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Nov. 14, 2023 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:37:59
20231114_what-democrat-panic-means-for-biden-and-trump-and-
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Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show 00:03:02
Okay, so fantastic me loses that stream flex too.
For the technique, for the toll television, you have two play bosses via play film or two extra streaming tennis.
HBO Max, Prime Video, Sky Showtime, you name it.
The foreigner holding funky netibil else Chromecast Potel Tevenstrandagranca.
Or hello, OOS.
Oh, I'm going to go to the next stage.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon East.
Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
Sometimes when we wake up in the morning, we are faced with a slow news day, and then there are days like today, where we need eight hours for this show.
We have San Francisco miraculously cleaning up its homelessness problem and its crime problem just ahead of President Biden and President Chi's visit.
Huh, amazing how they were able to do that.
Meantime, there are new reports about Mr. Biden's inability to run a normal 2024 campaign.
Wait until you hear what Politico is saying about that.
And we have updates on just about every GOP 2024 candidate.
Oh, it's getting uncomfortable between Fabik Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley.
It's like a little drama, little drama for you today.
Plus, Megan Rapino thinks her career-ending injury is proof there is not a god.
The fact that she's leaving the national scene proves there is.
Thankfully, we have the perfect guest for it all here with me for the full show today: Josh Holmes, Michael Duncan, John Ashbrook, and the man known to his minions as Comfortably Smug together.
They are the Ruthless program.
The program can be found now on video at youtube.com/slash RuthlessPodcast.
Biden's Legal Inconsistencies Exposed 00:15:43
Guys, welcome back.
Great to have the whole gang back together today.
I know.
Look at this full house.
Wow, we have such a big shot now that somebody's hosting debates and things like that.
Yeah, thanks for having us.
We're happy we got on.
Are you in a suit?
I am.
Does it look bad on me?
No, what's going on?
Did you have to do your day job today or something?
Yeah, job interviews.
So dapper.
You got to listen to the Ruthless program to find out what these mean, mean men, Ashbrook in particular, did to poor Michael Duncan, who forgot his jacket before the last debate.
They're not mean to one another.
That's how we show one another we love each other.
Yeah, that's true.
That's right.
I'm also, I'm a little brother, and I can't.
So, like, they do it to me because they know I'm a little brother and I always take the bait and it always makes the joke funnier.
I can't help it.
It's in my DNA.
Michael, what's wrong with a jacket, Michael?
Let's just say instead of a jacket store, he may have been redirected to, I heard the word girdles on your program.
What are they?
70?
What's South Florida, Megan?
You don't know what you're going to get.
You don't.
Okay, let's get into it.
There's so much to get through.
All right, let's start with politics.
I heard you guys were interested in this story, and so am I. Politico.
Politico takes a hard look at how Biden can turn around his terrible poll numbers.
All these polls, New York Times, Sienna, CNN, Bloomberg, the coming out showing him losing in these swing states and other terrible news, losing with black men.
I mean, since when does a Democrat lose to the Republican when it comes to black men?
In any event, this is Jonathan Martin at Politico with the advice for President Biden on how he can turn this around, saying it will be an extraordinary election and it demands extraordinary measures.
That's in part for reasons Biden refuses to accept his capacity to do the job.
The oldest president in history, when he first took the oath, Biden will not be able to govern and campaign in the manner of previous incumbents.
He simply does not have the capacity to do it.
And his staff does not trust him to even try, as they make clear by blocking him from the press.
Biden's bid will give new meaning to a Rose Garden campaign, and it requires accommodation to that unavoidable fact of life.
In response to this, Charles C.W. Cook of National Review writes, I must stop, Martin, right here.
This is not extraordinary.
It is disqualifying.
He does not have the capacity to run or govern as a normal man.
They're giving it up.
I guess in any other sane world, they'd be saying you really need to step aside, but the fear is so great of what will happen with Trump.
I don't know.
What are the Democrats thinking?
That Biden's their man, notwithstanding all these swing state polls.
Why is Jonathan Martin trying to save him?
I mean, you got what you have to love is the point that you just pointed out, which is like, oh man, we got a candidate.
He actually can't speak.
He's like a Roomba in a room when he gets out of it.
He can't, he doesn't go up from down.
We only get about half an hour of good time.
How are we going to re-elect him?
Yeah.
How are we going to make sure that this guy serves the American people?
They have to be innovative.
They're like, well, we have to make sure that the American people don't realize he's incapable of performing the job.
That's how we're going to run this.
We're going to band together.
Yeah.
Well, you guys talk about how he's like the Roomba in, you know, bumping into the walls and the legs of the chairs, you said.
And it's true.
And we saw that when he was trying, all he had to do was go to the wreath laying ceremony at Arlington the other day.
It's like every president does it.
Just go up there, you do it, and then you leave.
He couldn't even do that.
Look at this.
Nowhere to go.
Stutter steps, turns around.
Nope, back over here, sir.
Over here.
All I can think of is my, look again, again, back and forth.
All I can think of is my cousin Vinny over here, dear.
Yeah, but to the point you made earlier, Megan, I think the only thing keeping him in this race and keeping Democrats hopeful that they have some shot to pull an inside straight here and re-elect Joe Biden is Donald Trump's up by 40 points in the Republican primary.
And, you know, him being there, the 800-pound gorilla in the room is, I think, the only thing keeping Biden in this race because Democrats think they still have a shot.
Didn't they look at those polls I just mentioned?
Yeah, but I think they look at everything coming off their side of the ledger, whether it's black men, right, or black voters or Hispanic voters.
And they think we can bring those people home if Donald Trump's the nominee.
That it's just like a lack of enthusiasm for their choice in the Democratic primary.
They don't have one.
And so they're expressing their displeasure in the polling and saying, I'm not going to support Joe Biden.
But if you look at the rest of the polling there, when they test generic Republican or Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis, they're winning two.
In fact, generic Republican leads Biden in all of those swing states.
He's the big winner.
15 points.
We got to get that guy.
Yeah.
Who is that guy?
He's stout.
Draft generic Republican.
Well, of course, but that's, it's all, of course, a farce because there is no such thing or person.
And once a real person steps into the suit of generic Republican, he or she has problems and inconsistencies in their past and those numbers come down.
So it's fine to sort of say generic Republican, but there's got to be a body.
I mean, I feel like Mitt Romney was as generic a Republican back then, not today, as you could get.
He lost.
A little bit accurate.
No, it's very true.
But I think the point of Jonathan Martin's piece, which I, you know, I'm glad other people are picking up on at this point is when you're running a campaign, every single person of any sort of consequence has moments of high negatives across the board.
And then you got to look at your policy matrix and you got to look at your candidate.
You have to figure out a game plan to try to win people back over.
I mean, I'll remind people in 2012, when you looked at Barack Obama, his numbers were not dissimilar from where Joe Biden's are now.
They were very, very tough.
But Barack Obama, you knew you could barnstorm the country and he was pretty compelling speaker and he could make the case to the American people that he deserved re-election.
With Joe Biden, what Democrats are doing is looking at this and being like, well, whatever hole he's dug for himself, there's no chance that he can dig himself back out of it.
So literally the only thing we can do at this point is try to draw the Republican down to where Biden is.
And I think to Michael's point, they see that with Trump right away.
They think that almost no matter what, they could run a cadaver against Donald Trump and have an even odd shot at winning.
So I think that's the calculus.
I think that's what was captured that politico piece.
And at the very least, this might be the first election in history for president where the party out of power, the candidate out of power, the election is a referendum on them because Donald Trump is going to spend the whole next year battling these various court cases.
And so like, in a weird way, it's kind of like 2020 in Biden's basement campaign.
It's like, actually let Donald Trump suck up all the oxygen because all that oxygen ends up being negative for him.
I think that's...
Did you guys see he went into the Georgia trial is going to be televised because it's a state case in Georgia and they allow cameras in the courtroom.
But federal trials are not televised.
They don't allow cameras in for federal courts.
And he went into that DC courtroom with that judge who can't stand him, Tanya Chutkin, in the Jack Smith case on January 6th.
And Trump is asking for cameras in the courtroom, which I predict will be denied as it would be by virtually any federal court judge.
But he's asking for cameras there.
He definitely thinks the trials, the persecution is helping him.
And so far, he's been proven right on that.
Well, I mean, look, what he does best is put on a show.
That's what he's done best for 50 years is put on a show.
And, you know, I mean, he's had the number one show on television.
I would argue for the last six years, he's had the number one show on television still.
It's just everyone's channel.
So, of course, he wants to do this.
He wants to make a big show out of all of it.
I don't think it's going to help him in a lot of these cases, however, because look, they're court reporters.
You're going to get an even readout of what's happening there, even from the conservative side of the ledger.
It's tough.
I mean, there's not a lot he can do, but try to make it a show, particularly as Duncan always talks about that documents case, which I think is the one that's the toughest for him.
And in that poll that we were talking about earlier, they asked if Donald Trump is convicted, convicted of one of these cases.
Does that change your opinion of him?
It's a 20-point swing against Donald Trump with independent voters, a general election audience.
So, yeah, I mean, clearly it's helped him a lot to be the guy fighting in this primary.
It's helped all of his poll numbers, but it's, I mean, it's a general election suicide.
Yeah.
I mean, I think it's incredibly important to reiterate that point is that independent voters are incredibly shaky on Donald Trump.
If he's so much as, I mean, there's what, 50 charges, 70 charges that he's facing right now?
91.
91.
92.
Yeah, 92 counts.
If he's convicted as so much as one of them, independent voters are gone and the election's lost.
Well, because he's just going to say, I mean, the Dems are going to say convicted felon, convicted felon, convicted felon.
And Biden's going to say, I'm not debating a convicted felon.
Hell no.
I'm going to stay in my basement or the Rose Garden, what have you.
And it's definitely a plus, but I don't know.
Everything in the criminal lane has helped Donald Trump so far.
You know, Molly Hemingway over at the Federalist posted this graph of what happened the day Alvin Bragg indicted him.
That was the first one in New York.
And it was just, you know, he and he and DeSantis were like this with Trump a bit above DeSantis, but it was still, you know, it was a ballgame.
And I mean, as of that day, Trump went off the map.
Biden started going down.
And those two trajectories have never changed since.
But wait, I'll get to more of that in one second.
I just want to stay on the political piece for one more minute because I love this.
I love this piece of it.
So this is why we need more people who are right-leaning to write pieces in places like Politico, because, okay, I think most of us, Dem, Republican, Independent, can agree on what he's saying here about how Biden does not have the capacity.
Okay.
But then they get to the solutions.
This is him advising Biden.
I spoke with dozens of Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans about what the president can do to improve his prospects.
The level of despair was striking.
Here's an example of what Biden can do.
Okay, number one, get Liz Cheney.
Liz Cheney must be deployed and do all she can to bring other prominent figures with her, including Dick Cheney, her father, and former President George W. Bush.
Liz Cheney is the answer to their problem.
That's solution number one they have here.
Number two, Ram Emmanuel.
Bring him back.
He's Biden's envoy to Japan.
He needs to come back and chair the reelection.
As for the Mideast, you have to bring in Bill and Hillary Clinton because Biden cannot handle it all.
And the last two I actually agree with, heave Bidenomics into the dumpster, correct?
And talk about abortion every day.
Those two things will help them.
But what do you make of the Liz Cheney rescue plan?
Does that work, Johnny?
I'm not buying it.
I mean, to me, I mean, just to put it bluntly, if his plan is to call Liz Cheney and then call the Clintons, I really think that Joe Biden has a tougher road to reelection, even against Donald Trump.
He has a tougher road to reelection than these early polls suggest about what happens if Donald Trump is actually convicted.
People are fed up with Biden.
They're fed up with the economy.
They're fed up with what they're seeing on a global stage and they want something different.
And this could be a different election than we've seen in a long time with new candidates injected into the conversation.
You know, there's conversation, you know, RFK, how many states is he going to be on the ballot?
Will that have an impact?
Would Joe Manchin be on a ballot?
Will that have an impact?
I mean, we could see a very different cycle this year than we've ever seen before, simply because people are so dissatisfied left, right, and center with Joe Biden.
I don't know if you saw this poll that came out just yesterday, maybe it was two days ago that showed just how dissatisfied people are with the state of the economy.
There were more Democrats, Democrats, more Democrats said that they were extremely dissatisfied with their state of their own financial affairs than Democrats who said they were extremely satisfied.
Democrats are fed up with Biden.
And so I just think that we are in a situation like we've never seen before.
You also notice here is, let me give you just a little flavor and then I'll let you take it home.
Biden's comms director is speaking to this, the problem with the economy, the problem with Bidenomics.
And here's how the team at the White House sees the issue.
Listen to SAT 15.
Labor Department numbers came out for the third quarter.
Nearly 8.4 million people in this country are working at least two jobs.
That's the highest number since 2019.
So when people are looking for that economic shift, they don't feel it.
To that woman, you say what?
Yeah, I'd say that that's precisely why we need another four years to continue to finish the job, right?
I think it's important too that the president, of course, wants to get all of this done, but we have to be honest about the brick wall of MAGA extremism that we continue to run into when we're trying to get things done for the American people.
Wow.
It's so good.
It's like somebody who goes in for like a nose job and it comes out all messed up.
It's on the other side of your face.
And this plastic surgeon says, I just need another try.
That's all.
Just give me more time.
You can get back under the anesthesia.
I swear it's all going to go great next time around.
No thanks.
Yeah, that's why you need another nose job.
No question about it.
Don't let who broke it fix it.
I think that's a fair point, a reasonable point.
I think one that most Americans can follow along logically fairly clearly and easily.
I was going to say to your point about the Cheney and Rob Emmanuel and the Clinton thing.
You guys noticed that everything that happens in the Democratic world sort of like stopped in the second term of the Clinton administration?
Like there's not a single name that's ever surfaced in Democratic hierarchy that's not like, well, he was second chair at the Department of Labor in 1998.
So I think he knows what he's talking about.
You know what I mean?
It's incredible to me that they've not surfaced a fresh face anywhere in the apparatus from the candidate on through the entire operative selection process.
The only new thing they ever brought to the table was a geriatric named Bernie Sanders, and they dispatched him quickly, as quickly as they could.
They took him off stage and they're like, no.
Then they buried him.
More Clinton people.
So back to the subject of Trump and his legal challenges.
He gave an interview to Univision this week and made some news.
Indictments as Election Strategy 00:15:38
He's been news about him and this plan has been circulating in a few different publications.
So he was asked whether he has sort of a revenge plan in mind if he is to win a second term.
And in classic Trump fashion, he kind of said, yeah, yeah.
He didn't really run from it.
Here's what he said in SOT 6.
You say they've weaponized the Justice Department.
They weaponized the FBI.
Would you do the same if you're re-elected?
Yes, they do this.
They've already done it.
But if they want to follow through on this, yeah, it could certainly happen in reverse.
It could certainly happen in reverse.
What they've done is they've released the genie out of the box.
You understand that?
They've done something that nobody thought would happen.
They've taken a president who is very popular.
I got 75 million votes, much more than that.
I believe they've done indictments in order to win an election.
call it weaponization.
And the people aren't going to stand for it.
But yeah, they have done something that allows the next party.
I mean, if somebody, if I happen to be president and I see somebody who's doing well and beating me very badly, I say, go down and indict them.
Mostly that would be, you know, they would be out of business.
I have to say, I love, I love his honesty.
I do.
Like, I love how he'll say, yes, I'm going to do that.
Obviously, it's in the context of, hello, that is what they're doing to me.
And these are the risks of doing this to me.
That's very, very clearly what he's trying to say.
But what's great about this, obviously them putting out in the press and then him saying it on camera here is it did exactly what he thought it would do.
The Democrats melted down.
Completely clueless, unself-aware reaction to this alleged plan as they're like, what?
Who would weaponize the Justice Department against a political foe?
It's un-American.
This is absolutely wrong.
Here's just a sampling of that in SOT5.
A bunch of fat white pink boys, a bunch of phony populists that are going around talking tough and unfortunately making threats that we, those of us who love democracy, those of us who actually believe in the American experiment all these years later, have to be worried about.
We try to either call him out on the lies that he puts out there or not cover just frivolous stuff that he says that is lies.
But in this case, you have to look.
Guess what?
Joe Biden isn't perfect.
No candidate is, by the way.
But we have to understand what the alternative is here.
If elected to a second term, Donald Trump would prosecute anyone he deems an enemy, unleash troops on protesters, and essentially unravel the rule of law as we know it.
But sure, Joe Biden is three years older and occasionally trips over things.
So what would a second term look like?
It would look a lot like Vladimir Putin in Russia.
It would look a lot like Victor Orban in Hungary.
If he's weaponizing government against his opponents, boy, are we in trouble?
He's already said he's going to come after people like General John Kelly.
What about us?
Try it.
Go ahead, Tryan.
We have this show every day.
Okay, Donald.
Jeez.
Okay, Joy.
What a fun.
I thought we wish you had.
You know, honestly.
So I have a kind of a wild opinion on this.
My greatest criticism of Trump is he never did the stuff the media accused him of.
I think they've created this monster of Trump who's like this incredibly capable guy who crushes his foes and will use whatever levers of power are available to him to do what he needs to get done.
And you know, that might not have been the worst thing.
And I mean, for so long, we can complain about Hippocratic.
Like, wow, can you imagine if a Republican did this?
And like, at what point is it that we're going to be like, you know what?
Let's just give them what they've given us.
You know, I think there has to be a point where it's just like, you know, mutually assured destruction was the way that you dealt with with the USSR, with the Soviet Union.
Give the Dems.
I mean, they're essentially the communists.
Now at this point, give them a taste of their own medicine.
I'll never forget right after he won in 2016, he sort of made up with Hillary Clinton.
Like after all the locker-ups talk and everything, then there was no follow through on any of that.
What I think is most interesting about all those clips you played, like Gen Saki and everything, is what you see in this when, you know, if Donald Trump is the nominee, you can already see the blueprint for how mainstream media, liberal media, the Democrat Party has to have a therapy session with their voters to get these people back on board.
I mean, they're showing you exactly what they're going to do all next year.
Yep.
100%.
And that's, but that's always been their cheat code in these elections.
You can have a party that's ruining the economy, that's diminishing America overseas, that's creating chaos in the Middle East, that's doing like basically everything you would not want them to do, and yet they win in elections.
That's the reason because they're really, really capable.
And right now, the Democratic hierarchy is really good at manipulating a Democratic voter into believing that Trump is the worst of the worst.
And it's look at like John Fetterman in Pennsylvania.
I mean, this guy couldn't put a sentence together at the end of his campaign.
And yet, all those polling things that we talked about with the Biden, what he's losing with black voters and young voters and all these other things, same was true of Fetterman on election day.
What happened?
They voted for him.
They voted for him.
Same is going to be true again in this exact circumstance because of what you're seeing play out.
But I just can't get over how clueless these Democrats sound and these media figures sound.
Like, do they, we've been following the news.
Trump is under four criminal indictments.
He's facing two civil fraud trials.
Like, who do you think you're kidding?
And then you've got like a Kristen Welker out there on Meet the Press.
Like, well, I'll let you listen to it in slot seven.
He essentially threatened to indict his political enemies if he wins a second term.
Does that essentially make the Republican Party take a stance of the Republican Party stands for revenge?
What do you think of that messaging?
You know, I'm not going to get involved in rhetoric that's happening during a contested campaign for our presidential nominee.
I will say a lot of Republicans, Kirsten, feel like there's a two-tier system of justice that Republicans are getting prosecuted or persecuted through prosecution.
And they say it with President Trump.
Bob Benendez has been indicted.
The New York Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, just had his phone searched by the FBI.
How can you guys continue to make that argument?
I think when you look at what's happened with the Biden family and what's been uncovered since we've taken that.
Well, Hunter Biden's been indicted too.
I always think if this were Donald Trump Jr. getting that money, there'd be a big issue.
Good for Ronald McDaniel, by the way.
100% right.
Oh, Hunter Biden's been indicted.
You've got to be kidding me.
Anybody paying two minutes of attention to the news understands no one in the Biden Justice Department wanted to do that.
They were forced.
Their hand was forced by that one federal judge who caught them trying to give him immunity.
Yeah, it would be so nice if we could just stop the dumb fuckery for like five seconds.
You know, if it would be so great if there was a Democrat out there that was like, you know, that is a really scary proposition to totally prosecute your political enemies to make an entirely two system tiered of judge.
What are we doing that could, oh, wait a minute.
We might have a problem with that here.
No, what give it basically?
They talk about how brilliant Jack Smith is.
They defend all the players involved in the prosecution against Trump.
They make a hero out of Letitia James, the New York State Attorney General, who ran, who ran for office.
Here she is.
Here's just a little, Hannity put this together and it's very good.
Look at Sod 8.
I will never be afraid to challenge this illegitimate president when our fundamental rights are at stake.
I believe that the president of these United States can be indicted for criminal offenses.
Oh, we're going to definitely do.
We're going to be a real pain in the s ⁇ .
I don't think that I know my name personally.
That man in the White House.
Who can't go a day without threatening our fundamental rights?
Yes, we need to focus on Donald Trump and his abuses.
We need to follow his money.
We need to find out where he's laundered money.
We need to find out whether or not he's engaged in conspiracy.
It's important that everyone understand that the days of Donald Trump are coming to an end.
I look forward to going into the office of Attorney General every day, suing him, defending your rights, and then going home.
What kind of a party?
What kind of a party would use what would use the courts as political revenge guys?
The Democrat Party, I think this is honestly central to their DNA at this point is they are no longer interested in competent leadership or making lives better for Americans.
That's very clear when you look at the economic data and the communications director says, yeah, well, we need four more years of this.
But if you look across the board, whether it's all these prosecutors that left-wing dark money groups, George Source has funded to essentially unleash just legalizing crime coast to coast across this country.
Or you look at how they're trying to pack the courts.
They're trying to get rid of Justice Thomas.
This is what their party is about, lawlessness.
They want to have total control and they can't do that if voters are standing in their way.
They can't get these policies done like, you know, loan forgiveness, which the Supreme Court had to step in and say, wait a minute, you can't just use taxpayer money to pay off kids' student loans.
That's not allowed.
They had to, any policy that the Democrats want does not pass muster at the ballot.
So they have to take power by any means and they're using the legal system to do it.
Democrats are always guilty of what they accuse Trump of, and they have been since the beginning.
When they accused Trump of working with foreign actors to influence the election, it was actually Democrats in the Hillary Clinton campaign working with foreigners to influence the election.
Now they're accusing Trump of going after his enemies.
And every single day, that's all that Democrats do is they go after Republicans.
I just love the idea that protecting your fundamental rights includes investigating Donald Trump and whether he inflated the value of mar-a-laca.
Defending your inflation.
So they're pivoting off of, in part, this Washington Post report from November 5th saying that what he wants to do is use the federal government, if he gets reelected, to punish not just his opponents with the DOJ, somebody who might be giving him a challenge electorally, but to go after people who he thinks betrayed him, like John Kelly, Bill Barr and Mark Milley.
I don't believe for one minute Trump's actually going to do that.
I really don't.
I think he will actually go after somebody in the way that they're coming after, like a Biden type or a Hunter Biden type.
But does anybody really believe he's going to actually sick the DOJ on John Kelly?
Maybe I'm crazy.
Maybe I'll be proven wrong.
But this is what they're reacting to because these are people.
That's a different, like those, you go after Joe Biden and try to get him, whatever, criminally prosecuted.
That's tit for tat.
You go after Bill Barr, your former attorney general, like some weird Trumped up criminal charge.
That's a different story.
I just don't, to your point before, Smug, I don't actually think Trump would ever actually do that.
I think he likes to say that stuff because it makes him feel good.
Yeah, I mean, I think if we're all being completely honest of what a second Trump presidency would look like is it would look a lot like the first in terms of what gets done.
All of a sudden, you know, all these world leaders realize they can't essentially just do whatever they want.
The United States, it's the irony of when the Biden administration came and they said, oh, finally, the adults are back in charge.
And essentially carnage was unleashed across the entire planet.
The Afghanistan withdrawal, let the botched Afghanistan withdrawal that Biden was responsible for, let the world know that, okay, these guys, you know, Biden clearly does not know what he's doing.
You saw Ukraine then gets invaded.
You see what's happening in Israel with the terrorist attack.
And now you have a State Department telling Israel to stop defending itself from terrorists.
You know, it's free reign for bad actors across the planet.
You never saw that under the Trump presidency because, you know, it's a lot like Nixon with the madman theory of world leaders don't know what this guy is capable of.
And that fear keeps them in line.
And for the rest of the policy, okay, the border is going to be secured again.
I don't think there's any indication that we have that, oh my gosh, he's going to turn like, you know, this country into a fascist dictatorship and he's going to show up and arrest Joy Behar while she's recording the view.
Like, how unserious are these people when Americans right now are suffering economically?
Inflation's going through the roof.
People can't buy a house.
Like the American dream is being choked out in front of our eyes.
And they're trying to say that, well, we got to worry about the price of mar-a-lago.
And is Joy Behar going to be able to have her TV show?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Heaven forbid.
Now, here's the other thing.
People are worried about the economy.
It's obviously the number one issue.
But a close second, maybe not a close second, but the second is immigration.
And they're not totally unrelated either, but immigration and all the polls for all Americans, they care, but Republicans really care about what's happening at the southern border.
And so in the midst of this, Trump, through his old pal Stephen Miller, who ran immigration policy while he was in the White House and now is running the America First Legal, where they're filing all these really good lawsuits.
I have to say, Stephen Miller's been kind of on fire.
He gives an interview to the New York Times talking about what Trump plans to do to shore up our border and deal with the illegal immigration problem.
Now, I feel the need to say, because I do read Ann Coulter's Substack, she'd be here saying, bullshit.
You didn't do it the first time.
You're not going to do it this time.
That's why she turned on Trump.
So take that for what it is.
But this is what they say he's planning.
He's going to round up undocumented people already in the United States.
He will revive banning entry by people from certain Muslim-majority nations.
He will reimpose COVID-19 era policy of refusing asylum claims, bring back Title 42.
He will scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.
He will reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers to help ICE carry out sweeping raids.
He wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and as they await deportation flights, because right now we just send them right out into America and we never track them or anything.
He wants to revoke the visas of foreign students who participated in the anti-Israel protests.
He wants to end birthright citizenship.
He already said he would do that and he's saying he'll do it again.
But when I interviewed him, he said the lawyers told him he couldn't do it.
So that one's got a bigger question mark on it.
And he will expel suspected members of drug cartels and criminal gangs, quote, without due process, says the New York Times.
I obviously see this as a New York Times hit piece.
Like they're excited to tell their audience how extreme he is.
Deep State Fears and Kushner 00:04:08
Have you heard of a more motivating plan for the Republican base when it comes to this very important issue?
Wow, this sounds like a pretty great plan.
The border has been a, we've talked about this before, Megan.
The border has been a disaster for a very, very long time and it is way, way overdue for a fix.
And everything that he laid out, he talks about camps.
I don't know if you've seen where Eric Adams has immigrants up in New York, but he's got giant tents and camps where he's put these migrants.
And the New York Times is acting like, oh, well, if a Republican does something similar to that, that's a problem.
What Trump is talking about doing is shutting down the border now.
It has to happen.
He's talking about removing people who aren't supposed to be here, that aren't here legally.
He's talking about getting the terrorists out of this country.
And anybody who saw with horror what happened in Israel on October 7th, when these terrorists came over the border and into the country, and the same people know that Hamas is here now.
They want to terrorize American people.
People are afraid.
They're scared and they want the government to do something about it.
Democrats aren't doing anything about it.
And Donald Trump is saying that he's going to get serious.
And I think that a lot of Republicans are eager for that sort of thing.
I think I'm kind of with Ann Coulter on this, though.
And I think here's the thing.
I can hear you.
It's like we saw what happened in 2020 when BLM and these rioters and these anarchists were burning down American cities.
And, you know, you talked earlier about, you know, deputizing the National Guard.
Like Donald Trump tweeted law and order a bunch of times and took his advice on crime from Kim Kardashian, not Tom Cotton.
Like that's the reality.
That's the reality is like when Bush came to shove and he had to make hard choices for law and order, he didn't do it.
I mean, that's the thing that I keep picking up on on all this.
I mean, look, the plan, some of it's executable, some of it's not.
The problem that I have with everyone saying like, well, Trump is the only one that can do it is that he actually had the opportunity to do all those things and he didn't.
Part of it is because they didn't think about it.
Part of it is because they couldn't build consensus around the things that required legislative activity, like, I don't know, funding borders and things like that, which require Congress.
Heads up, everybody.
You can't just roll into the White House and sort of tip your cap.
You're going to get the exact same treatment out of the Supreme Court that Joe Biden has for forgiving student loans.
Like all this stuff requires a know-how and consensus building to actually get done.
The funny thing is, I think there's tons of consensus over two-thirds of that list that you just talked about.
There is a massive amount of Americans, center, left, and right that believe we have to secure this border and you have to do extraordinary things to get it done.
Could you put that kind of thing in front of Congress if you actually worked with Congress to do it?
Yeah, I bet you could.
I bet you could figure out how to do that.
Problem is, is that there's not been any demonstration at this point of the ability to do that.
Lastly, we keep talking about the deep state and who's going to eliminate the deep state.
And it seems like the number one talking point of the Trump campaign is this is the guy to eliminate the deep state.
Has there ever been in the history of this country a greater victim of the deep state than Donald Trump?
I know a lot of presidents, Republican presidents that have come in who have been victimized in one form or another by a deep state.
They've made some changes and tried to figure it out.
But I've never seen anybody who's been completely thwarted by the deep state.
That happened.
It happened for four years.
So now we're revisiting all of this and planning on this guy being the guy who's able to do it, except he's the only one in the field who's demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt he couldn't.
That's my problem.
One thing I actually want to rebut something that Duncan said of, you know, taking Kim Kardashian's advice on the law, I think that's more like Trump 90 chess.
He was like, you know, maybe if I do some felony criminal reform, this might help me out later down the road.
And that might help him on the election.
Trump's Shocking Rally Energy 00:15:47
He'll be glad he did that.
Well, honestly, that could be true because Jared Kushner was pushing it.
He's looking after a father-in-law.
Jeremy Kushner partnered with Van Jones and Kim Kardashian.
And before we knew it, we let a bunch of felons out of prison.
Go ahead.
Jared's like, listen, I have a dad who's been in jail.
Let's make sure it doesn't happen to you.
You want to hear the inverse?
The inverse of 9D chess is the criminal penalties for taking national security documents and mishandling them have been increased, right?
Do you know who increased them?
President Donald Trump.
President Donald Trump, it was a campaign promise after he beat Hillary Clinton because remember Hillary Clinton with the server and 30,000 emails?
Donald Trump increased the penalties for mishandling classified information and then did the thing.
Allegedly.
Allegedly.
It'll all play out.
Maybe even that campaign.
All right, stand by.
I'm going to squeeze in a quick break and then there's so much more to go over.
My God, we have just an embarrassment of riches to talk about today.
More with the Ruthless Bellas.
Straight ahead.
So fear not, because if you are not a Donald Trump fan, he has committed the gaff of all gaffes.
This is the one that's really going to stop him.
If you just tune into Morning Joe and The View, they will make clear to you how this is the thing that's going to put voters over the top because he's really crossed the line this time by referring to his enemies as vermin.
Listen.
In honor of our great veterans on Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections.
The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within.
So, I mean, cue virtually every left-wing critic's comment that that is, quote, straight up Nazi talk.
He's dehumanizing people, dehumanizing presidential historian Joe Meacham on MSNBC, Morning Joe, because to call your opponents vermin.
Now, he said they were like vermin, but in any event, to dehumanize them is to not only open the door, but to walk through the door toward the most ghastly kinds of crimes.
Trump campaign spokesman says, these people are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they're suffering from Trump derangement syndrome.
So I don't like, I'm amazed that they still cover comments like that with the breathlessness, but they do.
What do you guys think?
These people are in no position to lecture us when they've been trying to say from the river to the sea is actually a very friendly thing to say.
Right.
Right.
It's just inspirational.
Yeah.
The left is literally marching in the streets saying kill the Jews.
But Donald Trump said vermin.
So let's stop the presses and let's start talking about that.
Such a good point.
And I think Donald Trump puts this place into his hands, right?
Like he's been doing this since 2015.
It's like he will ramp up the rhetoric to suck up all the oxygen to get the media to write and light their hair on fire.
And it always benefits him in the end.
It's also amazing that the media uses this decoder ring to be like, whoa, whoa, what they really meant was.
Every time Donald Trump does something, it's like, well, what he really meant was Nazis are great.
Yeah.
And what he really meant in here was genocide.
Except then you got like a substantial part of the left that was like, Nazis were great.
Genocide.
And they're like, and then you have the White House that's out looking at like, well, I don't know.
There's a lot of anti-Semitism around what we need is a commission to study all this anti-Islam.
That's what we need.
And like just.
The New York Times is going to is doing hit pieces on him for his Nazi-like rhetoric in referring to people as vermin.
They literally just hired somebody who said, Hitler is great.
Love Hitler.
Yes.
Go, Hitler, go.
But Donald Trump's saying like vermin, that's a bridge too far.
They've given up the whole gig.
So meanwhile, like we saw in 1516 when he won, Trump is not particularly obsessed with what the Times or anybody else is writing about him.
Trump is doing what Trump does.
And he showed up at the UFC.
I don't follow sports and I certainly don't follow UFC, but UFC fighting.
I don't know, Madison Square Garden.
There was some sort of a fight run by UFC.
I don't understand what it is.
It's mixed martial arts.
Forget it.
I'm already off on a limb.
I don't know what I'm saying, but they fought.
And he was there.
And look at him come in.
He is with Kid Rock, Tucker Carlson, and Dana White.
Okay, so that would be what we call a base play, a base play, right?
Like, does Core MAGA want to see people any more than they want to see Kid Rock, Tucker, and Trump together?
Like, I'm not sure who you could throw in there to make them even happier, but what do you make of it?
Because it seems smart to me.
I know it's like suburban wine moms, maybe not so much, but Core MAGA, yeah.
This is Trump at his most entertaining because one thing he has realized and revolutionized in American politics is the WWF aspect to what politics can be.
The pomp and the circumstance that you haven't seen from a lot of candidates, a little bit different and it's way outside of the mainstream, way outside of anything you saw from Romney and Bush and Clinton and everybody before him, this sort of stayed approach to office.
And a lot of people argue that's the right approach.
But he gets people excited.
He's very entertaining.
And to the extent that he can continue to entertain people, they want to see more.
I mean, the energy levels were off the charts in that clip and everyone was talking about it when it happened.
And it's like this level of mania that he can generate where people are like, does this mean Tucker's going to be the vice president candidate?
Like people lose their minds in that excitement.
And that's a very powerful thing for when he runs for election.
And he's always had this, you know, this way of putting himself in cultural space to make himself relevant.
I don't know if people realize this, but like Donald Trump did, I think, like WrestleMania like 25 years ago.
And it's still rated one of like the highest WWE programs of all time, of all time.
So like very early, Donald Trump realized where his audience was.
They, you know, weren't people that read white papers.
They cared about politics on a cultural level that was totally different and adjacent to conservative values of the Republican Party, but wasn't it, wasn't the same thing that the other candidates are going for.
And so all of these things he benefits from when he shows up at a place like that.
Yeah, I also think part of the allure to it is the utter shock from the left, who had, you know, probably not encountered anybody who's voted Republican in 30 years to see a stadium full of people yelling and screaming for Donald Trump.
Like they're probably like, oh my God, what is this?
Who are these monsters?
Morning Joe said this would happen.
Yeah, in New York City, no less.
It feels like they're, you know, like they're watching zoo animals at some level.
It's like, this is a culture but understand.
And I think it's that, that combination of him understanding, like you said, the stadium culture and all of that with the reaction from the left.
It's like, my God, we've got big trouble.
To me, like a part of what I see here is how feckless the mainstream media is.
How they just, they're irrelevant.
They just don't drive opinions anymore.
Are there any two individuals in America that they have tried to convince us more are horrible, racist, misogynistic assholes than Trump and Tucker?
Right?
Like, it's a fail.
It didn't go so well.
I'm sure there, I know there is a core piece of the left-wing base that believes that, but that was a hero's welcome.
And I realize it's UFC.
It's a certain niche.
But as he pointed out in that interview, 75 million Americans voted for him.
The New York Times does not drive the opinion of the mainstream or even the center anymore.
Well, remember, they tried to convince the entire country that Mitt Romney was a misogynist in the middle of that campaign.
And I think that that's one of the, that was just like one step on this like long, slow trajectory to people not believing anything they read or anything that they see on television.
They're just looking.
That's why people are looking for alternate media because they're looking for something that's actually the truth, not the lies that they keep hearing over and over.
I get that.
But then like, I look back at 2022 and realize like a lot of these races, these Senate races and swing states across the country are really decided by not people that watch UFC, but like suburban women and stuff like that.
And it is still a concern.
I mean, like, yeah, I don't want to fly by them like, no, this means he'll win.
We haven't won, truly won an election since 2016.
I don't think any of us.
There is that pesky fact.
Well, you know, gosh, it's just everybody loves him so much.
All right, wait, I want to, I do want to pick this up because I'm interested in this and the wine moms and what they're going to do.
I love that it's been changed from soccer to wine.
Because I can say there's going to be a certain group that looks at that and says toxic masculinity.
And they're not all Dems.
They're not all lefties.
So we'll pick it up there and we'll talk about the attacks on Trump because now he's made a few gaffes.
The Biden team's picking up on it.
The DeSantis team is picking up on it.
And we'll get into the between Vivek and Nikki next as the guys from Ruthless stay with us for the full show.
Don't forget, you can check out more of our show at youtube.com slash Megan Kelly.
If you'd like to watch all these wonderful clips that you're listening to, check it out.
Okay, so the wine moms, the soccer moms, maybe they're not having the same reaction, right?
As you say, you say it as the UFC fans to Trump, maybe not even to the immigration plan.
You know, let's face it, they are a bit more moderate Republican voters.
That's why he didn't do as well with them.
And Biden did a little better with them enough to make a difference in the 2020 election.
So I think the conventional thinking is they're so fed up with this Biden economy and the open border and all the bullshit, they're ready to pull the lever for him anyway.
Are we losing something?
Like, are we not seeing the truth if we jump to that conclusion?
Yeah.
No, I mean, we are not seeing the truth if we come to that conclusion.
The reality is in 2022, you know, the best measure of all of this is the exit polls that came out after the election where it showed definitively that Republicans won the argument over the economy.
They won the argument over crime.
They won the argument over immigration.
They won the argument over this administration's excesses and periodic tilt off the left-hand side towards socialism.
Suburban moms, I mean, they bought it just as well as anybody else.
And you know what else they did?
They voted Democrat.
They voted Democrat.
And part of the reason for that is that they don't trust the Republican Party under Trump, that they are concerned about a whole range of issues dealing with how he conducts himself, whether there's fealty to Trump over the Constitution, all kinds of different sort of nuances.
But underlying it is this tonal problem that they will believe and do believe strongly that Republicans have a better policy prescription for this country than Democrats do.
And they still do not trust it.
You got to ask yourself at that point, is this a brand problem?
And what is that brand?
I don't know how you come to a different set of conclusions.
I mean, literally, we just had an election last week.
You have a president at 33%.
And you, granted, I think Republicans did better than is being portrayed in the media, but they didn't wipe out the Democrats.
Typically, over the last 20 years, when presented with those kind of numbers, there's a wipeout one way or another.
It didn't happen.
Didn't happen in 2022 with very similar circumstances.
Again, if we're being serious about this and we're just looking at outcomes and poll numbers.
I don't know how you come to a different conclusion.
And we must be serious about this.
Keep going.
I mean, yeah, I mean, that's dire, but I think that's just gospel.
That's God's honest truth, all of it.
I mean, that's a difficult thing that we're facing.
And I remember in 2022, like I saw some of the ads and some of the commentary from mainstream media about, you know, January 6th or the threats to our democracy and all of these sort of things.
And like, you know, hand up, I was wrong.
It was persuasive to those suburban moms and those independent voters and those moderate voters that live in the suburbs of this country.
And they vote a lot.
You know, like they vote in every election.
And if you can't win those people back, you do not have a majority.
You can't make it up with black men growing vote of Hispanic.
I'm just thinking of typical Dem groups that are migrating red.
Yeah, but I mean, look, that was tried in 2020 by Donald Trump.
Remember, the first Super Bowl ad in 2020 was Alice Johnson and criminal justice reform.
And the Trump people said, like, Donald Trump has this unique swagger and he's going to attract minority voters.
And it didn't happen.
It didn't happen in 2020.
And when they look at that poll that we mentioned at the top of the show, Megan, where like he's leading Biden in all these swing states, they will also make the argument.
He does really well with Hispanics because he's different.
He's not a conventional Republican.
But again, we talked about it.
Nikki Haley's numbers are even better than his.
Ron DeSantis is right there with him in the same place.
Generic Republican has winning by 15 points in all of these swing states.
So it isn't like Donald Trump has this unique prescription that if like Walk-A-Flock of Flame endorses him and like all these other rappers come out, that suddenly he's going to do a lot better than Republican.
I mean, it's, I hate to, I feel like I'm the bringer of all the bad news.
I'm sorry.
No, we need truth.
I think that's just reality.
Is Walkafock of Flame an actual rapper?
Yeah, seriously.
Yeah, seriously.
Megan, I thought that would be on your playlist.
Harden the family.
I thought that was a joke.
I think your audience would love it.
No, it's real.
And he, and I think he actually did endorse Donald Trump.
Yeah.
He did, for sure.
Great.
Excellent.
Well, I think the bigger problem, though, is if it's anybody other than Trump, the Trump people are probably going to stay home, right?
I mean, like, isn't that the biggest, the biggest challenge the GOP is facing right now?
If they, if they decide to dump him, not only is the Trump base not going to want the new person, but he, Trump will make sure that the new person fails.
So I don't buy into this thought that Republicans, unlike any other rational human, will be like, you know what?
Everything is terrible.
Over 80% of Americans in that poll, which was conducted by the Ross School of Business at Michigan, over 80% of Americans said that they are economically worse off today than when Joe Biden became president.
Closing the GOP Primary Gap 00:09:18
That is going to be motivating to a ton of voters.
My worry specifically about the, you know, the white, the wine mom demographic is this is like a very hardened leftist group.
Like you will not find more committed leftists in a lot of these instances in the middle of Brooklyn than you have in parts of this country where, I mean, you look at the cost, like when there were the BLM marches going around this country, it was about 75% suburban wine moms who are doing it.
I know half of them.
There it is.
But I think it's, I mean, look, it's easy.
There is that for sure.
But then you also have suburban demographics and people who voted for 20 years for Republicans that all of a sudden stopped and are the ones I was talking about that believe in all of these Republican policies.
And you know, it's easy on a piece of paper or just rhetorically to be like, well, we traded out the suburban wine moms for a growing Hispanic voting base or a growing African-American voter base, neither of which are particularly true, by the way.
There are places where multi-generational Hispanic voting blocks have increased for sure.
But if you look at the states that matter in the context of a presidential election, you're dealing with trading out a population that is far larger, far more frequent to vote than everything else that you're talking about here, right?
We're talking about just Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin.
I mean, all of these places, Georgia, all of these places, we're talking about trading out a population that literally makes it possible to get to 51.
Arizona.
I mean, like 75% of the vote will be in Maricopa County in one county, one county or outside.
And what are they?
They are McCain voters.
Is it like Scottsdale?
Yeah.
Is that suburban?
Yeah.
That's suburban.
So like, you wonder how it is that you could win a state for 35 years and then all of a sudden lose it in four straight election cycles.
Like, I don't think this is particularly difficult.
It's like just putting blinders over your eyes, pretending you're going to have a different outcome.
Well, here is the other problem emerging with the GOP frontrunner.
Not to say he's in Biden's league, but he is not in DeSantis or Vivek's or Nikki Haley's league when it comes to mental acuity.
That's just the reality for most guys who are 77, not all.
Dershowitz, I put up again.
Dershowitz has better mental acuity than I do.
And he's 85.
But in any event, Trump, for sure, he's lost a couple steps.
And Ron DeSantis is pointing it out.
He's getting a little bolder and calling it out.
Ron DeSantis tweeted out this video of Trump falling down on the job with it when it came to the word things.
And Biden retweeted it.
The Biden campaign retweeted it.
My God.
I mean, that's an interesting dynamic.
Here's a mashup of Trump.
He keeps calling Biden Obama.
The first time I thought it was a genuine slam, you know, like Obama's the puppeteer and Biden is his puppet.
But you can tell in the context of listening to these clips, it's not intentional.
It's a slip.
He's messing up sort of where he is.
That can happen.
But just if you look at the greater context of the number of times this keeps happening, you know, you start to pay attention.
Here it is.
And we did with Obama.
We won an election that everyone said couldn't be won.
Almost 500 miles of, well, even the Obama administration says it in their stats.
Bauci became big in the Bush administration.
It's almost the same thing.
In the Biden administration.
You ordered the Defense Department to use special forces to inflict maximum damage.
I didn't say that.
People said I said, why would I say that?
I didn't say that.
I will order the Department of Defense to make the appropriate use of special force to inflict maximum damage.
You would send special forces and quote other military assets to Mexico.
I didn't say that.
Somebody said I said that.
Really was when I came here, everyone thought Bush was going to win.
They thought Bush, because Bush supposedly was a military person.
Great.
You know what he was a military?
He got us into the Middle East.
How did that work out?
We would be in World War II very quickly.
Big hello to a place where we've done very well.
Sioux Falls.
Thank you very much, Sioux Falls.
So Sioux City, let me ask you.
Okay, so he confused Sioux Falls, South Dakota for Sioux City, Iowa.
So what do you guys make of the montage and whether this is a problem?
Because one of the biggest issues with Joe Biden is his age.
And yes, infirmity.
So I think it falls into the category, if you live by the sword, you die by the sword, right?
When you have made over a period of time somebody else's mental acuity the focus of all of your attacks, yours comes under greater scrutiny as a result.
Now, I think that there is a massive difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
And I would take Donald Trump 10 times out of 10 in any sort of mental health.
Trump is not a Roomba.
Not exactly.
He is not a Roomba.
I wouldn't want to be held to the same standard of having to be perfect on stage all of the time, which unfortunately that is where he is when you make that a center of your attacks.
But as to the age thing itself, look, that's part of the deal.
I mean, he's not going to erase his chronological age.
And that has been a core critique of all of his primary opponents.
It's going to be an issue.
And I think he's going to have to overcome that a little bit in order to keep that alive for Joe Biden.
I think part of the other issue for Donald Trump right now isn't the acuity.
It's the focus.
I mean, I think this is a guy who's distracted.
He's indicted 91 times.
If you just want to see how distracted he is, go to his true social page.
And like he's up at all hours of the night arguing with Letitia James about, you know, the value of Mar-a-Lago and then arguing about documents or arguing about January 6th and all this stuff.
And it's like, that takes a toll.
That takes a toll on any human being having their time divided on all these other things that you want to attack and not be focused on the job at hand, which is like winning the election.
Right.
The other thing I think that's worth pointing out here is that his primary opponents need to be doing more of this stuff more often if they want any chance at closing this giant gap he's opened up.
And it's kind of wild to me that more of his opponents didn't do this stuff early on.
I mean, maybe Trump's rise wouldn't have been as rapid through the summer and through the fall if these primary opponents had taken him to task in such a clear way as Ron DeSantis is doing right now.
And I think that he's going to have to do a whole lot more of that if he wants to close the gap in Iowa.
No, there's a real question about whether it's too little, too late.
We saw Tim Scott bail out of the race.
And I mean, I don't think there's another, a nicer guy in politics, but he did not resonate this time around.
It was actually kind of a stunning exchange.
I'm sure you guys saw the clip when he was on with Trey Gowdy on Fox.
And according to reports, even Tim Scott's campaign staffers, or at least some healthy collection of them, did not know he was going to announce he was, quote, suspending his campaign.
That's how they say it.
Now they're dropping out.
So we have the clip.
Take a look.
I love America more today than I did on May 22nd.
But when I go back to Iowa, it will not be as a presidential candidate.
I am suspending my campaign.
I think the voters who are the most remarkable people on the planet have been really clear that they're telling me, not now, Tim.
I don't think they're saying, Trey, no, but I do think they're saying not now.
And so I'm going to respect the voters And I'm going to hold on and keep working really hard and look forward to another opportunity.
I, you know, I feel a pang of sadness.
Such a good guy and a good guy like that should be able to make it in American politics in the GOP primary race.
And yet he obviously couldn't.
What do you guys think of it?
I saw Charles, again, C.W. Cook.
He's getting a lot of mentions this week because he's brilliant saying he bailed out because he actually was running for president.
And he is not an ego play for him or a vanity play for him.
Yeah, I mean, look, I think it's one of the differences between this field and the 2016 field in a lot of different ways is that people, when they chose to run for president, knew that it was going to be an uphill task, but thought it was an important one and thought that voters deserved a very real choice against a former president that they see the world differently from.
You saw this happen in former vice president Mike Pence.
You've now seen it with Tim Scott.
The field is beginning to winnow here much quicker than it did in 2016.
Does it ever get down to that one-on-one point where this is actually a real race?
I don't know.
But there's at least a chance of that because of people like Tim Scott who were running to try to win this thing.
And when they knew it wasn't their time, they think enough of the Republican primary electorate to give them a real choice in that regard.
That's such a patriotic thing to do.
Vivek Ramaswamy's Party Role 00:15:25
But meanwhile, not everybody feels that way.
I mean, we all know Chris Christie has virtually no chance, you know, with all due respect to the former New Jersey governor.
I realize he's playing a different role.
He's sort of being a Trump antagonist, but there are just no numbers behind his campaign.
Even in New Hampshire, where he's supposed to be putting most of his stock, he's not looking that good.
And you can't win by just winning New Hampshire, right?
You got like, anyway, he's still in it.
And as far as we can tell, no plans to bail before he gets to New Hampshire.
And then you've got Haley, DeSantis, and Vivek.
Now, things are getting interesting because really right now at the top of that triad are Haley and DeSantis.
And Vivek is considerably lower than those two in the polls.
But the fighting right now at the debates and elsewhere has been between Vivek and Nikki Haley.
And DeSantis is kind of like trying to stay out of it.
And they're not really coming for him.
She's tried to come for him a little.
He hasn't really engaged.
It's kept him out of the fray.
I don't know if that's good or bad, but I want to bring you up to speed on what's happened between Nikki and Vivek as of late.
You saw the third debate, right?
Where they had their back and forth.
She called him scum.
He brought up her daughter.
It was unpleasant.
He went on, Vivek Ramaswamy, with Clay and Buck.
And they, Clay Travis, put it to him very frankly, like, she doesn't like you.
Why doesn't she like you?
Because she definitely doesn't like you.
And it led to a very interesting answer.
Take a listen to it in part.
Why do you think she dislikes you so much?
Because it does seem personal.
Like the way that she's gone after you.
I mean, you raised the point that her daughter is on TikTok, her daughter's grown.
And she was, I mean, she, this is not acting, right?
She seems to genuinely not like you.
Where do you think that comes from?
I think it comes from a deep-seated envy of sorts, actually.
I mean, there's a woman who's never made an honest dime in the private sector, but clearly aspires to be wealthy and sees me as, I think, a young buck who has not, I didn't mean that in the Buck sense of.
I get you.
I get you.
A young buck who, you know, I think hasn't put in the kind of earned the kind of stripes that someone like her has.
You know, funny story.
The first time we met was actually her reaching out to me.
There was something striking about it.
I mean, it was a very calculating move, right?
This guy could be a player.
I want to be the first person probably to reach out.
She makes sure I'm getting him on my side.
He ends up blurbing the back of the book.
So, this is somebody who, for her entire career, has proven he will do literally, and you can look at the full extent of her past in South Carolina.
She will do literally whatever is required to get ahead.
To her now, to say that out of turn to challenge her path to power, I think that she does take that very personally.
But, you know, frankly, even in this conversation, I think we've spent too much airtime on somebody who is really just another manifestation of a modern Dick Cheney that has no place in the modern Republican Party.
He is just so annoying.
What do you make of that?
He is so, he's just so annoying.
I mean, just so pompous and narcissistic.
And Nikki has what three times the poll numbers he does.
And he sits there and talks down to her like he's the future of the Republican Party.
Pal, you got five points in the polls, five points.
And he had a little boomlet after the first debate because people were like, wow, this guy's interesting and he seems really, really smart and articulate.
And then his poll numbers cratered because he's the kid in the first chair in the classroom begging for more homework from teacher.
It is just annoying.
It's just, I mean, like, I just don't think.
I mean, people call me after these debates, you know, family, extended family.
I have not heard a positive thing about Vivek since the first debate.
What did you think, Michael, about his criticism on the honest dollar piece of it?
Well, I mean, Vivek Ramaswamy, you know, he bought a pharmaceutical drug that had failed clinical trials like four or five times and then repackaged it and IPO'd the drug, made like a ton, a ton of money, and the thing failed again.
And he's going to lecture everyone on business acumen.
It's patently absurd.
Like, I mean, he has hundreds of millions of dollars.
I mean, he knows how to make money.
He does.
And you know what?
Tim Scott had all the money in the world to keep in this race.
And he's a patriot who was like, it's not my time.
The voters have said that.
Guy's got like $25 million of candidate money and he got out of the race because he wants to do the right thing.
Don't you see?
Let me ask you this, Duncan.
I see him at this point.
Vivek knows he's not going to win the nomination.
I see him more like a Ron Paul.
Remember how Ron Paul used to stay in it just because he wanted us to hear his libertarian views?
And it was just a platform to sort of get his thoughts out into the mainstream and get them discussed and considered.
Don't you think Vivek is doing something like that?
I'm so glad you said that because I think it has reconstituted.
I think it's reconstituted the very online Ron Paul Paul world of 2012 that was like brigading drudge polls to make it look like Ron Paul was going to be the nominee.
But it just hits different, Megan, when it comes from nice grandpa who looks like a teddy bear than when it comes from Vivek.
Because Vivek is just grading and he feels like he's, it feels like he's lecturing you and he tilts his head and points his finger in the air.
And I just think the visual representation of that is just annoying.
Also, I think it's a wild thing that Ron Paul's policies sound more sane than Vivek's.
When Vivek is like, I'll find everyone in the government.
We'll see who has an odd social security number at the end.
If it ends in an odd number, you're fired.
It's a novel approach.
I said at the time it sounded like the Cato Institute was being run by Anton Shigur.
Like we're just going to flip a coin and some sociopath is going to decide whether you have a job or not.
Well, I'm fine because mine ends in an even.
So I don't know about the rest of you, but I also have a job.
So I'm pro, but I do think the words he was using were very interesting that she has a deep-seated envy of him because he's so wealthy.
That if you listen to the whole clip, he says, she came to me.
He talked about it a little bit there where he says, I was putting woke ink out and she called me up and she saw me.
He says in that, that, oh, he could be a player.
He said, I was a rising star.
And she came to me and like sort of tries to schmooze him and wound up blurbing his book.
She doesn't look wonderful if you hear the full context of the clip.
And then you tell me what he's implying at the end because he says she will do literally whatever is required to get ahead.
He's trying to do the Trump thing.
He's trying to do well he said.
First he said, but let me just tell you this because he said Boeing.
She, she scratched their back, then they put her on the board.
He named another company.
She scratched their back.
Then they put her on the board or they did something for her.
Then he said, even personally, and I'll let you go do your research on that.
It was like, This is pretty explosive stuff.
Yeah, I just, it's so bad.
I mean, to act like, oh, he was this huge up and comer.
And that's why that she went to go see him.
No, no, no.
No, she was running for president, son, and you have a billion dollars and she would like your support.
That is the way that this works.
I am very, very surprised that you've gotten into this line of work without doing that 101 homework, which is basically what we're not your friends.
Surprise.
But I mean, look, beyond all of that, we had Nikki on the program today for your listeners who want to check that out.
And we asked her a similar line of questioning about why it is that she's got this thing going on.
And she's like, I'll be honest with you.
I went into this debate intending not to look, even look at him, but she's like, I just can't, I can't help it.
And he, what he tries to do to engage her over and over and over again is, is on his side of the ledger, not really hers.
And when you invoke somebody's daughter and that daughter is sitting in the front row and you know that, you know, you're going to get a reaction, right?
So that's what he's doing.
I mean, look, he's a talented guy in a lot of different respects.
Is he wholly unqualified to be on that campaign stage?
Unequivocally, yes.
Unequivocally, he has absolutely no business being on that campaign stage.
But if you like a little top hat and cane routine every once in a while, a little different version of events that doesn't actually exist in facts here in the United States of America, he's a great one to look for.
But don't you think that he's reinvented himself since the beginning of this campaign?
You know, I knew Vivek prior to any, prior to him getting close to politics when he wrote his books and he was writing op-eds for the Wall Street Journal with a friend of mine from Yale Law School.
And he was interesting and he was a woke anti-woke warrior.
So he was very interesting and he kind of came into this with a much different message.
Then it seems like he found a lane in trying to be like sort of like a Trump Jr. or a Tucker Jr. and got a lot of clicks, got a lot of attention.
And now he's like firmly in that camp, but it doesn't really match up with the way he entered.
I don't, am I wrong?
That's the strangest thing about it, Megan.
And that is why I'm so angry about it.
It's like, I read Woke Inc. and we met Vivek before he ran for president.
And just go back and read that book.
I mean, like he has flip-flopped on all the positions that he had in that book.
Look in particular, the way that he describes January 6th and Donald Trump's role in it and what he should have done after 2020.
And then compare it to what he's saying on the campaign trail now.
It's like it's night and day.
The guy's totally reinvented himself because he thinks there's this lane to get clicks, to be an influencer, to not really try to run for president, but basically be on a troll, be a troll on the debate stage against Nikki Haley.
It's just like, it just seems so dishonest.
And like, that's what really upsets me.
I mean, you guys like, you seem to like Nikki Haley.
You seem to like Haley DeSantis.
We used to like what about, I know, okay, but, but he's representing a wing of the party that is important that needs to be brought along.
You know, that diehard Trump crew, they don't really like Nikki Haley and they don't really like Aron DeSantis.
And like, I see him up there serving a purpose.
You know, like I'm always looking at these guys, like, do you serve a purpose still in this race?
And I see the purpose he's serving in addition to those libertarian things that we talked about.
Like that Trump lane, they cheer everything he does.
They're like, yes, sicker, get him.
Neocons, fight.
So, I've actually noticed kind of a sea change, which has happened.
I think this somewhat indicates the reason that his poll number started faltering: Trump folks have started going after Vivek, being like, oh, you know, he's a part of the whole Davos crew.
He's got this whole history of saying that Trump was a horrible person because of January 6th.
So, they are starting to take notice.
And I think that's starting to hurt him.
It's kind of like catching up to him.
Like Duncan said long ago, like anyone who'd actually read the book would know these things.
And I've noticed a lot of the Trump folks are trying to put that message out because they're like, we don't want this guy to try to, you know, write our coattails and try to steal our message from him.
Right.
He was like a fun toy for the Trump voters to pretend like they supported him because they knew he was a stalking horse for Donald Trump and he hurt the other candidates in the race.
But I think the joke is weird than even on the Trump people.
But Donald Trump is not as simplistic as what Vivek is talking about.
Like the idea that you just sort of abandon Israel in the middle of a conflict.
I mean, one of the other reasons that, in addition to what you just said, Smug, that his poll numbers are having a problem is because the world's really coming into focus over the last six weeks.
And it requires a president that knows how to deal with these kinds of things.
And you mentioned Nikki Halichi obviously does.
I think Ron DeSantis does as well.
I think Chris Christie can figure that out pretty quickly.
I know, and everyone knows who's ever spent a minute listening to Vivek Ramaswamy that that would be a catastrophe if he was sitting in the Oval Office amidst the crisis that we're facing.
It just, you need some experience to deal with it.
It's not about ideology.
The ideology that he's sort of ascribing to Donald Trump and the American First People is not one that was effectuated in the four years that the president was president.
He's the guy who dropped the Moab.
He's the guy who took out Solemani.
He's the guy that was threatening North Korea and Russia with any sort of aggravation around the world.
Like that is not some isolationist.
That is what he has prescribed to Donald Trump that actually didn't happen.
That's very interesting.
Let me ask you about Christie because I don't want to move on without mentioning him.
He is in danger of not making the next debate.
You got to have, according to the RNC, they keep raising the requirements to make the debate and it's working in winnowing the field.
Mike Pence was not going to make the last debate and he announced it he was dropping out.
I don't know about Tim Scott.
He did it right after the last debate, not right before the fourth.
But now we're going into the fourth and it happens on 12-6.
And in order for Chris Christie to make it, the other three I think are going to make it, but in order for Chris Christie to make it, he's got to have 6% in a national poll.
You can either do it in two national polls, 6%, or one national poll and one from an early primary state.
So if he's polling 6% in New Hampshire plus one national poll, he's good.
We looked it up.
The national poll has to have happened, I think we said, after September 15th.
And so he just needs one.
But that's actually a tall order for Chris Christie.
You also need 80,000, at least 80,000 unique donors.
And we believe he has that.
So it's really the polling that could keep him out.
So if he does not make the debate, first of all, do you think he'll get that?
Tim Scott's out.
I don't know if he gets any of Tim Scott's support and it drives up his poll numbers enough to 6%.
Do you think he'll get it?
And do you think he'll stay in if he doesn't debate?
I mean, technically, I think Asa Hutchinson's still in.
Isn't Doug Bergam still in?
Even though they didn't make the, right?
So what do you think?
Well, Chris Christie is not Asa Hutchinson.
He's in it for a serious reason.
I think he got into it for a serious reason.
I actually think that he falls into the category of former Vice President Mike Pence and Tim Scott in that he does want an ultimate choice.
This isn't like a narcissistic adventure for Chris Christie at all.
If you look at the polling, he's got at least one state poll in New Hampshire where he would help to qualify there.
The national polls, I don't know what that looks like.
I think you're probably right that that's going to be a stretch, but I think it's a chance that he could be on that stage for sure.
And he has had some popularity with small dollar donors.
So I think that part of it is there.
But more importantly, he has a serious conversation with people, even when they don't want to hear it, which I think is an admirable trait.
You watch candidates roll around, and I've been very critical of some of them where I know that they're saying things that they don't believe and they're afraid of the electorate that they're speaking to.
And that's not Chris.
And as long as that's what Chris is doing and he can qualify for these debates, I don't see any problem in him being on that stage.
Now, you may not agree with him, and polls would suggest the vast majority of Republican voters do not agree with him and do not like him.
But just because of that doesn't mean that he needs to immediately get out.
I think Chris would make that decision if he came to the conclusion that he could not compete to win New Hampshire.
Will that happen next week?
Will that happen after Iowa?
I don't know, but that's my guess.
And I think also, I think Christie's decision is informed by what he sees the other primary candidates doing.
Ron DeSantis Finds His Voice 00:14:20
And we played that video earlier of Ron DeSantis putting out the missteps of Donald Trump.
Like, I think Chris Christie really wants this primary to be a referendum on what Donald Trump did and did not do when he was president.
But he's not mentioning him that much.
He's not mentioning that.
He's mentioning him a lot more than the other candidates are.
So why?
I don't remember Christie mentioning Trump at all at this third debate.
I have to go back and look at it.
But he kind of abandoned it.
Well, he was asked it specifically.
That's why.
Yeah.
I think bringing up Christie and the debates is critical to understanding the situation because ahead of the first debate, he had that reputation of like, okay, when Christie's on stage, he could kill somebody.
Like, you know, this guy's dangerous.
And people want to see the fireworks of like, who is he going to fight?
This is going to be entertaining because people love like the Coliseum aspect of a debate.
Like, we're going to see blood.
This is going to be awesome.
And he's had three shots on that debate stage and he hasn't bodied anybody.
And I think that's led to a lot of disappointment.
I think he has a lot of those small daughter donors probably are giving it, giving money because they're like, we want to see him, you know, go after somebody on stage.
We want to be entertained by this.
And I think he's had three shots at, you know, making his presence felt and bringing back, you know, what he did to Marco Rubio the last time he was on that debate stage and it hasn't materialized.
And I think that could be a big problem.
Donald Trump's not on the stage, right?
And I think that's ultimately the issue is Chris has been sort of defanged by the fact that the guy that he wants to ultimately attack is not in the room.
And I agree with you, Megan.
I think the national poll may be the ultimate problem here.
Like, I don't know if he's going to qualify because of that issue.
I think he will, obviously, in New Hampshire, but it's that national poll that's going to be the issue for him.
We looked at the polls so far for him.
So far, real clear politics average in Iowa, nothing about 5%.
New Hampshire, USA Today Suffolk poll released October 4th did have him at 6%.
South Carolina, there was one Trafalgar poll released in mid-August.
That's too long ago at 7%.
So he'll probably get one in New Hampshire, but whether he can get at the national level, we do not know.
We'll find out together.
All right.
Now, wait, I am going to take a break, but before we do that, we should talk about DeSantis and Haley.
Hello.
They're in a death match.
That's the real match right now.
Of course, we've talked about Trump, but she's on an upward trajectory in her poll.
I heard you guys saying she kind of peaked at just the right time.
You know, when you go to Saratoga, that's right by where I grew up, and you bet the horse.
You don't want the horse to be first when it comes out of the gate.
You want it to hang back.
And then when you're almost at the end, you want it to be in third.
And then boom, he takes off right at the end.
That's literally what she's done.
And DeSantis has been stagnant.
He's not kind of, he's not going down anymore exactly, but he's kind of stagnant.
So, you know, if you're at Saratoga, do you put your money on this DeSantis horse that's kind of in the, not totally the middle of the pack, but not leading the pack exactly?
Or do you put it on this other horse that like is super fast, it's in third, and it's moving up towards now tied for second, first in some places?
You guys tell me she is on the rise, and it's very interesting to watch.
And I, I just sort of have a little bit of a different take on this whole thing, Megan, to be honest with you.
Like, I think it's actually going to make Iowa an interesting race to watch from here on out.
Because if you look at the history of Iowa, it has for the last 20 years finished as a very close race.
Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Ted Cruz, all of them won by very, very slim margins.
And when Ted Cruz won in Iowa, Trump was leading him in the polls the entire time.
And then Cruz snuck it out and won at the caucuses.
What's different this time is the ground game that the Trump campaign has for 2024 that they didn't have in 2016.
But he's not the only one with a ground game.
Ron DeSantis has a very smart operative leading the way in Iowa.
He has the endorsement of Kim Reynolds, the governor in that state.
That is very, very good for him ahead of a caucus that is traditionally a very sort of inside, who are you talking to type deal.
But Ronnie D is not the only guy who has people on the ground in Iowa.
If you look at some of the latest announcements from Nikki Haley, she actually has Kim Reynolds campaign manager running her program in Iowa.
She has endorsements from a lot of Iowa luminaries.
So it's going to come down.
It could really come down to the wire in that state.
The last president who finished above 40 in Iowa was George Bush in 1999, 2000.
And didn't Nikki Haley just buy $10 million worth of ads?
And is it Iowa and New Hampshire?
Yeah, spread apart, spread across the two states, is what she told us.
Yeah, I think ultimately, you know, what the DeSantis people will tell you is he's the only candidate with crossover appeal into the MAGA base.
And if you don't have that crossover appeal, you can't actually beat Donald Trump in a one, one-to-one, you know, heads-up match.
And that Nikki Haley's electorate is, you know, primarily made up of more moderate voters, independent voters, suburban women, and that their propensity to actually turn out in a complicated system like a caucus may actually be lower than the more conservative voters that support Ron DeSantis.
And he has an incredible organization on the ground in Iowa.
I agree with you, Ashbrook, and that probably does benefit him as we get closer to the night of the caucuses.
But like, you know, the map gets a lot better for Nikki Haley in New Hampshire, right?
Especially if Chris Christie gets out of this race.
And then the third is South Carolina, which is her home state, right?
So like you could see a scenario where her transition go up and Tim Scott's gone, right?
So you can understand that.
And then also like on Nikki's side here, wouldn't it be great if we did better with suburban women and independent voters and moderate voters?
And I feel like everybody looks like the candidates who aren't named Donald Trump look at all of this as like a static thing where like if as consolidation happens, you know, their voters become my voters.
And it's like, that's not always how it works.
Like what happens if those independent voters or moderate voters decide to stay home because no longer is Nikki Haley in the race, right?
And so it's like the math isn't perfect there.
It's, it's, you know, it's tough odds for both of them, but they both have an argument to make.
Yeah.
But what, what, how does Ron DeSantis do it if he wins Iowa?
Let's say, I mean, honestly, like Trump is crushing them all in all these states.
I feel the need to reiterate that lest anybody out there who's voting for a non-Trumper get excited.
He's crushing them in all these places, but who knows?
So let's say DeSantis wins Iowa.
He's not going to win New Hampshire and South Carolina, is he?
Like he's not polling particularly well there.
So it looks like maybe Nikki Haley will win New Hampshire.
I mean, I guess maybe Chris Christie, but okay.
Not win.
I guess I'm saying win amongst the undercard, you know, come in second.
Then you go to South Carolina.
Yes, she'll probably win.
She could win South Carolina.
So, like, then where are we?
It all gets decided in Super Tuesday.
Well, there's a lot of things that happen when you start counting votes, right?
I mean, it has a way of focusing the money.
If you look at the last few presidential elections, including the Democrats back in 2020, I mean, Bernie Sanders won by massive margins in Iowa and New Hampshire until Democrats got their act together.
It was like, you know, maybe it's not a great idea if we nominate a socialist against Donald Trump.
And they began the consolidation process and endorsements and got behind Joe Biden.
Like, Democrats are better at that than Republicans.
I don't expect that to happen here.
But you're getting into a scenario after the first two states after New Hampshire, where it's like, you know, three, three go in, one comes out.
It's like a cage match situation.
There is not going to be a lot of tolerance amongst a Republican, and there's at least half of this electorate that doesn't want Donald Trump to be renominated.
There's not going to be a lot of tolerance for the John Kasich routine from somebody who's just sort of hanging around with no prayer to win this.
I think, like, if I'm a strategist here and I'm in Ron DeSantis' camp, I got to get second in Iowa, whether I'm third or even fourth in New Hampshire, sort of immaterial.
I got to have a really strong showing, maybe just behind Nikki in South Carolina.
But then I got to make the case that my donors haven't abandoned me, that I've got money to spend and I'm ready to go hit Super Tuesday hard to try to winnow that field even further to a point where you've got something close to a Mano Amano for Super Tuesday.
In that scenario, weird things have happened, right?
I mean, you saw in 2016 where, you know, somebody like Marco Rubio, who they lost everything by massive numbers, ended up picking up delegates and winning a couple of states on Super Tuesday.
It widens the aperture from what it is that we've been looking at to a bunch of different states that we don't have quite as close a handle on.
That's what I would be looking at if I was in Ron DeSantis camp.
With Nikki, I think, you know, if she's like second in Iowa and she's in second in New Hampshire and she's going in her home state, I think she's thinking, how can I choke this guy out?
He may not make it to Super Tuesday.
That's that's what my strategy would be.
I mean, the thing is, is if everyone were, or to be honest, would you rather be with the Haley campaign right now or the DeSantis campaign?
Because I think the really unfortunate thing.
Wait, can I see that?
Make them answer that smug.
Raise your hand if you'd rather be with Haley.
Raise your hand if you'd rather be with Haley.
I just don't know how to ballpark that.
No one's raising.
No, no, no.
I would say that.
This is the debate.
I would say Haley because expectations are very, very low.
For Ron DeSantis in Iowa, expectations couldn't be higher.
If he doesn't finish close to Trump, they're going to, you know, very close to Trump.
It's harder to meet that bar.
You're right about that.
It's much harder.
DeSantis actually needs a second place in Iowa.
He does.
Nikki doesn't.
Yep.
That's the thing.
It's so hard for all of you.
But Duncan's kind of raising his hand.
Are you raising your hand to speak or are you raising your hand?
Yeah.
I would also want to, I would prefer to be Nikki in this scenario for one other reason is she, there's nobody in the field who's done more with less.
She's had less money than everybody else in this race up to probably now this moment in all these debates where she's gained all of this momentum.
So like Ron DeSantis has a $150 million super PAC, right?
And I know that the Trump people have been attacking him.
They've spent like $20, $25 million attacking him.
So his numbers have taken a hit.
But like Nikki has gained all this momentum and traction, and now she's going to have the resources to go out and tell her story more.
So I have to think like the momentum is a little more with her on that.
The one caveat I've got to this, and I think you saw it last week in this debate, is that it feels to me like Ron DeSantis, for the first time in this campaign, has found his authentic voice.
He does not seem hesitant.
He does not seem like he's searching for how to find an opinion somewhere.
Feels to me like he is doing everything he's doing because that's where he is and that's what everybody fell in love with in a Republican primary electorate some a year ago.
Uh, if he can recapture some of that, you can see where you could start building back up.
It's like your racehorse analogy, when a horse is leading in the final stretch, sometimes another.
A horse just needs to see another horse before he takes off again, and that could happen here.
I just think it's it's incredibly unfortunate the situation that he's found himself in, where I think as a candidate he's incredibly strong, he's got a great track record and Republicans love him.
He got that big win in Florida, really energized people.
That okay, we you know we're heading in a good direction, but I think his campaign has done him a tremendous disservice until he's been allowed to have an authentic voice where he's not being overcoached or he has you know, Jeffro leaking memos to the press of being like here's what Rona Santis needs to do at the debate like it's been a mess that he's dealt with and it hasn't actually had anything to do with the candid, which is the problem, and I think that's why, with the momentum that Haley has yeah, he's the ceo.
Well, he's the ceo.
He said that.
You know, I mean my number one piece of advice for Ron Do Santis.
Not that he needs my political advice, but he could.
He could use it.
He should stop doing that weird little smile at the end of his answer.
I totally agree.
I totally agree.
It makes me uncomfortable.
Nobody likes it.
It seems affected, it doesn't seem sincere, it's unnecessary.
You don't have to be smiley.
We don't need smiley, we we need competent.
Don't make the wheel smile like he's got one consultant saying you need to smile and one can't consultant saying remember, don't smile at the end.
And then he's thinking of both.
These smile if it's natural, if you actually feel like smiling, then smile.
Otherwise don't.
Don't force it.
I, somebody hasn't somebody told him you do not have a convincing fake smile.
Yes, you're not exactly like the happy warrior.
You're the guy who's supposed to tell like hard truths and be like I win and this guy lost and you should nominate me like.
That doesn't have to end in a smile.
Like you can be real and authentic to the voters.
And also, if you're going to force a smile, do it instantaneously.
The thing that kills me is the pause yeah, the pause in between the end of the answer and then the smile is like, and I saw, and they're going to be stone cold dead.
And so now he's going to be like, okay, I have one consultant saying smile.
One consultant saying don't smile, Megan Kelly saying just do it fast.
And so he's going to do the smile in half as much time, don't?
No, here's my rule to go.
Number one, don't do it.
Number two, only smile if it's genuine.
Oh look, we have the video.
Oh no, they got the.
If it's genuine, let's see, he sees he's holding his pen, he's making his.
Here it goes.
I'm so right, that's so.
You're never gonna run for president man, everyone's gonna call it out when you mess.
I am helping him.
I bet I have a million weird affectations that I don't know about, but if I were to run for president I would know every, not a one.
You'd be good, you're not wearing Pants.
I don't know if you do that.
No one told me.
Blank is home than not.
Look at these cams.
All right, standby.
Quick break.
Back with the fellas in two seconds.
Hey, everyone.
It's me, Megan Kelly.
Mark your calendars.
Newsom Debate Event Preview 00:03:35
News Nation, SiriusXM, December 6th at a live prime time event, the News Nation Republican primary debate.
SiriusXM's Megan Kelly returns to the moderator's seat.
I'll ask the questions you want to hear.
Real issues, tough questions.
Every contender.
Because if you want to be the leader of the free world, you better be ready to give America the answers they're looking for.
Live from the University of Alabama, the News Nation Republican Primary Debate.
Moderated by SiriusXM's Megan Kelly and News Nation's Elizabeth Vargas.
December 6th, 8 p.m. Eastern.
Watch it on NewsNation, America's fastest-growing cable news network.
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The News Nation Republican primary debate.
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City leaders are making sure the city shines.
Caltrans repaving major roadways like the Harrison Street off-ramp from the I-80.
BART doubling down by deep cleaning their stations overnight more often.
Scrubbing and power washing is happening all over the city.
Yeah, the bottom of my shoes look clean.
It's noticeable how clear the streets look and how few homeless encampments there are on major thoroughfares.
Public Works is installing decorative crosswalks in North Beach and Chinatown.
And the Webster Street Pedestrian Bridge in Japantown was recently repainted.
The Yerba Buena Gardens at the Moscone Center are decked out with new colorful landscaping and murals, paid for by the Clean California Grant, just in time for the 20,000 high-profile CEOs and heads of state coming into town.
Unbelievable.
Gavin Newsom and San Francisco, London Breed, clean up the city just in time for the Chinese leader to show up there with Joe Biden.
They're important, but the actual residents of San Francisco can pound sand.
When Gavin Newsom was asked whether this is in fact what you've done, he, well, said the following: Listen.
Anytime you put on an event, by definition, you know, you have people over your house.
You're going to clean up the house.
You have 21 world leaders.
You got tens of thousands of people coming from all around the globe.
What an opportunity to showcase the world's most extraordinary place.
Folks say, oh, they're just cleaning up this place because all those fancy leaders are coming into town.
That's true because it's true.
But it's also true for months and months and months prior to APEC.
We've been having different conversations.
So what do you guys make of it?
I mean, I had a bit on our show today about how it was sort of like when my wife would clean up the house, but unlike our show, she actually listens to yours.
So I'm not going to do that bit.
I'm just going to thank Gavin Newsom for proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's not that they can't clean up the cities in America.
It's that they choose not to.
Exactly.
In one week, he can make that city hospitable for all the citizens there.
And he chooses not to.
With all the money that we owe to China, you got to make sure their investment looks good when they get it.
And you think about it.
This is the before picture, by the way.
Why wouldn't he leave Xi's customers there who are on fentanyl?
I mean, you want to be like, yeah, you're doing a great job.
You know, this is his real work.
This is Xi's real work in the city of San Francisco.
All the people hooked on fentanyl and drugs.
San Francisco Drug Policy Critique 00:00:57
It is so offensive.
Yeah, when somebody comes over to the house, you clean up the house.
Yes, most of us don't live in a pigsty day to day.
We have some small clutter to clean up.
It's not a complete overhaul of where we choose to raise our children.
That's what's needed in San Francisco.
He doesn't give two shits about the children there, Ashbrook.
None.
He doesn't care about them at all.
I think we know that.
He's proven it over and over and over again.
And look, we know who he likes better than people in California.
It's she.
Yeah, apparently.
It's so offensive.
And I love that he just gave it up.
That's true because that's true.
He's been taking speechwriting from Kamala Harris, his main competition for the job of president.
Guys, what a pleasure.
Thank you so much.
You are awesome.
As always, it's great to talk to you.
You're the best, Megan.
Thank you for having us.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Ruthless Variety Program.
Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no
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