was given to Wall Street.
	And they decided, once they drove up the price of everything else, that they were going to go into the single family home market.
	And so, you know, you have a situation where before 2010, there was no Wall Street institutional capital in single family homes.
	At the end of 2022, just over one in every five homes was purchased by a corporate buyer.
	And the statistics from, I think this past June, it was 26% of the homes that were sold that were purchased by corporate buyers.
	It is.
	It was the most shocking piece of research, I think, that I came up with for the book was the fact that this didn't exist in such a short period of time.
	There was such a shift.
	And what's happening with these companies, Megan, as you can well figure out, they're not looking to fix them up and then flip them back to you so that you can have this largest asset on your balance sheet there to be able to drive wealth for you and your family.
	They want to rent you the American dream.
	They want to take that house out of the purchasing supply and they want to make it a rental and basically transfer wealth that has been in families in Middle America to Wall Street.
	And it's being aided and abetted by Fed and government policy.
	So you have that issue on one side that's been driving up the prices.
	And then on the other side, now you've got the Fed who has been, you know, did a whipsaw in terms of the rates now that the Wall Street has gotten all their benefits out of it.
	Now they have raised rates.
	And so even if you wanted to stretch and try and buy one of these very limited homes, which you can't barely afford because the price has gone up, now you've got this mortgage situation where you might be locked into a 3.5% mortgage.
	Now they're over 7%.
	You're not going to be able to sell your home.
	Or if you're a first-time buyer, you're not going to be able to buy one.
	And so they have you coming and going.
	And this is the literal picture of the American dream that they are taking away and they are moving from Main Street to Wall Street.
	So what does a gal to do, right?
	Like, what are people out there who are dealing with all these issues?
	Right now, we didn't even talk about how gas is so much higher than it was when Biden took office, but we've got still high gas prices.
	We've got still dealing with the inflation.
	A lot of people still struggling to pay their bills because of the inflation and the lack of corresponding high wages.
	And now they can't get a home for some of the issues that are some of the reasons that you've discussed.
	So, like, what is the average person supposed to do about any of this?
	Yeah, it's really challenging.
	And obviously, some people aren't going to be able to do that.
	And so I'm sympathetic to that.
	But to the extent that you can, you know, it's a time to practice some personal austerity and figure out where you can cut back so that you're not putting money on credit cards and paying 22 to 24% interest.
	Or if you have a little bit of money, that you can start owning things, that you have that opportunity to start with the investment.
	From the housing standpoint, you can take a personal stand.
	I talked to our mutual friend, Dana Lash, about this.
	And I think when she sold her home, she said that she said families only.
	I mean, that's it, that you don't sell your house to a corporate buyer.
	We want everyone to get the highest price, but understand that that means that that house is probably never going to be able to be sold and occupied by a family that owns it again if you do that.
	So you can start talking to your homeowners associations and even just taking a personal stand or getting involved in local government to try to change some of the policies around this.
	Also, part of the issue is that we don't have enough supply because of government policy.
	So to the extent we can get more people involved at the local level, expanding the ability for new homes to be built, that's another thing that's going to help to ease the pressure here.
	But we need more people who are aware and informed about things like the Federal Reserve and about government policies that are creating this issue because everybody can feel the pain.
	They know that the symptoms, but they don't know what the ailment is.
	And we have so many people who are standing up and fighting back against things, but not on the financial front because they don't know where to go.
	I mean, when's the last time that we saw a protest of the Fed?
	I can't think of anything.
	It was the 70s, right?
	So we need more people to be pushing back on these central planners that are just taking policy and completely using it to historically transfer trillions of dollars in wealth to their cronies at the expense of Middle America.
Caller Thoughts on Vivek 00:12:19
	So, you know, bottom line, do what the elite do.
	Don't do what they or don't listen to what they say.
	Do what they do.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Look out for yourself and look at them too.
	They're not to be trusted.
	The book is called You Will Own Nothing, but the longer title tells you what you can do about it.
	Check it out.
	Carol Roth, great to see you again.
	Yeah, great to see you as well, Megan.
	All right.
	All the best.
	You are my guests for this back half hour.
	Who do you think will be the final competitor to Trump in the GOP primary?
	Who are you rooting for?
	Let's game it out.
	Vicki from North Carolina.
	Hi, what are your thoughts?
	Hi, Megan.
	I was a little disappointed in the debate, but I thought Vivek did a great job.
	I listened to a lot of his follow-up interviews the next couple of days.
	And there we got the full explanation of some of the answers that were cut off or maybe trivialized or taken in the wrong way.
	Have you ever interviewed him?
	Many, many times, Vicki.
	Many times.
	Well, I think now's the time to revisit and say, okay, let's talk about the debate.
	Let's talk about what people are talking about and see where it takes you.
	I think he's a smart, intelligent guy.
	Of course, it does look like Trump will be the outcome winner, which I'll support him if that's the case.
	But I'm so happy.
	So here's your second.
	Who's your second?
	The vague, for sure.
	Okay.
	Is that because he's Trump-like?
	I mean, what is it about him?
	He is Trump-like in the fact that he is running to the problem, not away from it like all the politicians have been doing for years.
	And I just am tired of politicians.
	And them backed by PAC money and, you know, the elite, because they're in the pockets of the elites as well as the Democrats.
	I don't care who says different.
	And maybe the Vake is.
	Time will tell us.
	Well, yeah, I mean, he made all his money in pharma, which is not, you know, some people have a problem with that.
	I don't know.
	It's like good a way of making money as any other, if you ask me, but that'll come back to haunt him in some pockets of the GOP.
	Listen, thank you for calling, Vicki.
	I appreciate you listening and weighing in.
	Let's get a call going out of Florida.
	Terry is in Florida.
	Terry, hope you escaped the wrath of that hurricane, okay?
	And what are your thoughts today?
	And I did escape the wrath.
	I'm actually driving back to Florida from Indiana for the summer.
	So I'm in Alabama right now.
	But as far as my, yeah, so as far as my thoughts, I love Ron DeSantis as a Floridian.
	I think he is amazing.
	I'm a registered independent, but I love Ron DeSantis.
	I just think that Donald Trump takes all the oxygen out of the air.
	So I don't see anybody, which makes me sad for Ron DeSantis.
	I don't want to see him as Roguekill in this whole thing.
	I wish he would just stay as the governor of Florida, but I think it's too late.
	He's in it now.
	As they say, you're done in it now, boy, so you better do something.
	Well, he may, I mean, if he loses, of course, that's exactly what he's going to do is stay, just at least for the end of this last term of his.
	Yes, but I think it will just tarnish him in a long-term political career by having stepped in it now.
	Because Donald Trump is just, you're right, he's the gorilla.
	I think the things that Beck has said are very thought-provoking.
	But there are some parts of him, like you said, like he wants to be na-na-na-na-na.
	I'm the outsider, you're not.
	And I think that's so, I hate that.
	You remember that kid when you were in class?
	It was like always the smartest one.
	Shut up.
	Absolutely.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	He is that guy.
	Maybe I'm just annoyed because I'm not that person.
	Well, that too.
	But he showed that during the debate in how he answered things, like, I'm not bottom paid.
	Just rise above and speak your truth and don't be that guy.
	Yeah.
	Keep it classy and stop complimenting yourself.
	Like that's that's a good rule of politics.
	Like stop saying how courageous you are.
	No, like nobody who's actually courageous talks about how courageous they are.
	I've never heard a Marine once talk about how courageous he is.
	You know, it's sort of a good rule of thumb.
	Yes, I love your show.
	You have kept me awake and interested in my whole car right up to Indiana, my whole car right now back home to Florida.
	Excellent.
	Well, now that on the way back, if we're not live, you just go and you listen to the archives because there's a lot of good stuff in there too.
	Thank you, Terry, for calling.
	Great to talk to you.
	Stay well and stay safe out there as you continue your drive.
	All right, let's see.
	Let's go to Pat in Kansas.
	Hi, Pat.
	What's on your mind?
	Hi, Mannigan.
	How are you today?
	I'm great.
	Good.
	I'm glad to hear that.
	Hey, just want to let you know, I just started listening to you a few months ago, and I'm so glad I found you on Channel 111 because I really enjoy your interviews, and I just enjoy your style.
	So, thank you very much.
	Thank you.
	Thank you very much.
	So, what are you thinking about this whole GOP race right now?
	Well, I think it's obvious that no one's going to beat Trump.
	I think the only person that could beat Trump is himself.
	And I did tell your screener that I really was impressed with Nikki Haley last week and just her stance on foreign policy and how she stood her ground.
	I do think that she made a great running mate for Trump.
	I think any time that you can, and I say this cautiously, throw women or minorities in the mix, it just gives the Democrats a reason to show their true colors and to kind of go against everything that they say they stand for.
	Oh, that's an interesting way to land the sentence.
	You're right.
	Keep going.
	Yeah, keep going.
	Yeah, I got to tell you, I'm not a fan of the Vaik.
	I think he's phony.
	And I think you had an interview with someone by the name of Charles last week.
	Charles C.W. Cook.
	Yeah, he was really good.
	And he kind of said it too.
	He said the Veik knows that he's not running for president, or he can say he's running for president, but he doesn't have a chance.
	And I think Vivek just wants to get in for a cabinet position, which is what Charles said.
	But I just, I don't trust him.
	I think he's phony, and I think he'll just say whatever people want to hear.
	Thank you for that.
	Wait, can I ask my team, can you get that sound bite up of Trump talking about Vivek?
	Do we have that, guys?
	I think Trump was on, was it with Glenn?
	Glenn Beck yesterday?
	Hello.
	Yeah, hold on.
	We're pulling it over because, yeah, I can hear you now.
	Because to Pat's point, Trump kind of said something interesting about Vivek, how he might consider him for something, but then it also had a warning for him.
	Do we have it, guys?
	Let's listen.
	I think he's really distinguished himself.
	He's starting to get out there a little bit.
	He's getting a little bit controversial.
	I got to tell him, be a little bit careful because some things you have to hold in just a little bit.
	Some things you have to hold in just a little bit.
	That's a classic from Donald Trump.
	I kind of love what he said.
	I think he may have learned that lesson himself, though.
	I'm not sure he's living it.
	Jenny in Georgia, you've got thoughts.
	Tell us what they are.
	Hi, Megan.
	I actually emailed you the other day.
	I couldn't quite put my finger on it about Nikki Haley.
	You know, I just couldn't find, I couldn't find my voice in the words.
	Everything that you're saying about Vivek, I felt about her.
	I felt she was arrogant.
	She was pompous.
	She was the, I know it all.
	I've had, I've taken these guys at the UN.
	I took them face to face.
	Kind of that air, you know, that arrogant.
	She was that arrogant one in the room.
	I don't want to vote for Bill Crystal.
	God, no one does.
	Very good point.
	I don't want that.
	You're not listening to the populist.
	And if you're doing your job at the UN, you were doing the job of what the president wanted.
	You were there as his voice.
	You didn't make your own negotiations.
	They were the voice of the people.
	Second, I think the most prescient voice that should have been on that stage wasn't.
	And that's Larry Elder.
	I think this whole conversation would be totally different.
	If they had allowed him on the stage, his ideas, his thoughts, he, I think, personally would be a great running mate.
	I think Vivek should be chief of staff.
	He could learn the ways.
	He knows the law.
	He's very intelligent.
	And learn the ways of politics.
	Don't discourage him.
	Let him, you know, and then he can help write these.
	No, you can't do that legally.
	Here's the law.
	And you advise, but you also learn.
	Almost like, you know, like a mentee mentorship.
	Larry Elliott.
	Usually they go for like some DC insider.
	You know, usually they go for like the rom Emmanuel type who's like got the city wired, who can help the president understand how to get legislation through, that kind of thing.
	That's that wouldn't be Vivek, but that's not to say that he couldn't have any role.
	But I mean, I think we're all kind of pretending a little that his candidacy is real.
	I mean, we all know that there's no lane for Vivek when Trump is in this race.
	There may be a lane for the others, but Vivek's not even running for the non-Trump lane.
	You know, he's just backdrafting behind Trump, which does seem like a play at getting the VP nod or some cabinet role.
	I don't know.
	We'll see.
	And I will interview him again soon, I'm sure.
	I haven't asked, but I got like, I was pissed off about the 9-11 comments, so I have to let my anger dissipate because I shouldn't, like, I don't like to interview people who, especially who I like, when I'm feeling mad about something.
	That's just my own personal because I don't want it to reflect and I want to be fair and all that fun stuff.
	Jenny, thank you for calling from Georgia.
	My brother lives in Georgia.
	It's a great state.
	Okay, let's see.
	Melanie in Indiana has called in.
	She's got thoughts too.
	Hi, Melanie.
	What's on your mind?
	Hi, Megan.
	So I'm calling because I find the polling so fascinating.
	I think it's being manipulated.
	I don't know a single person that has been told ever.
	I don't know anybody who voted for Trump the first time or the second that feels like it's this foregone.
	Yeah, yeah, I'm serious.
	Foregone conclusion, 50-point lead.
	Nobody has a chance.
	This whole narrative plays into a general where Trump loses because everything is Trump, only people are exhausted with Trump.
	And yet we tolerate his terrible attitude.
	And then we pick apart every little nuance, whether it's Vivek or Nikki Haley or DeSantis.
	I thought I'm open-minded.
	I want to hear them all more.
	I want to hear more issues.
	I want to not criticize their personalities and just let them talk about the issues because the polls are never right at this point out.
	But yet, here we are right now talking as if it's from God's mouth, our mouth to God's ears that Trump is it, setting ourselves up for that foregone conclusion in the primary, which sets us up for this, which is why I think there's some, you know, back-end manipulation of what everybody calls the polling data that's out there.
	Because in the general, he will lose.
	He lost down ballot last time.
	So, well, the other thing is, I mean, he's, you made a good point about getting tired of Trump because I think he did worse, you know, when he ran for reelection and then the midterms that followed, when people had been exposed to him day after day, after day, like there's been a break from Trump and the chaos that was around him to some extent when he was in office.
	And, you know, you kind of forget.
	It's like how you get back together with an old boyfriend who maybe wasn't that great for you.
	You kind of forget.
	Then you only remember the sunny moments.
Bringing People to the Forefront 00:02:22
	And then before you know, you're back together.
	You're like, oh my God.
	So that there could be some factor of that.
	There's also definitely a factor of name recognition in those polls.
	So I don't know that they're being manipulated, but for sure, people, if they don't have a strong feeling, a lot of them had never even heard of Vivek Ramaswamy before that debate.
	They see Trump like, oh, Trump, I know, Trump, I like.
	So, you know, you could be onto something there, Melanie.
	Thank you for calling in with your thoughts.
	Let me get Matt in Texas on.
	Matt's got some thoughts.
	Welcome, Texas.
	What's going on, Matt?
	Hey, Ms. Megan.
	First off, this is an honor.
	And I want to thank you because I'm self-employed, spend a lot of time on the road, and you're riding shotgun with me every day from 11 to 1.
	You know, and in my opinion, you took Rush Limbaugh's spot in the truck.
	And so it honors me that I'm getting to talk to you.
	That's amazing.
	Thank you for saying that.
	Oh, you're welcome.
	And in doing so, you have been super influential in a lot of my thinking.
	And as a registered Republican, I'm excited at the chance of getting to vote for RFK.
	And you've been plugging him.
	And even, I'd say your friendship you've had with him over the past two years has just really opened my eyes.
	And yes, I was enthusiastic about Trump at 16.
	And I haven't been enthusiastic since, but.
	I've kind of got that same excitement again that it's like, we got a chance to do this again.
	We got a chance to push his message.
	And it's people like you who aren't sound by the left and right that are bringing people like him into the forefront.
	So I want to thank you for that.
	Well, thanks, Matt.
	I do like RFKJ.
	I think I, you know, I don't really know him personally.
	It's not like we get together in our downtime, but I would.
	I've got a lot of respect for him.
	And I don't think he's in any way the lunatic that his critics paint him as being.
	And, you know, if you stay open-minded on these guys, you know, it's like a, it is in some ways like a relationship, though.
	Like you get mad at him.
	Like I always said, I was mad at Mvaik.
	I wasn't happy when RFKJ went after moms for liberty.
	Like, what?
	What are you saying?
	But then you reminded he's a Democrat.
	There's certain boxes he has to check.
	It's just like we all have this relationship with our politicians.
	And as a journalist, some of them tick you off.
	And then you got to get yourself back to center where you cover them normally and fairly and all that fun stuff.
Reading Listener Emails Together 00:01:08
	But in my new job, I get to be transparent about how I feel and where I am on that emotional journey.
	And I love hearing from you guys, Matt.
	I love hearing from all of you guys on where you are.
	And hopefully we stay open-minded and have our highs and lows together as we go through this process.
	Eventually, it's going to result in a president.
	Could be the same one.
	Could be the one from the last term.
	Could still potentially be somebody brand new.
	Thank you guys all for calling.
	You can email me too.
	We're going to get to the mailbag at some point, probably next week now.
	That's Megan, M-E-G-Y-N at MeganKelly.com.
	And we do read them all.
	And then my team puts it together for me.
	And I read the big, I don't get to read every single email, but I get to read the summary and I get to read a lot of individuals.
	So I see a fair percentage of them.
	Okay, so email me.
	And we're off tomorrow and Monday for Labor Day, the end of summer.
	But I want to tell you, we've got some exciting announcements for you next week, including I'll be in a new studio when we come back on Tuesday.
	I'm super excited for you to see it.
	Have a great long weekend.
	Talk soon.
	Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
	No BS, no agenda, and no

Chapters

00:01:37 Power and Responsibility Concerns
00:16:30 Character Flaws and History
00:32:03 The Trump Political Strategy
00:40:17 Nuanced Foreign Policy Debates
00:48:45 Inflation Rates and Job Creation
00:58:53 Anti-Business Government Interference
01:02:42 Global Wealth and Human Nature
01:13:42 Homeowners and Market Speculation
01:20:17 Caller Thoughts on Vivek
01:32:37 Bringing People to the Forefront
01:35:00 Reading Listener Emails Together