Dave Smith and Rob Bernstein critique Donald Trump's leadership failures, citing his ineffective handling of the pandemic, refusal to fire Anthony Fauci, and firing Steve Bannon on day one to appease media. They argue big tech censors dissidents like Russell Brand while mocking Janet Yellen's claims of economic strength despite high interest rates and flawed metrics. Ultimately, the hosts conclude that public pessimism regarding the economy is justified by unsustainable debt and rising costs, exposing a disconnect between corporate narratives and reality. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Roll Back The State00:02:13
Fill her up!
You are listening to the gas human.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the gas digital network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
What's up, what's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I'm Dave Smith.
He's Rob Bernstein.
What up, gangster?
How you feeling?
I'm fighting a vicious fight against Spirit Airlines to try and retrieve my bag.
It's taking a lot of my focus and energy at this time.
They still have your bag?
Yeah, and they won't communicate or acknowledge it.
So I don't know if it's lost and they'll be replacing said items so I can repurchase production gear or if I'm just waiting on the FedEx.
No, it's the bag with all the production gear.
I got a lot of gear in that bag.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
I really stuff a lot of things into a bag.
I mean, there's an epic amount of things in that bag.
So after that whole nightmare, there's a whole additional nightmare attached to it.
Spirit Airlines, I'm telling you, they don't run an airline.
They're running off of, they're harvesting your spirit.
That's what they're doing.
That's what it actually is.
They run off of evil energy and they realize that I'm an angry person and that they could really milk a lot of my energy out of me.
And like even like the spokesman for them is like, I mean, it's right there in the name.
We told you this airline runs off spirits.
What did you think?
You agreed to give us your spirit when you came here.
Wow, Jesus Christ.
Good luck with all of that.
That sounds like just the worst thing in the world.
All right.
This picture brings me hope because if our United States government can find its $950 million plane in someone's backyard, then who knows where my bag might turn up.
All right.
There you go.
A message of optimism.
That's something we always try to add here on this program.
By the way, okay, before we get into the show, one more reminder.
My brand new comedy special just broke 300,000 views.
Please go check it out.
Creepy Landscape Of Allegations00:10:48
Share it around with a friend.
It's not getting pushed by the algorithm.
So if you could share it, we really, really appreciate it.
And then, of course, this weekend, I will be at Governor's.
If you're in the Long Island area, come on out there.
Rob can't make this one, but Chris Fega will be opening for me and it'll be a real good time.
And then a whole bunch of stuff coming up real soon.
If you are a European listener to this show, me and Robbie the Fire Bernstein, along with Louis J. Gomez and Zach Amiko, are doing our first ever European stand-up tour.
So very much looking forward to that.
Comic Dave Smith for all of those dates.
Robbie the Fire for all of Rob's headlining dates.
Anything else you want to plug before we get this bitch going?
Utica and Boonville this weekend coming out.
Hell yeah.
That's the reason why you can't be with me this weekend.
Bastard.
All right.
So last episode, we talked a bunch about these accusations that have come up against Russell Brand.
There's a new element to this, which I find particularly creepy, that it was just widely reported today that YouTube has demonetized Russell Brand's channel.
Now, however you feel about these accusations or whatever you believe, whether you believe Russell Brand did this or didn't do it, it does seem to me if we're all just being honest with ourselves, the correct answer is none of us know.
But there is something really creepy to me about the idea that, you know, at the heart of Western civilization and at the heart of the concept of liberty is the idea that people are innocent until proven guilty.
Now, of course, this is a concept for the legal system.
And okay, fair enough.
There should be like a different, say, standard for throwing somebody in a cage than for demonetizing their YouTube channel.
However, there is still something to that spirit of innocent until proven guilty that is fundamental to a free society or even a society with any degree of freedom.
If you can just be accused of something and then you're treated as if you're guilty, then you really don't have any liberty, or at least it's pretty damn easy to lose what liberty you have.
And the idea that a couple of these like corporate journalists can do, which what they did by their own admission is go on a fishing expedition to try to get people in your past.
Now, as I said in the previous episode, I do think when you're dealing at the level of someone like this, someone this famous, someone like Russell Brand, who is not just famous, but also like a playboy, who's been with probably hundreds and hundreds of women, the idea that you can find two or three of them who are, you know, regret the encounter or had negative encounters or whatever is not that crazy.
Now, this does not in any way prove that they're not all telling the truth.
Maybe they are all telling the truth.
But the point is that typically these type of things, you would think the process would involve police and lawyers and a judge and evidence being scrutinized from all sides.
Now, I'm not saying that the legal system is perfect.
I'm a pretty big critic of our legal system, or I'm sure I would be of the British legal system as well.
But the idea that none of that's really happening, it's just journalists going out and looking to find these women and then they can report on it and you can have your YouTube page demonetized over that is pretty creepy.
What are your thoughts on this, Rob?
I think especially if you just look at the accuracy of, I wonder if someone actually even studied the accuracy of these particular reporters and what kind of articles they typically put out.
Not even something I thought about till this very moment.
Do these guys have an incredible 100% accuracy track record that, you know, it's like that guy's, he's gotten every story right.
We better put this person on pause until we can do an investigation.
Seems like a creepy landscape that we're living in where allegations can prohibit your ability to make an income.
And then, what, it takes a long time to prove otherwise?
It doesn't seem like a greater working system.
Yes.
And then it seems, and this is something we touched on on the last episode as well.
But then there's this whole element of like the unequal application of some of these standards.
And so is it a shock really that the thing they go to is that, oh, we've got to demonetize this guy's YouTube channel.
Like that's got to be the punishment here is that now we have to suppress, because let's get real.
It's not about the money being made on YouTube.
That's not the issue here.
The issue is that when they demonetize these videos, they also suppress them in the algorithm.
They also make it so that less eyeballs get on them.
And Russell Brand, I mean, I don't exactly know his financial situation, but my guess is the money coming in from YouTube is not the biggest deal in the world to him.
But so what they're going at here is they're going, oh, there are these accusations out there.
They happen to be accusations against a guy who's an outspoken critic of the regime.
And so we're just going to have to suppress his message of being a critic of the regime, right?
Like, isn't it kind of obvious what's going on here?
And this is true whether he's guilty of the allegations or not.
That's a separate issue.
The issue is like, maybe he is guilty of all of these things.
Maybe he's guilty of none of them.
Maybe he's guilty of some and not others.
Who knows?
But I do know that there are creeps all over the place who are not outspoken critics of the regime, who do not suffer any of these penalties.
And so that's, I think, more what we're actually looking at here.
And the truth is that, you know, Megan Kelly, who actually we're going to play a different clip of her later, Megan Kelly, somebody who I like very much.
I've been on her show a couple of times and I like her very much.
And she had this video where she went off.
And I think it's fair, the point she was making, but she was just saying, like, let's not have a knee-jerk reaction in the opposite direction of like the me too thing.
So let's not like say, okay, like let's not like dismiss these women as liars right away.
Okay.
Which I think is fair.
Fair enough.
Like there, there should be some process.
I don't think it should be this.
I don't think it should be litigated in like articles.
You know what I mean?
Like there should be some processes.
No one's really dismissing.
I'm going to make the argument.
And I shouldn't say no one.
Yes, there's always someone.
Yeah.
We're not dismissing the women.
We're dismissing the journalists.
We're dismissing the entire structure here of the way that the media lies to us and operates.
I didn't personally sit down with one of these women and have them recount the story to me.
I've had a newspaper cherry pick four incidents after telling me that they went looking to try and cancel someone because in their own words, this guy's a dangerous wellness influencer.
So we've tracked down four women willing to speak to try and get him canceled.
That's what I'm questioning.
Yes, I'm exactly.
I'm not dismissing the accusations.
I'm dismissing this standard.
I'm dismissing the standard of anonymous people can make an accusation about something you did a decade ago.
And then we're all immediately supposed to treat you as if you're guilty of that.
I'm dismissing the standard practice of going on fishing expeditions to try to get dirt on someone.
Not someone's coming to your newspaper and saying, hey, I have a story here, but you're going around and trying to find people and say, hey, does anyone have a beef with him?
If you do have a beef with him, we're going to write a story about this.
Did he abuse any of you?
If you did, we're going to go get him.
Because the problem with that is that then you open yourself up to, look, the fact is, and look, this is just a reality of the situation.
I think it's an uncomfortable truth, but that's what we specialize in here.
When you have a guy who's had a large number of sexual encounters, which by the way, I don't think is the right way to live.
I think there's also number one, I don't think it's the best way to live.
Number two, I would say to all men who listen to this show, also know the world that you're in now and know the dangers that you're taking on if you are living that way.
It's a dangerous world.
I'm talking to you, Rob.
I think that...
I'm really trying to look away.
I'm sorry.
What's that?
I heard something from outside.
What did you say something, Dave?
No, and the Fed, dude.
You're right.
Well, look, I think there's a dynamic here where if you're having, let's say, lots of casual sex and you start to get your numbers up.
The women who you're having these encounters with are disproportionately a certain type of woman because there's a whole lot of chicks who aren't going to do that.
They're not just going to bang a famous guy randomly without, you know, maybe dating them or something like that.
And so you're dealing with, let's say, the pool of women you're pulling from are disproportionately a certain type of crazy.
And when you're having casual sex with a lot of women, again, it's a numbers game.
And the more you have, the higher the odds are that there will be some of these women who wanted something more.
This is just, I think something that everyone knows is true, right?
There will be some of them who are like, oh, I didn't want to just get fucked by Russell Brand.
I wanted to continue to see him.
And so it just increases the likelihood that when journalists go out and say, hey, we're looking for a story where Russell Brand was abusive to someone.
And now you give a chick who's a little bit crazy an avenue to damage the person who she's resentful of.
Now, that doesn't mean that's what happened in this situation.
It's possible that all of the women were abused by him.
However, this standard of practice is like, is ripe for that type of abuse.
Rejecting The Standard00:04:31
And so that's what we're rejecting here.
Not that, not that we're dismissing the women's allegations.
We're openly saying we don't know.
That's the truth for all of us.
We don't know.
But we're saying this, this whole standard is just wrong.
And then the idea that big tech companies, by the way, we've learned something about these companies over the last few years, right?
Like what have we factually learned?
We've learned that they are deeply intertwined with the government, that the government has infiltrated these companies and with the express purpose to do what?
To censor, to limit the reach of dissident voices.
And then to see there are these accusations that are made.
No charges are brought.
There's no legal case going forward as far as we know.
And that a company like YouTube is going to go, okay, well, we are going to take it into our own hands to punish him for these unverified accusations.
That is a, I mean, you know, that is a system that is ripe for abuse.
I also, Man, Economy, and State, I know I'm going to get you juiced up.
The second I reference that, but one of the interesting takeaways from that book was when he explains the relationship between the elites and the academics and how it's kind of a enforces itself circularly where they both.
Are you thinking of?
Uh, you're thinking of anatomy of the state, thank you.
Anatomy of the state?
Yes, the other one's too big.
Who reads the other one?
But anatomy I do.
That, that's real.
That's a thin pamphlet you can get.
You can get through that one and pretend like you're well read in the libertarian literature.
But anyways, back to my incredible uh point off the works of Murray Rothbard, it becomes credible that the politicians, if you get an academic saying what they want, they're going to hand them a bunch of money.
And then all of a sudden people go, oh, look, that must be the right opinion to have.
The market really likes that opinion because look, this academic has all the money.
And they kind of rely on this infrastructure where the only way to be successful is by playing ball and kind of working with the regime.
And when all of a sudden we live in this free market landscape for media and CNN and Fox News are not what's popular.
And so you get to actually see, oh, people like this other information.
Oh, there's money in producing this other information.
That kind of breaks down the entire system that they require to play with everyone's minds and make them seem like they're more popular than they are.
Their ideas are more popular than they are.
It even influences like kids in school.
It goes all the way down to if, you know, if you were interested in journalism and media, like, you know, 10 years ago, you were trying to get a job at CNN or Fox.
That's probably the only thing you were doing.
So you were kind of narrowly focused on what kind of information you were going to consume and how you were going to present that information.
Like that was the game you were playing.
In this open landscape of podcasts like ours, it, you know, it changes the entire game of what they need to do to try and control people's minds.
Did you ever see, there was a great clip once with Noam Chomsky and some corporate journalist who was interviewing him.
And he was kind of talking about Noam Chomsky was always very good at breaking down how the kind of like the like, obviously Rothbard was great at this too, but breaking down how like the media ended up serving the powerful rather than the powerless.
And he's kind of breaking this down how there's like this allowable, I forget his exact quote.
It was in manufactured consent, but it was something like you, what you do is they narrow the range of allowable opinion and then allow for ferocious debate within that very narrow window.
So you get the impression that you're watching like a real debate here.
Like we're, yeah, we're going to see Chris Christie and Barack Obama go at it.
You know, Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton are really going to disagree on this issue.
But then when you zoom out, you're like, oh, but they're all together on all of the most important issues.
Like no one, that, you know, and so he's talking to this journalist and the journalist is like said to him at one point, he's like, so you're saying that like I'm bought and paid for that I don't really hold the views that I like, I don't sincerely believe in my views.
And Noam Chomsky goes, no, quite the opposite.
I'm sure that you very sincerely believe in your views.
What I'm saying is that if you didn't, you wouldn't be here.
And that kind of like gets right to the cra so and there is something like corrosive about that, where you know on some level, you know that there's, there's like a lane that you kind of can't step outside of or you will be gone.
Pulling Numbers From Asses00:13:25
That's it.
You will be gone.
And so anyway, that's, I think that's part of the dynamic that's at work here.
But it's just, it's, it's, it's awful.
I, I, I hate the idea of like assassinating someone's character, especially with these like very vicious accusations.
Look, I'd also hate the idea of somebody being guilty of these vicious accusations and getting away with it.
So there's two different errors that you're trying to control for here.
The issue is that this can't be the standard.
And it is hard to not go in a more conspiratorial direction in your mind when there's been so many conspiracies that have been proven to be accurate over the last few years alone, let alone over the last 20 years or the last hundred years.
And it does seem like, oh, we just happen to be going into an election season where the justice system is being weaponized against the leading candidate.
And we just happen to now have this campaign to target and suppress the reach of one of the most popular dissonant voices.
Of the other most popular dissident voices.
You know people like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson.
Yeah, it seems like there's been campaigns to silence all of them too.
Right, there's Joe Rogan.
Was the was the the target of one of the biggest cancellation attempts in in history.
Tucker Carlson recently got fired from his cable news show.
It's like, oh yeah, it does seem like going into this.
There's all of these attempts to silent all of the voices that oppose the regime.
I'm sure that's just coincidental and I'm getting carried away in my mind here, but one could wonder.
One could wonder about some of these things.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Okay, switching gears.
Last week, Donald Trump was speaking.
We were talking about Megan Kelly before.
Donald Trump sat down with Megan Kelly.
Donald Trump does relatively few of these one-on-one interviews.
I also think Megan Kelly, I give her credit.
Megan Kelly is, she's, she's no slap.
She's no pushover, Megan Kelly.
And I, I, I appreciate that he did it with her because I think she is somebody who, look, I, I would say within the realm of like kind of very well-known people who you could sit down and have an interview with, Megan Kelly is going to be somebody who is, she's going to be reasonable, but she's going to be tough.
And I will say, I'm a big fan of Tucker Carlson, but I thought she gave Trump a much tougher and more interesting interview in a lot of ways.
Tucker is a Tucker is a very good interviewer, but I think this particular one, Megan Kelly, she got the best here.
There was one moment particularly that went super viral that I'm sure me and you, Rob, both will have a lot to say about.
So let's play that.
Here's Donald Trump last week with Megan Kelly.
But I have people on the other side.
I don't, not my side, although probably there are some on my side too.
They said, you saved 100 million people because I got it done in nine months as opposed to five years to 12 years.
A lot of people are proud of it.
No, I'm not proud of it.
I'm saying what Democrats think.
Democrats.
I get it.
And I'm not somebody who denies some of the things.
So you can tell the topic is the COVID vaccine.
And it is just unbelievable that Trump, it's, and it's such a weakness of his.
It's just classic Trump.
Like his strengths are also his weaknesses.
And like his political strength is that he's always like, I'm the winner.
I'm the best.
I'm tremendous.
Always like kind of this braggadocia.
But it's such a weakness that he's just incapable of going like, yeah, you know what?
I was kind of misled into this.
You know what I mean?
Like really like, you know, we should have just been looking at therapeutics.
This didn't make sense for the vast majority of people to take this.
And instead, he's left in this ridiculous corner where he's going, well, the Democrats say, I mean, even the Democrats say it's like, yeah, hey, Trump, the Democrats are full of shit.
Okay.
So the fact that they're saying this isn't anything.
You've got nothing here.
Anyway, any comments on this part or we'll play some more?
Well, it's particularly sharp when she goes, so you're proud of it.
And then he has to backtrack because he likes to keep everything in a gray area of, I have the perfect number, the perfect solution.
And so any attempt to peg any sort of specific, it just derails him.
So that was a particularly sharp question by her.
But so he just kind of walks around it.
Well, look, and this is what Donald Trump always does is he's on every side of all issues at once.
And so this kind of, I guess, works for him in some way because it's kind of like you're like, yeah, wait, what was he saying there?
He used to do this all the time.
Like even in 2016, where he'd be like, we shouldn't be fighting any of these wars and we will take out the terrorists.
We will bomb the crap out of them.
We'll torture their families if we have to.
We'll take the oil, but I don't want to fight any of these wars.
I just want to come home.
You're like, wait, what?
Like, which one is it?
You can't be all of those.
And you're right.
It was a very pointed question by Megan Kelly because if you're claiming you saved 100 million lives, you should be proud of that.
So why won't you just say you're proud of that?
What are you saying here?
Are you saying the Democrats are right?
And I'm proud of saving 100 million lives.
Or are you just saying they say that?
Because those are two different claims.
Let's keep playing a little bit.
Did I lived through that too?
But of course, a lot of people have been vaccine injured.
And that's one of the questions.
Those people are mad that they were rushed through and that they can't sue.
Well, I never gave mandates and people have to make up their own, you know, make their own decisions.
As far as I'm concerned, now some places had mandates, very strong mandates, largely Democrat governors and probably some Republicans, et cetera, et cetera.
But there are Democrats that say, why are you talking about that?
It's one of the, they really believe strongly.
One said, you say, and this is very smart people.
They said, you saved 100 million people worldwide.
In 1917, you know, it could have been as much as 100.
It ended the First World War because all the soldiers were dying of this horrible disease of 1917.
You know, it actually ended the First World War.
The soldiers were dying.
There were spongo flyings.
They're fighting and they're dying of this horrible disease.
They said, you might have saved 100 million people, 50 million people.
Why aren't you talking?
Let's pause it.
Okay.
First off, I'll start with the end there.
They go, you might have saved 100 million people, 50 million people.
Well, that's a big difference.
I mean, which one is it?
Maybe, but maybe 100, maybe 50.
It doesn't sound like very smart people.
Doesn't sound scientific to me at all.
Sounds like you're all pulling numbers out of your fucking asses.
Okay.
You might have saved 100 million people, maybe 100,000 people.
A lot of people.
If it wasn't for me, y'all would have died.
Okay.
Not one of you would be breathing right now.
It's these, as we've talked about before on the show also, these numbers are bullshit.
They are as much bullshit as anything, as any of the bullshit numbers that have been put out through the pandemic that they all admit are bullshit now.
You know, like they all, when convenient, admit, like Fauci will admit, oh, the hospitalization numbers are bullshit.
Like all, this is all bullshit.
The idea of measuring how many people would have died had they not had this vaccine.
It's ridiculous.
Okay.
Might as well just be going, if it wasn't for me, you would have died of global warming already.
I cooled it.
It would have been so much hotter.
You have no idea.
Here is the truth.
And I will say this, but I think this is the most you can concede if you're really looking at the science and not just going off the bullshit propaganda and the junk science and stuff like that, but really looking at the arguments.
I will say, and tell me if you disagree with me at all on this, Rob, but I will say I think there is an argument.
There is really a strong argument, at least a reasonably strong argument, that for the first couple of strains of COVID, old, sick people who had never had COVID probably should have gotten this vaccine.
That's my feeling, that there was this demographic.
And the demographic, again, is very sick people, old people who had not had COVID.
For them, I think they did get some protection for those first two strains.
You mean people that might have died suddenly anyways?
Yes.
Yes.
But still, you'd also go like whatever long-term risks there are associated with mRNA vaccines, it's probably not that big of a concern for you, given where you are.
Now, there's also some people within that group whose doctors advise them not to take the vaccine because they're so fragile that you're like, this could actually really be bad for you.
So that I would say, you know, listen to what your doctor advises.
But there was just never for like when you start to consider some of these other demographics, like when you consider the demographics of someone in their 30s who's not sick, who's already had COVID, there's your argument falls to pieces.
There's like no scientific argument that you should be taking an experimental mRNA vaccine.
There's just no argument for it.
But notice that, so she said, so even if you're accepting there is this demographic that maybe should take the vaccine, but then there's huge, enormously bigger demographics that it doesn't make sense for.
And she brings up the point and what Megan Kelly said, by the way, she didn't mention mandates now that you could mention that and add it in there.
But what she said is that there are all these people who took the vaccine, that it was rushed, and that they got vaccine injured.
Again, this is undeniably true.
This is true that a lot of people got injured by this vaccine.
I know you're not allowed to say this, and probably this video is now demonetized on YouTube because I said it, but that's just a fact.
It's true.
And what she said to him was they're upset that they can't sue, that they have no legal recourse.
And then Donald Trump responds by saying, you know, I never did the mandates, which fair enough, Donald Trump did not do the mandates.
The reason Donald Trump did not support mandates is because he was out of power by the time the vaccine was rolled out, or at least maybe he was in there for like a few weeks of it being, but he was really gone by the time the vaccine was available for people to take.
And I'm not like, I'm sorry, he can say he never did the mandates, but it's not as if Donald Trump was illegal to mandates during 2020, right?
He was championing a whole lot of mandates, mandated lockdowns, mask mandates, things like that.
I don't know if he championed the mask mandates, but he definitely championed the lockdowns.
And so maybe, maybe he never would have done them.
But when you're talking about the liability protections, yes, that was on his watch.
That was on his watch.
That was all part of Operation Warp Speed.
So that, you know, again, it's just he's circling around this, but it's like, no, dude, you were bad on this issue.
You were bad on COVID through all of 2020.
That's, and, and this, I don't know about like, maybe this will fool some people or whatever, but this to me is just horrible.
I don't know.
Anything else you want to add, Rob?
No, because I'm going to be jumping to Megan Kelly's next question, which is so on point.
Okay.
All right.
But what I did do is I got something done for that specific thing.
I also got Regeneron and I got a lot of therapeutics done, which were great.
I also got the robes and the leather and the rubber and all of the different things, the ventilators.
We did a tremendous job and it's never, you know, they appreciated what I did with the economy.
I got a lot of good marks on economy.
I got a lot of good marks on a lot of things, rebuilding the military, getting rid of ISIS, the biggest tax cuts in history.
Supreme Court.
I never got, I think, the credit that I deserve on COVID.
And here you see again, just the problem of this with Donald Trump, where, Rob, he's actually bragging about sending the ventilators.
Like, did this guy not learn?
I don't even know what he was describing on half of that reason.
Yeah, some of it was just kind of strange.
Deep Sleep Benefits00:03:09
Rubber.
They needed bulg eggs.
We sent him bulgs.
But you're bragging about the ventilators, which we found out were killing people.
It turns out we didn't need any of those ventilators.
Now, look, of all the things in COVID, that's the one that I am somewhat like forgiving of, where I go, it seemed like a genuine mistake and not like, I don't think this was a plan to kill people with these ventilators.
It seemed like they were putting a lot of patients on ventilators.
This was with the initial wave of COVID.
And the doctors started realizing, like on the ground, realizing that the people going on the ventilators were having much worse outcomes than the ones who weren't.
They then pulled back on that and it was much better without the, there were, you know, sometimes people were at the point where they needed ventilators, but it turns out there was never a need to like send these thousands and thousands of ventilators.
Most of them went unused.
But so, okay, they got it wrong and they kind of course corrected to some degree.
But for Trump in 2023 to be bragging about how he sent ventilators out is just, this is so bananas.
Like, no, dude, this is yet another thing that you got wrong.
This isn't something you can still brag about.
And I'm sorry, but like after everything we went through over the last few years, a lot of us are still pretty damn angry about it.
And I am not okay with this guy out here just bragging about what a great job he did.
It's unbelievable.
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Cheating You Out Of President00:10:17
Okay, I know you wanted to, you wanted to talk about this other question, Rob.
So let's go to the other clip here where Megan Kelly grills him a little bit more.
For years, you've been saying that the reason you didn't fire Anthony Fauci was because he'd been there for a long time, that you would have taken heat, that it would have created a firestorm, quoting your words.
Then for the first time in May.
I also said I didn't listen to him too much.
I'm getting there.
But then in May, you started saying, well, he's a civil servant, so I couldn't technically.
The truth is, though, not only did you not fire Fauci, who is loathed by many, many millions of Republicans in particular, but also some Democrats.
By the way.
You made him a star.
You made him a star.
This is the criticism of you, that you made him the face of the White House coronavirus tax.
Do you think so?
That he was out at every presser, that he was running herd for the administration.
Did you pause it?
Pause it already right there.
Yeah, I think so.
Like, I think so.
And the main reason why I think so is because I have this very powerful tool within my brain called a memory.
And I remember 2020.
I remember it.
It wasn't that long ago.
Because I remember shit that happened even before 2020.
But I remember 2020 very vividly.
And yes, Fauci was the face of the pandemic response.
How is that even debatable?
How can you even go, you think so?
Really?
Was it him?
You think what?
Having him on TV every single day?
Being the head of the NIH?
Who's here to tell you what the guidelines are?
Yeah.
I mean, you like Trump can say, technically speaking, Mike Pence was the head of the COVID task force.
Okay.
Yes, technically speaking, that's true.
But who was the face of it?
It wasn't Mike Pence.
Everyone wasn't, Americans weren't listening to Mike Pence every day on TV because he was going to be the one who would break down the science on this.
No, you had the guy who funded it, who funded the creation of the goddamn thing.
You had that guy as the response to it.
How is that even debatable?
All right, let's keep on.
And that you actually gave him a presidential commendation before you left office.
Wouldn't you like a do-over on that?
I don't know who gave him the commendation.
I really don't know who gave him the accommodation.
Presidential accommodation.
Somebody probably handed him accommodation.
He probably, but let me just tell you about Fauci.
Fauci was very important in the Biden administration, much less important.
If you know, he didn't want to stop China.
He wanted to let everyone come in from China.
I stopped it.
I overrode it.
I overrode many of the things he did.
He was much less important to me.
Now, with that all being said, he's been there for years.
He was respected.
He lost a lot of the respect because of COVID, but he was respected.
And on COVID, if you know what I did, I let the governors run their states.
And many of the governors opened up their states.
Some of them didn't.
Florida, by the way.
That's true.
Florida, by the way, was closed.
But if you take a look at Henry McMaster, he had his state, South Carolina open.
You take a look at South Dakota.
Take a look at Tennessee.
A lot of the states were not closed.
And I allowed, it's the federalist system.
I allowed the governors to do that.
I also allowed Democrat governors to do that.
But I don't think any of them, none of them did it.
Wouldn't you like to go back and try to clip his wings?
This guy was pushing mask mandates on us.
He wanted the most extreme measure at every turn.
Okay, look, I'm not one that blames a system that if you're civil service or if you have some other protection, that you can't get fired because I've done things that are a lot worse than that.
You're big on the firing.
So, so yeah, I fired a lot of people.
I fired Comey and that was one of the great firings.
I fired Comey and then I fired a lot of other people in the FBI and they were great firings because the deep state and they were at work and they were not good people.
All right.
We can pause it here.
I mean, what can you say about this, Rob?
It's just a total dodge.
And you can go to then, you know, start talking about other great things that you did.
And like, yeah, you did, Trump.
You fired Comey, and that was a good firing.
Then you appointed Ray.
So I'm sorry that you don't get that much credit for it.
Because it's not, if you fire someone who's bad and replace them with someone who is equally bad, that's not that great.
But again, that's just a dodge.
It's a dodge from this very basic question.
And then, of course, he pivots into this like ridiculous political argument where he's just committed to fighting the most, the worst candidate in DeSantis.
And for some reason, he's committed to fighting him where he's strongest.
And we're supposed to pretend that Florida, I mean, look, he's right about South Dakota, but he's not right about any of the other states.
Yes, Florida initially had lockdowns.
Then they pivoted away from that.
And they did not have lockdowns while all of these other states did.
And I don't, you know, he can brag about the federalist system, but I mean, come on, dude.
Like, yes, you have the federalist system just in this one area, basically.
The federal government's telling states what they can and can't do left and right and all through your administration as well.
But the one time we'll use this federalist system is if the governors want to egregiously violate the basic natural and constitutionally protected rights of their residents.
Then we'll have a federalist system.
Then it's totally cool if you lock people in their houses.
That's okay now because, you know, states' rights.
We're such big believers in states' rights in the United States of America, right?
But this stuff about just like, oh, I, you know, did he get a presidential accommodation?
I don't know who gave that to him.
You know, it's like, well, but you were the president, man.
Certainly you could have stopped that from happening.
And I don't know.
She's just absolutely right that at every turn, Fauci was advocating the worst policies.
And he can sit there and say, yeah, but Fauci wanted to let Chinese people in and I overrode him on that.
It goes, okay, but you didn't override him on lockdowns.
You didn't override him on mask mandates.
You didn't override him on school closures.
You didn't override him on all of the things that like destroyed the lives of the American people during that year.
So what just how you have no response for this, no response for any of this.
And you're just incapable of just saying the basic truth, which is that you got it wrong too.
You got it wrong.
And it's something that Donald Trump just can't run away from, man, that when the biggest test of his life came, he failed.
He failed miserably.
And, you know, and I know Trump supporters give me shit for this, but I'm not somebody, I'm not somebody with Trump derangement syndrome.
I'm the guy who's saying on the biggest platforms in the world, you know, I broke down extensively on Joe Rogan's podcast just a few weeks ago, how Donald Trump was absolutely framed by his own deep state, and that he was framed for treason and that it was all bullshit and that these charges against him are all bullshit and they're all just the weaponization of the legal system.
But if you're gonna, if you're gonna like, you know, get on people for having Trump derangement syndrome, like, you know, like these progressives who believe all that bullshit about him, well, okay, but you can't be the opposite and just always believe the good things about him.
This is demonstrably true.
He got this wrong.
Donald Trump could have in one decision taken Fauci off of that task force.
Why the hell didn't he?
And no matter what your answer to that is, that's not good enough.
And there's, oh, the things Trump said, oh, there would have been a firestorm if I had.
What do you mean?
What would they have done?
Impeached you?
Would they have called you a Russian spy on television?
What more were they going to do to you, dude?
You dealt with all of that anyway.
What would you have gotten impeached again?
Oh, wait, you did get impeached again.
So you gave us Fauci and still got impeached again.
I don't know.
Any thoughts, Rob?
Yeah, the better pitch at this point would be along the lines of what you're saying, and not in these exact terms, but they cheated you out of your president the last time.
They said that I was a Russian asset.
And as a result, I felt that I had to hire establishment political players in order to keep our democracy alive because people were so convinced that I was working for the Russians.
And that was a mistake because as a result, when I picked these cabinet members, they made the following decisions.
I'm not doing that this time.
Here's my team.
I've got the following person for this role.
I've got the following person for this role.
They will not steal your president from you.
I will enact my agenda.
I will serve you.
That's the way he has to play it.
Now, he might still just be the front runner anyways, and Biden might, you know, be so inept and the war so unpopular that he manages to win again, but it's not a very convincing argument of, hey, here are your failures the last time.
No, they were all great.
There's no wall, buddy.
You promised everyone a wall.
There's no wall there.
Economy went to shit.
And this is something I check out my podcast, Run Your Mouth.
I think you might find this interesting as well.
I think Donald Trump was particularly bad at wielding power.
Now, I'm not saying that president should wield power, but look at how good of a job Bush and Cheney did at wielding power.
They managed to keep us in a war for eight years that was unpopular.
They managed to get people in the deep state to lie about nuclear bomb, nuclear powers that didn't exist.
Or look at Biden.
He managed to figure out how to censor social media.
He did a good job of wielding power.
Donald Trump did a particularly bad job of going, oh shit, they're making accusations towards me.
I better go over the top to placate the machine so that they stop calling me a Russian spy or calling her.
He did a little bit too much.
Like he actually didn't force his will upon other people.
If there's one thing that Donald Trump didn't do well in his first presidency, it was wield the actual power of it.
Yeah, 100%.
And it's so funny because the accusation is like he was a dictator or something like this.
He's some type of fascist.
But the truth is, if he's a dictator and he's some type of fascist dictator, and he goes, well, he was framed by his own intelligence agencies for treason and nothing happened to any of them.
So what type of dictator is that?
Why Polls Are Pessimistic00:14:42
Doesn't sound like a strong one, right?
Sounds like a pretty weak one.
And look, to your, to your-day one, the fact that he gave up on Bannon on day one, like Bannon was the dude.
Like, I'm not, by the way, I'm actually not endorsing Bannon.
I don't follow his show.
I don't know Bannon, but I'm saying you had a guy who recruited you out of nowhere, figured out how to run a winning campaign in a populist message.
He got into the White House and then the media complained, hey, that guy's a racist.
And you got rid of him to placate the media.
That's what I mean by not wielding power.
You didn't bully them into going.
No, this is my team.
And the end of the day, and at the end of the day, like you said, I mean, how do you not look at this and go, look, the wall wasn't built.
The swamp wasn't drained.
You said you would deliver winning.
2020 was the biggest loser year for this country.
Make all the excuses you want to.
It wasn't his fault.
It was everybody else.
They lied to him.
Yeah, that's not what your pitch was.
Your pitch was you would win.
And we didn't win.
Okay.
So sorry.
You got to own that to some degree.
And I do agree with you too.
Now, I don't know if it's smart politics or bad politics, but if he were to say something like that, like, look, this is what I did wrong.
This is why I got it wrong.
Now I realize I need all of these swamp creatures out of there.
And here's my team.
I know who the guys are now that I can trust.
And here's my team, everything.
And that would be a lot more compelling to me.
No more swamp creatures.
That's a good, that's a good slogan.
Yeah, this ain't going to do it.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Okay, let's let's switch gears before we wrap this one up.
I want to play, um, I want to play the clip of Janet Yellen.
Janet Yellen joined MSNBC.
Of course, Janet Yellen is the former head of the former chair of the Federal Reserve, and she is the current Treasury Secretary.
So let's listen to Janet Yellen and the cast of Morning Joe discussing the state of the economy.
The rosy picture that you just painted of the U.S. economy with inflation coming down and unemployment coming down and answer the riddle that the White House is finding so befuddling, which is with those good numbers, why are polling amongst the American people so pessimistic about the economy?
And I'm wondering if it's that they just having been through a period of inflation, they fear that inflation might come back again, those high oil prices that let's already pause it right here.
Because Rob, I'm not sure if you're familiar with this, but this is the talking point right now in the corporate press.
And this is, it's funny because they actually have the Treasury Secretary on to ask her about it.
But so there, this is basically the talking point in the corporate press.
It's pretty goddamn hilarious.
This is, this can only come out in an election year when a Democrat's the president.
But they're like, okay, listen, the economy is great.
The economy is great.
But we've got this pesky little problem, which is that all of the American people disagree with us.
They say it's really bad.
I don't know why.
I don't know why they say it's bad because it's great.
It's clearly great.
It's just all the people think it's bad.
And that's this really tough issue that Joe Biden's got to get a hold of.
Like, how do we convince all of these people that they're wrong when they all think the economy is really bad because it's so great?
So that's it.
And look, we have these numbers on a graph that show it's great.
And yet all these people are still out here swearing it's not great.
How do we deal with that?
That's pretty much the question here.
So here's the Janet Yellen.
The OECD is forecasting slower growth next year, something like 1.3%, I think, for the U.S. Is it just fears about the future?
I'm not asking you to play therapist with the American voter, but there seems to be a disconnect between the numbers we're seeing and the way people are feeling about the economy.
And how do you account for it?
I agree with you that there's a disconnect.
And I don't have a simple and convincing answer, but Americans have been through a lot.
The pandemic really took control.
Sorry, some issues just make me really mad.
And so I have to hop right in.
And I can answer this for everyone.
I can just answer it.
I'm not always that smart.
Sometimes I can just answer things.
So firstly, this lady was yelling about, what is she going to say?
It's back to being transitory inflation?
Like, what exactly is her claim to be?
I'll tell you.
I haven't thought about this for two seconds until you just played this clip.
Most people live on debt.
When interest rates go up to seven or eight percent, they probably can't go consume the cars of their other expensive purchases to pretend like everything in the economy is going great.
It's very hard for people to live in an illusion of things are growing great when it's seven or eight percent.
That's it.
So everyone realizes, oh shit, I'm not going to be able to afford the things that I used to maybe be able to purchase and pretend like things were wonderful.
There you go.
Problem solved.
Well, yep.
And of course, you know, like the federal, like central banks, they can, all they can do is screw you over.
They screw you over going and coming.
So they keep interest rates so low that you have to deal with the inflation.
And then when they have to raise interest rates so that you know what I mean, you don't, that inflation doesn't go out of control even more, then you have to live with the fact that we're in a debt-based economy and debt just got a lot more expensive.
So yeah, that's a pretty, that's a pretty concise.
I do love that she just, they ask her this thing and just the way they even put it, like, I'm not, it's just so funny, man.
Like the idea that they're just like, everyone's wrong.
They think the economy is bad, but they're wrong.
They don't even know what they're talking about.
These people are like, no, she goes, I'm not asking you to play therapist, but we really got to lay these people down on a couch here and just be like, what happened?
What, what trauma in your childhood are you processing that you're under the illusion that you're living in a bad economy when the economy is so good?
And her initial response is she goes, I'm not going to have a very convincing answer.
Yeah, that's right.
That's exactly right.
You're not going to have a convincing answer.
And then she's like, Americans have just been through a lot over the last three years.
Yeah, they're just, they're traumatized by all of this stuff that we did to them.
So now they still think they're living in a bad economy.
Yeah, let's play a little bit more of what she says.
On American families, on children, on households.
We are enjoying a remarkable recovery, but also with high inflation, much of it reflecting supply bottlenecks that developed during the pandemic.
And then with Russia's brutal attack on Ukraine, we saw a surge in gas prices, in food prices.
Americans have everything is great.
Sure, it's all more expensive.
Food and things you need will cost you more, but it's great.
I'm doing her as Dr. Phil, but you get the point.
Well, I love also that it's like, oh, look, it obviously, I mean, the reasons for inflation.
Yeah, we have these like supply chain issues with COVID.
And then, of course, Putin, I mean, Putin really did it all to us.
Like, you know, so yeah, people had to deal with that.
I mean, the reason are having negative effects on the economy.
I mean, like the idea that this is a woman who was the head of the Federal Reserve and is now the head of the Treasury.
Okay.
This is, if you wanted to point at someone who's very responsible for the economic picture, she's, she's right up there with who's the most responsible, right?
Okay.
And the idea that we have lost a tremendous amount of value in our currency and the person who was the head of the central bank and is now the head of the treasury department is going, yeah, the problem was Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, plus some supply chain issues.
It's like, yeah, might, might it also have something to do with printing trillions of dollars out of thin air and then spending trillions of dollars more than we were spending even when we were already the biggest government in the history of the world, adding trillions of dollars on top of that, which by the way, the last guy we were talking about, Donald Trump, one of his great ways of handling COVID, was signing the biggest spending bills in world history and bragging about how they were the biggest.
Anyway, maybe that has something to do with it too.
But the other thing here that everybody's missing, your point about interest rates is an excellent one, Rob.
But the other thing, and if I could just break this down a little bit, when they say, okay, so this is basically, we don't even need to play anymore of this video because it's just so ridiculous.
But this, this is the fundamental thing that's going on here, right?
When they say, well, look, the economy is doing really great, but everyone feels like it's doing really bad.
Why is this?
Why don't they get it?
And here's the obvious answer is that the economy is not doing great.
And they know that.
And people feel that.
The economy is terrible right now, okay?
It's not a great economy.
So when they say, when they're, what are the numbers that they're looking at?
What are the numbers that they're looking at when they say the economy is doing great?
Well, there's two big ones, and they mentioned this at the beginning.
They said, number one, that unemployment is coming down.
But unemployment is a bullshit number.
The way government unemployment number is designed is that it doesn't count people who have dropped out of even looking for work.
So all of those people aren't even getting counted in this.
And if any of us were actually trying to get a real gauge of how many people are working versus aren't working, you would definitely want to count the people who have just given up.
Okay.
So you don't, this isn't a real number.
And also unemployment doesn't account for things like, let's say you owned a small business.
And then let's say like there was a lockdown that destroyed your business.
And so now you don't have this small business that you were running, but you go and you get a job at Starbucks.
The unemployment rate would say still employed.
That's all they would have to say about that.
It would not account for the fact that your life has basically been ruined, right?
It's just that they would just say, oh, it's still, that's still one person.
It was one person employed at the beginning and it's one person employed at the end.
Okay.
So that's the other part of that.
So that number is complete bullshit.
The other number that they'll brag about is that inflation is down, or so they'll say.
However, when they say inflation is down, what they mean is that the CPI is lower than it was before.
But two things on that.
Number one, the CPI is bullshit.
It's a bullshit number that does not capture nearly how bad inflation actually is.
When we talk about inflation here, talking specifically about prices, not really inflation in the true sense of the word, but rising price.
You know, they don't count energy and housing and things like that to the degree that they actually matter.
And those are a big deal to the American people.
So inflation, when they said it was 9%, it wasn't 9%.
It was much higher than that.
The other point, this is a very important one, is that inflation is, or at least as measured by prices by the CPI, say, is cumulative.
If prices were rising by, say, 9% last year, and then they go, oh, inflation is down because it's only at 5%.
But that's not actually down.
It's not like the inflation was, it's not like the CPI was 9% and then the next year it was negative 9%.
So we returned back to where we were, the level of prices before that big inflation.
It's, it was 9% and now it's 5%.
So basically, it's 14% higher than it was before that starting point, right?
It's not like the prices came back down.
There wasn't a negative CPI.
They just kept getting more and more expensive, maybe at a slower rate.
But everybody who's a regular person, hey, MSNBC, this is why they feel like the economy is bad, even though your dumb bullshit number says that the economy is good, because they recognize that the prices are still high.
They're higher than they were when you guys were admitting inflation was terrible.
They just haven't been increasing as quickly.
But so what?
Wages haven't increased to that level over the same period of time.
So people are still drowning in these high prices.
And now they're drowning in the high prices and they have to deal with what you said too.
That debt is much more expensive than it was back then.
So overall, they're just in a much worse position than they were.
And that's why they feel this way, dummy, because they're right and you're wrong.
And that's basically the short of it.
You're using bullshit government statistics to try to make it look like the economy is good because you're entering into a campaign season.
But it's not, and people know that.
It's also somewhat self-fulfilling because if the actual participants in the market are expecting more inflation, you're going to have more inflation.
They're going to buy shit thinking they can't afford it down the line.
Or if people start holding on to their, it's like, you know what I mean?
It's like there's a reason why people are acting in the way that they are.
And I don't, firstly, I don't think most people are sitting at home watching Janet Yellen going, oh, I didn't really, it's actually, it's doing well.
We got saving, guys.
We can go out and spend this money or we don't have to go stock up on things we might need.
It's not going to get more expensive.
Didn't you see Janet Yellen?
She said it's back to transitory inflation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, it's, it's just, it's, it's ridiculous.
All right.
Look, let's let's wrap the show up there.
Thank you guys very much for listening.
Come catch me this weekend in Long Island at Governor's.