Dave Smith and his co-hosts dissect the second assassination attempt on Donald Trump, rejecting narratives blaming Democratic rhetoric as propaganda while highlighting suspicious links between shooter Ryan Routh and intelligence agencies. They critique CNN's ineffective strategy of inflammatory criticism, arguing it reinforces Trump's base by alienating swing voters who now bypass traditional media for podcasts. Ultimately, the episode suggests that political discourse has devolved into a cycle where corporate media narratives serve as coping mechanisms rather than tools for genuine democratic engagement. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trump Shot Narrative00:14:49
What's up?
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
We are live only at partoftheproblem.com, which, you know, guys, this is what's cool about having your own thing, being independent here.
I got Ari Shafir coming over.
We're going to record a State of the Union episode, which everybody always loves.
Maybe not everybody.
Maybe that was a little, that was a little Trumpian of me to start that way.
Everybody says it's tremendous.
But so we decided to go a little bit early today, but we can do that now.
So we're just streaming live right to partoftheproblem.com.
That is the place, by the way, if you want to support this show, that's where you go.
You get all of the shows live, uncensored, ad-free.
You can sign up.
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There's different levels where you can get extra goodies and stuff like that.
The part of the problem inner circle is now there at partoftheproblem.com.
So please, if you can, make sure and go sign up.
How are you feeling this morning, Rob?
I got to meet David Stockman last night at the Soho Forum.
He's a hero.
He was a sweet guy.
It was very cool.
I am a little bit jealous of you.
I'm a huge David Stockman fan.
Of course, we've told the story on the show before, but me and you, a decade or more ago, more, more than a decade ago, bonded over David Stockman's great book, The Great Deformation.
And that guy's incredible.
Just an unbelievable, brilliant mind.
That's cool that you got to go see him.
Of course, he was debating at the legend Gene Epstein's Soho Forum, which is in New York City.
If you guys are interested in these ideas, if you love debates, make sure to go check out a Soho Forum debate there.
They're very reasonably priced, the tickets and stuff, too.
They have great debates all the time.
Where are they?
They're not in Soho anymore, right?
Where are they, Rob?
No, he's got this beautiful theater.
We should actually play it sometime.
I think it's called the Sheen Theater.
It's like a 300-seater, but it's really, it's an elegant one.
It feels like you're in some nice New York City highfaludin type place.
I like an elegant theater.
I do.
And if you don't like elegant theaters, you can come out to Porch Tour.
I'm a man of the people and I'll be right in people's backyards so you can catch it.
You want to take this thing to the other end of the spectrum?
Sure.
Then you go check out a porch.
If you want to feel like you're joining a militia, but one that just likes to sit on the lawn and drink beers.
I will be in Pyron, Michigan this Saturday and Syracuse, Utah on Sunday.
Come hang out.
Hell yeah.
Rob is only comfortable in, it's got to be either like drinking a beer on a porch or Carnegie Hall.
Rob doesn't really like the middle ground, you know?
It's like a comedy club for the weekend.
That's not really Rob's style.
Yes, absolutely.
Go check out Rob on the Road on his road to filming his first comedy special.
And of course, we're going to be back out on the road for the rest of the year.
Comicdavesmith.com.
Got a bunch of dates coming up.
I know we're back in Detroit, Philadelphia, a bunch of great.
Joe Crane presents Skankfest.
Looking forward to it.
Oh, and of course, Skankfest is coming up very soon.
All right.
So let's start getting into some stuff here because I got some things on my mind.
Number one, Donald Trump did a Twitter spaces last night.
You'll never get me.
Nana Nana Boo-Boo.
Can't shoot me.
You know, it was, and I cannot overstate this.
It was so incredibly bizarre.
It was one of the most bizarre, to me at least, one of the most bizarre things in this presidential race so far, which is really saying something because there's been a lot of pretty wild stuff that's happened in this presidential election.
But so Donald Trump goes on this Twitter space.
I don't know any of the people who were on it, the hosts.
Not that that means they're nobodies.
I just, I don't know.
You know what I mean?
There's people out there who are huge.
I just don't happen to know them.
But he goes on.
He had his son, Donald Trump Jr. on with him at one point.
They very briefly talked about the assassination attempt up front and then just talked about like cryptocurrency.
For it's just so like to me, it was like so tone deaf.
I don't know.
It was very bizarre.
Donald's got a product to sell after he went back to Twitter and banned in Truth Social.
You know, then Trump shoes, he sold those out.
Bibles, he sold those out.
And you might think he's just running a presidential campaign, but, you know, Papa Trump's got to make some cash on the back end somehow.
Well, just to be clear here, but yes, I'm sure there's something like that too.
I don't know.
But there is Donald.
Okay, so Trump talked briefly about the assassination attempt.
What I've noticed, say, in the 24 hours since we last recorded is you've started to see the narrative that is emerging after this apparent second assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
And I just want to be clear here that Donald Trump seems to be a willing participant in this narrative.
Let's go to the CNN video because they have a little clip from Donald Trump in this Twitter spaces.
And then you can kind of get a flavor for what the corporate press's narrative on this is going to be.
So let's go to that table.
The former president is online tonight promoting a new cryptocurrency venture.
Just moments ago, however, he was asked about yesterday's incident.
This was the second attempt in your life in under two months.
What do you make of that?
Well, there's a lot of rhetoric going on.
A lot of people think that the Democrats, when they talk about threat to democracy and all of this.
And it seems that both of these people were radical left.
That was the former president just moments ago.
Here's his running mate also tonight, also pointing the finger at his political opposition.
You know, the big difference between conservatives and liberals is that no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months.
And two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months.
I'd say that's pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric and needs to cut this crap out.
Well, the date began, as you know, along similar lines in a similar tone, talking off camera to Fox Digital.
The former president directly blamed the president and vice president's rhetoric, quoting him now.
Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at.
He added, and I quote, they use highly inflammatory language.
He said, I can use it too, far better than they can, but I don't.
A bit later, he posted this on social media, quoting again, the rhetoric lies as exemplified by the false statements made by Comrade Kamala Harris during the rigged and highly partisan ABC debate and all the ridiculous lawsuits specifically designed to inflict damage on Joe's then Kamala's political opponent, me, has taken politics in our country to a whole new level of hatred, abuse, and distrust.
Because of this, communist left rhetoric, the bullets are flying and will only get worse.
Join us now as former Harris Communications Director Ashley Etienne, Republican strategist Brad Todd, and CNN senior data reporter Harry Inton.
Brad, obviously Vice President Vance went on to say that he'd do his best to tone down the rhetoric.
Do you think it's really a genuine promise, given what we just heard him say and what the former president has certainly said in terms of contributing to very heated rhetoric?
Well, you know, since Donald Trump came down the elevator in 2016, Democrats have constantly said that the Constitution would be shredded, the country would end.
All right.
We can pause it there.
So I just wanted to, you could take that down because I want to discuss this a bit.
So you kind of get it just from watching it right there, right?
So there is, in a very bizarre way, there is.
You see this.
This is what's fascinating about watching the corporate media.
It's fascinating about studying propaganda in general.
You can kind of watch the way it works, right?
A narrative is being crafted here.
And without even like explicitly saying it, it's very clear what it is.
The conversation now is going to be about the rhetoric being used.
Okay.
And Donald Trump and JD Vance clearly are willing participants in this.
Like they are also saying, this is what the conversation ought to be about right now.
The rhetoric of Biden and Kamala Harris and the left, whatever the hell they mean by that exactly, is this is what's leading to Donald Trump getting shot once and attempted to be shot again.
And then you're going to have, you could already see what this whole panel discussion is going to be, right?
Like, do you even need to play the end of that?
Everybody knows what the points on both sides will be.
The Republican guy will say, well, look, they say Trump's going to be the end of democracy.
They say he's all of this stuff.
They've had this alarmist rhetoric since he started running for president.
And then what's the progressives' response going to be?
Well, look at Donald Trump's rhetoric.
Donald Trump.
I mean, by the way, of course, Donald Trump also plays whatever role he's a part of perfectly, because even that tweet or the Truth Social post is just so hilarious.
It's so Trumpian.
If I really wanted to use the rhetoric, I'd be better at rhetoric than any of them.
And by the way, in the same thing, he calls Kamala Harris a communist, which is just like, I don't know, it just kind of writes itself.
Like it leaves you, but this is almost, this is when propaganda is perfectly effective, is when you can have almost like the way it works is they kind of like they limit the discussion to here.
Okay.
We're going to have a conversation within this, what Tom Woods calls the three by five index card of allowable opinion.
And then you want to say something within that, you know, like the old Noam Chomsky thing.
You want to have a very limited range of allowed discussion, but then you want to have a fierce fight within that range.
Okay.
So Trump just opens the door for that perfectly because he's like, their rhetoric is over the top, these commies.
And then it's so easy to go like, but that's the same exact thing, right?
Like, what?
I mean, okay, you're saying they call you a Nazi.
You're calling them a commie.
What really is the difference here?
Anyway, let me start by saying this, because obviously we did talk a lot about the rhetoric in our last episode.
I talked a bit about this after Donald Trump was shot the first time.
I do think there's an interesting conversation to have there.
One of the things that I find to be interesting about it is that it does, in a sense, it kind of calls the bluff of the anti-Trump people.
Like when you speak the way you do about this guy, but then you also say like, oh, political violence is never the answer.
There is something that just doesn't quite jive with those two positions, right?
So like I saw, I watched a few minutes of Piers Morgan yesterday.
He had a panel.
I know Jimmy Doerr was on it and Joe Walsh was on it and a couple other people.
But so, Joe Walsh, you know him, uh, Rob.
I've as I've done Piers Morgan with him before, and he was like a um, he's like a never-Trump Republican type, you know what I mean?
Like, uh, was a Republican, but is now voting for the Democrats because Trump is such a unique threat.
And at one point, he's talking about the rhetoric, and he's like, Well, Donald Trump has to tone it down too.
And I hate political violence, you know, blah, blah, blah.
I don't support this.
And then at one point, he goes, But look, I do think the truth is that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy.
And if that Donald Trump, if Donald Trump wins, we no longer have the United States of America.
And it's just like you hear him say that, and you're like, Okay, but look, if you really believe that, then why exactly do you not want him shot?
Like, I'm just saying, like, I'm not saying you should do anything illegal.
I'm not saying you should shoot him.
I'm not saying you should want him shot.
I'm just saying, how can you have two views simultaneously?
How can you have the view that this guy is literally Hitler, but also we wish Hitler a speedy recovery?
That it does seem to me that you got to pick one of those two, right?
So, there's an interesting conversation to be had there.
As we said before, there's an interesting conversation about the um you know, does rhetoric lead to a higher likelihood of violence outbreaking?
There's a conversation to be had there.
Um, there's it, I also think it is, I guess, look, I don't, nobody should legally be held responsible for their rhetoric being too heated.
I mean, short of a direct incitement to violence, speech should be protected, and that's foundational to having a free society, right?
You couldn't the slippery slope of not allowing that means you could shut down all speech, essentially.
If I could say, Hey, this guy's an awful president, and then if someone goes out and shoots the president, I'm not responsible because I said he's an awful president.
I have to be allowed to think and speak, otherwise, we don't have any freedom.
However, there's anyway, I guess my point is just this: there's all types of interesting conversations about political rhetoric.
However, right now, in the current moment, this is a limited hangout at best and a total distraction at worst.
None of these, after sitting here and spending a day and a half looking into who this shooter was and what just happened, it is nothing but a pure distraction to be talking about whether Donald Trump should stop calling them commies and they should stop calling him a fascist.
That's just not what this conversation ought to be about.
It's totally taking you away from the actual important conversation here.
And why Donald Trump and JD Vance are willing participants in this itself is an interesting question.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
This is bitchy, feminine, and lame.
This is very, uh, this is very left tactics.
There's something funny about it.
It's true.
The Democrats keep going.
Trump is literally Hitler.
He's a threat to our democracy.
And they're doing that because it sells.
And so that's why they're up there firing up their base and they're making these grandiose claims that if Donald Trump is elected, it's literally the end of our democracy.
And he's right.
That is fiery rhetoric that might get crazy people to go, well, why would I leave this up to democracy if it's going to be the end of the democracy?
But it's so feminine.
The language that they're using is, this is not the way you win as the Republicans.
Deep State Questions00:16:04
What you should go is, hey, we've got a deep state and they're trying to take me out.
And guess what's going to be the end of our democracy?
It's if you guys don't show up in massive droves and actually win this the proper way, because we have to get rid of this system that will always try and take out the people that are willing to actually represent you and drain the swamp.
That's what he needs to be talking about.
He needs to be talking about, listen, I'm not leaving my security to these people anymore.
You know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to hire my own army.
If you want to join my army, come join my army.
You guys can be the outer perimeter.
Secret Service can have the inner perimeter.
Let's make me safe.
Let's go.
Can you imagine if people started showing up with the monster trucks to be outside of Mar-a-Lago and what the imagery of that would be of the deep state has failed me?
Do you guys want to actually be the ones to protect the president?
I'm just saying he's got so many options here to look fucking cool and to go, we have to win and we got to take this thing back.
And this one, it's funny.
It's a little bit funny to prod at the Democrats, but it's feminine and lame.
Well, listen.
Okay.
So I totally agree with you, but I just want to make it clear.
I'm going further than just that.
What I'm saying is that, okay, so we have a situation here where, like, just to be clear, I'm not just saying that it would be good politics.
It would be more effective for Donald Trump to spend this as a money for them.
Well, look, I'm just saying, okay, so what we know right now, and like, let's just take this at face value, okay?
The second, second would-be Donald Trump assassin takes, you know, just happened.
The second would-be Donald Trump assassin.
This guy gets stopped.
We now know.
So, Ryan Routh, the guy involved in this second assassination attempt.
By the way, I'd highly recommend for people if you're on Twitter or X, Max Blumenthal had a great thread on this the other day where he's actually got like the manuscript that this guy wrote.
For those of you guys who aren't following this, apparently the FBI took down all of his social media, but a bunch of people got like screenshots and got some because, you know, this is the way the internet works now.
So there's a lot of things there.
But this guy, this isn't just some dude.
Now, I'm not saying we know exactly what this guy is yet.
We don't exactly.
But a few things that we know, it was reported in the New York Post earlier today that it was either in 2002 or 2003.
Yeah, excuse me.
It was 2002.
He had a police standoff where he was charged with a WMD crime, a weapon of mass destruction.
Just reading here quickly from the New York Post, the alleged gunman who authorities say tried to kill former President Donald Trump was arrested with a bomb, a quote, weapon of mass destruction following a tense police standoff in 2002, according to authorities.
It's just one incident in a long history of dangerous and unsettling behavior recounted by cops and neighbors in his hometown.
Ryan Ralph, 58, was charged with possessing a weapon of mass destruction after Greenborough, North Carolina police arrested him during a traffic stop that escalated dramatically when he barricaded himself in the office of his roofing business.
Okay, so here's one piece of information.
This guy was charged with having a weapon of mass destruction back in 2002.
Now, the reason why this is particularly interesting, I mean, you know, not too many of us get that charge, Rob.
You know, like we've, I'm not saying we're all choir boys here, but it's pretty rare that you catch a WMD charge.
The last I heard of was Saddam Hussein, who caught one of those.
He was later cleared of that charge, though, tragically after he was already sentenced to death.
But so, okay, so this is in 2002.
Now, we know more recently, this guy has been in Ukraine recruiting volunteer fighters for the Ukrainian army.
Again, not the average guy type of thing to be doing.
He was also making recruiting attempts in Afghanistan.
He was praising the free Syrian army and he was demonizing Iran.
In fact, even seemingly rooting for Trump to be assassinated off, you know, his tearing up the Iran deal or something like that.
Just saying these happen to be, I don't know, these goals happen to align with the CIA.
Let's just say that, right?
I mean, we're talking about the war in Afghanistan, the war in Ukraine, Iran, even praising the free Syrian army.
This is enough to get your eyebrow to raise a little bit, particularly the fact that he was going to Kiev.
Like, how is it exactly, Rob, you tell me that a guy who's like, look, the article says he was charged.
I don't know ultimately what he was convicted of here, but it at least raises like the questions of like, how exactly is this guy going back and forth to a war zone, coming in and out of the country without having any issue?
Right?
Are you telling me like he's, is he a convicted felon?
Because I think weapons of mass destruction would be a felony.
So like, anyway, this is this in itself is more than enough.
It more than meets any reasonable threshold to where the question you would be asking yourself is, is this guy connected to intelligence?
That we're at least at that point.
Like in the same way that like, I don't know, you know, I always try to come up with these analogies, but let's say like you caught your wife or your husband having an affair.
Okay.
You catch them having an affair with somebody else.
And then you guys are working on the relationship.
You're like, you're going to stay together.
You're going to make it work.
And months later, your wife or your husband, they lie to you about where they're going.
And you catch them.
They were hanging out with the person they were having the affair with.
Okay.
You find that they lied to you.
They said they were going to work, but they really went over to that person's house who you know they had been having an affair with previously.
Now, I'm not saying that's enough to convict them in a court of law over continuing.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, I'm not saying you have beyond the shadow of a doubt proof that they were, you know, sleeping together again.
But you're well past the point of wake where you're like, that's the question we're asking.
The question is not, you know, was our rhetoric too intense in our fight about this?
The question is like, what were you doing there?
And so all I'm saying is that in theory, if there was somebody who was just like an MSNBC viewer who went and tried to assassinate Donald Trump, then perhaps the reasonable question would be, were they, was the rhetoric so intense that that influenced them to go make an attempt on somebody's life.
However, when they're going to Kiev to recruit for the Ukrainian army and praising the Free Syrian army, by the way, do you guys, if you don't know who the Free Syrian Army is, this was the name given to the collection of Syrian rebels who the CIA was funding and arming to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in 2012 and 2013.
That's who he was praising.
The CIA's shock troops in Syria.
Okay.
That is not somebody who was radicalized by Joy fucking Reed.
Okay.
That's not somebody who just like they listened to Rachel Maddow talk about how Donald Trump's a racist and then wanted to go kill him.
It's something a little bit deeper than that.
Okay.
Now, again, I'm not saying that this is proof that this guy is connected to intelligence.
We're way too early in the understanding of this historical event to have any type of conclusion like that.
But it's enough to say that that's the question.
It's enough to say that's what I'd be asking about.
If you're Donald Trump taking to the media or to Twitter spaces or whatever the next day, it seems like that's what you'd bring up, not to get into this ridiculous conversation about is it their rhetoric or is it our rhetoric?
Because the truth is, if you're going to convict anyone, and I don't mean legally, I just mean like if you're going to, if you're going to put blame on anyone because they're using extreme rhetoric, we're way past the point of everyone being guilty of that.
Way past the point, at least 10 years past the point of where, yes, Donald Trump has said many times, it'll be the end of America if Kamala Harris wins.
And Kamala Harris and Joe Biden and all their surrogates have said many times, it'll be the end of democracy or whatever if Donald Trump wins.
That is not the relevant question here.
Clearly, I mean, as much, like just what I've said right now is as much as you catching your wife or husband going to hang out with that person who you knew they had an affair with already.
The question is, are you having an affair again?
The question here is, was this guy connected to intelligence?
That's the question.
And so it's, again, it's not just your point that this would be, it wouldn't be like bitch gay energy to be like talking about like, well, you said mean words.
It would be, it would, it would help Donald Trump more to like start dog whistling about the conspiracy.
Like what really is going on here?
But I'm not even just saying it would help him.
I'm saying it's totally appropriate at this point for him to start saying, hey, what the hell is going on here?
And again, the look, I'm just saying like the preponderance of evidence or whatever or the circumstantial evidence here is you have a guy who is clearly undeniably at this point in the crosshairs of the deep state, the deep state.
It's not as if, look, that whole, The steel dossier may have come out of the Hillary Clinton campaign, but it got legs under it when the FBI and CIA took up the story.
Okay.
It was three-letter agencies that were framing Donald Trump for treason.
It was three-letter agencies that were spying on Donald Trump's campaign and on Donald Trump's White House.
It was the Justice Department who started trying to charge him with every goddamn bullshit charge under the sun that they could come up with.
That's who it is the deep state that's been going after Donald Trump for all of these years.
And now we just happen to have his second assassin or would-be assassin is praising the free Syrian army and the war effort in Ukraine.
I'm sorry, but in that situation, to be having a conversation about the rhetoric on cable news is it's not even a limited hangout.
I was wrong.
I shouldn't have even said it like that.
It's just a distraction.
This isn't even part of it.
I'm sorry.
This just isn't even part of it.
It's like if you were, it's like if there was somebody who was going, let's say somebody was going to Moscow and helping Vladimir Putin in his war effort.
And you found out that they had praised Adolf Hitler and were, you know, whatever, like had like all the same views, Adolf Hitler aside, but like all the same views as the KGB or something like that.
And then you were like, they were radicalized by Sean Hannity.
Like, no, they fucking weren't.
That's not where you get that from.
This is a much deeper level of like being a part of something here.
Like, maybe there's an explanation for this that has nothing to do with him being connected to intelligence.
And it was just another Secret Service failure.
And this guy just happened to be a nut and he was a nut who got radicalized on behalf of the Ukrainian effort.
It's possible.
Okay.
It's way too early to like completely rule that out.
But that's the question here.
The question is like, I don't know.
This, this, this smells like three-letter agencies.
Look, dude, he was in a goddamn BlackRock commercial.
Both of Donald Trump's assassins or would-be assassins were in BlackRock commercials.
Does that not strike anybody as a little bit odd?
Is that not something we might have a few questions about?
And yet, Donald Trump, this guy who will stoke conspiracies about everything else, about everything else, he'll stoke a conspiracy theory.
The Muslims were celebrating in the streets after 9-11.
Russia Gate was a witch hunt.
They're just trying to take down your favorite president.
Yet the people who bring rifles to where he is, one of whom shoots him in the face, that we're not going to speculate about at all.
No questions.
Something's not adding up here, man.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
We might need to fact check that the second shooter was in a BlackRock commercial because I've heard that it might have just been footage from Kiev or something else that they had sponsored or something along those lines.
Okay, fine.
Everything you're saying still stands.
Still close.
There's look, there's just more than enough here.
There's more than enough here to go like, no, we have some serious questions.
And of course, like, you know, the FBI just comes in and like takes down his social media.
You know, they're going to do the typical thing that the FBI does, which is like, it's like, okay, we will be confiscating all of the evidence.
We will run an investigation and you can take our word for what we find, which we all know is what they do is they don't run an investigation.
They run a control of information campaign.
So it's not as if we can like, like they're there to just get rid of the evidence.
And so it's not like we can trust them.
We got to sit here and wait for like Ian Carroll to make a good video about it or something.
Like, you know, I think I'm going to sent this video in the chat, but DeSantis said that he's Florida is going to run its own investigation because the FBI can't be trusted on this, which I thought was fascinating.
Yeah, that is, that is interesting.
But I wonder what actually is going to come of that, you know, like, or, you know, it's, it's, uh, I don't know.
It just doesn't, it doesn't.
I'm not buying it, I guess I would say.
Ron Desantis Radicalization00:10:16
But so what did DeSantis say exactly?
I mean, do you want to hear?
Natalie has it.
Why don't we pull it up?
Joining me now, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
So this happened.
You're in your state.
What are you going to do about it, Governor?
Well, the state of Florida is going to do our own investigation.
Clearly, there were multiple violations of Florida law.
We also, I think, have an interest in vindicating the truth about where this guy came from, what his motivations were.
The people of our state deserve that.
I don't think it's in the best interest of this country to say that agencies like the FBI and DOJ, which are trying to prosecute Trump in South Florida, they're on appeal at the 11th Circuit, trying to reinstate an indictment that had been dismissed, that they're the best people to turn around and one, give us the truth about this defendant, but also to prosecute the case where they don't have as strong of jurisdictional claims.
And so we are going to be doing our investigation.
I'm going to have more to say on that very shortly about what precisely we're going to do.
But I would know, Jesse, you know, I've played golf with the president when he was in office at that course.
It's a great golf course.
That part of the property, the fifth green, the sixth hole, and then the seventh T, that is right there up against the fence line.
So the fence line is covered with shrubbery.
So if you were just walking by, you couldn't really see inside.
But that is clearly the biggest point of vulnerability on that course, because if you're burrowed into those in those shrubs, you have a pretty clear line of sight on a number of golf holes.
And so when I heard that this had happened, there were kind of conflicting reports.
Maybe two people were shooting at each other.
They said, no, this was meant for President Trump.
I immediately knew exactly what part of the course it would have been in.
So how did this guy get in there?
How was he able to burrow in?
And yeah, we're thankful that the Secret Service agent, when he saw the muzzle of the gun, fired and caused the defendant to leave.
But that guy was burrowed in there.
It seems like for the rest of the night, how did that happen?
Right.
Thank God for that agent.
Thank God for that agent.
But that course should have been swept before, and that vulnerability should have been neutralized.
When you hear the Democrats talk about this, I don't personally feel that much sorrow or that much sympathy or even regret that this happened twice, governor.
How do you understand that?
I think a lot of what I saw, I saw a lot of Democrats attacking Trump today.
Really didn't even give this much of a thought.
They're just all out with the rhetoric all over again.
And look, we'll see who what this guy consumed.
It seems like he was a consumer of a lot of these corporate media narratives that the Democrats propagate.
We'll see.
I think that's what the investigation is doing.
All right.
Let's turn this off.
Okay.
To me, the interesting part was just having someone in the government going, I'm not going to trust the FBI in the investigation.
Now, with that said, do I actually think Ron DeSantis will run an investigation that links him back to the Ukraine and then want to actually shed light on that?
Probably not.
It seems pretty unlikely.
I'll be pleasantly surprised if anything but that is the case.
But yes, I don't think that Ron DeSantis, the guy who wouldn't even come out against the Ukraine war when he was running for president, is going to actually get to the bottom of this.
And I'm sorry, but the point I was making before is that there is, and maybe I'm struggling to find the best analogy for it, but there is just something where it's like, look, if somebody was saying, I wanted to go assassinate Donald Trump because he's such a racist or he's such a threat to democracy,
then maybe I'd buy into this narrative that it's because he's consuming the corporate news or he's watching cable news and that.
But this guy actually went to help out with the Ukrainian war effort.
That just points to like a deeper level of radicalization and a more complex story than just, you know, he was all swept up in Wolf Blitzer or something like that.
I'm sorry.
I'm just not buying that.
It just, it comes to a little bit of a different level.
You know, anyway, it is, we will see one of the things that's very interesting about the first Donald Trump and second Donald Trump assassination attempts is that they're happening in 2024, not in 1963.
And this is not a situation where we have, you know, the this one angle of JFK getting assassinated in this grainy footage, you know, and like in something like this, obviously there's no footage of it, at least that's emerged yet at all.
But you can now, you have these kind of like internet, you know, people who can do at least attempt to do some real journalism on this.
Now, I'm not saying all of them are great and there will be, there will be kooks out there who make claims they can't substantiate, but you do have a situation where it's much harder for, say, the CIA to have complete control of the flow of information.
And so it'll be interesting to see what comes out.
Clearly, somehow they were able to say that that last guy had like no digital footprint.
I don't believe that for a second.
But this guy clearly had a serious digital footprint.
And this also wasn't a kid, you know, like that's another kind of interesting element to this.
This wasn't like, you know, one of these things where a 19-year-old is radicalized and has kind of lost their grip on reality.
This was a grown adult who's been very committed to several causes that happen to be the causes of the CIA.
We'll see what happens with that.
Okay, I wanted to go to on this discussion because there is something interesting just about the politics of all of it.
There's a Hillary Clinton interview that's been going viral.
Now, I believe this is from before this assassination attempt, but there was just, I thought this was kind of interesting enough because, you know, Hillary Clinton is just the worst human being in the world, is truly the herpes of American politics, never goes away.
Could always come back at any given moment.
But here she is with Rachel Maddow.
Talking about Trump.
I think that's really a critical question.
And I think there's a couple of things going on here.
You mentioned the press, and sadly, the press is still not able to cover Trump the way that they should.
They careen from one outrage to the next.
What was outrageous three days ago is no longer on the front pages, even though it threatens the physical safety of so many people, particularly as you point out, immigrants that he and Vance have decided to demonize.
And I don't understand why it's so difficult for the press to have a consistent narrative about how dangerous Trump is.
You know, the late great journalist, Harry Evans, you know, one time said that, you know, journalists should, you know, really try to achieve objectivity.
And by that, he said, I mean, they should cover the object.
Well, the object in this case is Donald Trump, his demagoguery, his danger to our country and the world, and stick with it.
You know, they were merciless about what they saw as President Biden's, you know, problems in the debate and calling for him to withdraw.
I believe Donald Trump has disqualified himself over and over and over again to be a presidential candidate, let alone a president.
The second thing, though, is that part of what Trump is counting on is for people to get desensitized.
I mean, oh my gosh, did you hear what he said yesterday?
Did you hear who he attacked?
Did you hear the viciousness?
And it just like with a shrug, okay, fine, we're moving on.
Well, Americans need to understand that they have to take Trump both seriously and literally.
He has said what he wants to do.
He and his allies with Project 2025, his desire to be a dictator, at least on day one, all of that is in the public record.
And I believe that more Americans have to be willing to endure what frankly is discomforting and to some extent kind of painful to take him at his word and to be outraged by what he represents.
And then finally, the hopeful side of this is that I do think more and more Americans are rejecting the kind of chaos that he represents.
We can't go back.
That's what the Harris campaign says all the time.
We're not going back.
We're not going back to what he failed to do to protect American lives during COVID.
We're not going back to the romance with dictators that puts innocent lives at risk and America's security in danger.
We can't go back and give this very dangerous man another chance to do harm to our country and the world.
All right.
All right.
There is Hillary Clinton.
I can't stand anymore.
All right.
Let's get her away.
Democracy In Crisis00:07:38
Okay.
So I did just find this really interesting that Hillary Clinton is complaining that the media isn't harsh enough on Donald Trump.
It's just, yeah, it's just wild.
But think about the, first of all, you know what's so funny too?
Is like she goes, she's like, they're not harsh enough.
They always skip around, blah, blah, blah.
And then what she offers is literally the exact same thing that everyone in the corporate media has been saying this entire time.
He'll be a dictator on day one.
Project 2025.
He's disqualified to be president.
So she just offers nothing new.
It's what they're already saying already, but I guess they should be saying it more.
I did, to me, the most interesting part of all of this is, you know, we were talking about on the last show.
And this is a major theme that I've had, you know, for many, many years now, but that essentially there's no such thing as democracy.
And then in actuality, no one really believes in democracy.
It's just kind of this thing that makes people feel good about themselves.
It's what the idea of democracy essentially has become is like a coping mechanism for people in advanced first world countries today to not come to terms with the obvious fact, which is that you are ruled.
You know, there's like that is just the reality.
You are a ruled person.
And that's, that's just true if you live in this country.
And, you know, look, I work five, six months out of the year for the government.
They take about half of what I make.
Like half of my working is for my family and the other half is for the government.
And I have no choice about that.
I'm forced into doing that.
I'm, you know, we're, we're not free people in this society.
We're ruled.
However, when you claim this thing about democracy, it almost gives you this out to feel like, oh, no, no, no.
It's like we all kind of got together and decided.
You know, like we're, we are really the ones who rule ourselves and we just, we, you know, we outsource it to the people in Washington, D.C.
It's just not true.
It's really not true.
It's like, yeah, we decide between two approved upon candidates from the two major political parties that are allowed to participate, both of which will not stop the fact that you have to work for the government for a huge portion of your of your life.
But then you have the people like Hillary Clinton who constantly opine about democracy.
And their biggest critique of Donald Trump, as she just said, is that he's a threat to democracy.
Yet she'll also say in the same breath that she believes Donald Trump has been disqualified.
She believes he's disqualified.
Why is he disqualified?
Well, because he has his rhetoric.
He's said things that I don't agree with.
And so he's, well, what exactly does that mean?
Like, what is it that qualifies Donald Trump to be running for president?
And what would disqualify him?
Right now, the race, at least according to the polls, is like the closest presidential race in my lifetime.
It's closer than Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and it's closer than Joe Biden and Donald Trump were polling going into their elections.
It's way closer than Barack Obama and John McCain or anything like that.
It's a coin flip according to the polls right now over who's going to win.
It comes down to these swing states and they're all within the margin of error.
And so you're like, well, why is it that Donald Trump is qualified?
Well, it's because of the voters.
It's not because the media wants him to be the candidate.
It's not because the big donors want him to be the candidate.
They were throwing their money behind DeSantis and Nikki Haley.
He's only there because his supporters, however you feel about Donald Trump, however you feel about his voters, his voters want him.
He's got tens of millions of people who want him to be president.
Is that enough?
We'll see, you know, but it's just interesting that they could just say, oh, he's disqualified, though.
It's kind of just one more example of how nobody actually believes in democracy.
It's not like if 60% of people were voting for Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton wouldn't just go, all right, then he's our guy.
He got more people.
She doesn't care about democracy at all.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Any thoughts, Rob?
I agree with you, but she's such an idiot because unless you're censoring the entire internet, do you think that the news channels yelling more inflammatory nonsense about Donald Trump is what's going to win over the voters?
I mean, I mean, just look at the demographics.
You think the swing voters are watching CNN on a nightly basis?
And if CNN is louder about the fact that Donald Trump can't be trusted and that his rhetoric is violent and, you know, you can't remember he's outside of the norms.
You guys have drummed up that machine for as long as you possibly could.
And guess what?
People are desensitized to it because they realize you're lying and that it's annoying to listen to and that it's a temper tantrum and that it's not actually fixing things.
And oh, wait, Donald Trump had the border right.
Oh, wait, Donald Trump didn't have us in all these wars.
That doesn't work.
You're basically asking the news companies to just get rid of, just close the doors on your business.
Become completely irrelevant.
Unless you want to go full dictatorship and censor the internet, that the only place you can get information is from CNN.
And so I guess if you're bored and you want to know what the machine wants you to know, you're like, I might as well, I might as well find, I'm not going to get the news, but I can find out what they want to tell me.
But guess what?
That doesn't work.
And so, I mean, that's why she, that's why she's a loser is because her plan is, oh, the CNN war machine isn't being loud enough in criticizing Donald Trump and that his behavior is normal.
Media Control Tactics00:03:18
His behavior is fine.
What is he doing that's so outlandish?
Can you explain to me what the threat of Project 2025 is, which he has not endorsed?
It isn't even his.
It's not even his, but what exactly is the threat?
Oh my God, the boogeyman, Project 2025.
And what is the threat of Project 2025?
Oh, and the innocent lives that are, wait, Donald Trump's responsible for more innocent lives being dead than what's been, what's happened in the Ukraine war.
Can you explain that one to me?
She's literally a moron.
Or Hillary Clinton's war in Libya or the war in Syria or the war in Iraq that Hillary Clinton voted for.
I mean, it's just, you know.
Donald Trump's gotten a foothold because we're not doing enough to demonize the language that he uses.
And since the CNN isn't daily talking about how horrible he is, that's why he seems to be getting more of a foothold.
Great.
Scream louder about the fact that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy and that his language is dangerous and have everybody turn off their television because you're not reporting anything.
Well, you know, one of the things that's interesting about figures like Hillary Clinton, and this is fairly dominant in our political class, is that, you know, she really is a boomer.
Yeah, I mean, Hillary Clinton is in her 70s and just something you know about, look, just people in their 70s in general.
Forget really evil people like Hillary Clinton, but just people in their 70s.
As you know, there's oftentimes they will have wisdom.
You gain wisdom as you get older.
But when it comes to say, like talking about new technology, you know how it is.
I mean, I don't know.
I know like my mother or my mother-in-law or father-in-law, like, I mean, you know, it's a whole thing.
It's a whole, I mean, I've had my father-in-law, I've had like, he will call me and he'll be like, um, he'll be like, I'm coming over.
I have to print something.
And I'll be like, oh, okay.
Well, I was like, just email it to me and I'll print it out for you.
And he goes, no, I have it in my hand.
And I'm like, okay, so you don't need to print it.
But he's like, no, I need to mail it.
And I'm like, well, if you need to mail it, you need to drop it in a mailbox.
Like, that's, that's how that works.
And he goes, no, I got to mail it from the computer.
And you're like, oh, okay, okay.
So you need to scan a document and then email it to someone.
And he's like, yeah, that's what I said.
And you're like, it's not.
It's not at all what you said.
And by the way, he comes over to my house to do it.
I would just buy them a printer, but there's no chance they know how to install a printer.
Like I have to buy them a printer and then go over and install it.
Then it's going to have to be a phone call about telling them how to use the printer.
Like if you could just imagine me trying on the phone to tell my father-in-law how to scan a document on his print.
Like he's going to have to come over.
I'm going to have to just do it.
Okay.
And then by the way, I'm 41.
Some 20-year-old will run circles around me.
Anyway, the point that I'm making is just that Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, a lot of these people who are the boomers who are in the political class, they really do not understand the new landscape of information.
Tucker Winter Audience00:05:55
And you can see this thing in them where they're like, they're very frustrated that they understand the old methods of propaganda.
They understand how it would work in the 80s or the 90s.
You get the corporate media on board and they say the thing you want them to say.
And then that's the only information that people have.
And if somebody was called a Nazi or a racist in the New York Times and the Washington Post and on CNN, well, then they're going to be branded as that.
I mean, that's what the news says.
People believed the news when I was a kid.
Like my parents believed the news.
It's a crazy thing for people our age to understand.
But my parents looked at the news and they were like, those are the people in suits and ties on TV who tell us the truth.
That's how they viewed it.
I don't know how they were so stupid, but they did.
That's how they viewed it.
What Hillary Clinton just absolutely doesn't understand, and I don't think this is an act.
I think they really don't get it, is that the first of all, it's not only that, it doesn't matter what CNN says about Donald Trump.
It just doesn't matter.
They could say he murdered babies.
They could say he's going to be a dictator on day one.
It doesn't matter.
In fact, it just helps him.
That's the appeal of Donald Trump: every single Donald Trump supporter thinks that CNN hates his guts and that they're lying through their teeth.
That's what they all believe.
The fact is that they now have other places they can go to get information.
Okay.
Now, sometimes that's good information.
Sometimes it's really, really bad information.
But the point is that it's a whole new world.
And so part of the thing that Hillary Clinton, and I'll tell you this, because I, you know, I worked at CNN for a year and like in the middle of Donald Trump's administration, like I've had like, I've had private conversations with a lot of the players involved, Brian Stelters and, you know, Don Lemons and SE Cups and people like this.
And I'm telling you, it's not an act.
They really don't get it.
They don't get that what they're doing just helps Donald Trump.
And that's why every single day they're like, maybe we just haven't done it well enough.
Maybe we should just, maybe there's got to be something new.
Look, I'll be extra outraged about Donald Trump today because they don't understand that, first off, nobody's watching you.
The audience isn't there.
I don't know how to explain this, but like there, there is like I get more people to watch me.
This is not an exaggeration, okay?
More people watch me do flagrant, like more people watch me do Andrew Schultz's podcast than all cable news for that hour combined.
Like combine the audience of CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News for any one given hour.
And it's less people than a popular podcast has watching them.
Okay.
It's there is no audience there.
And then to the extent that anyone watches you, they've already dismissed you as a liar.
They don't believe any of it.
And so they see you in the form of like a clip online and they go, ah, look, there they are trying to bring Trump down again.
And why would these liars want to bring Trump down again?
Must be because he's the hero.
That's how it just reinforces their view.
That's all you're doing with this.
And it's kind of amazing to see their inability to grapple with it.
All right.
Let me, I'm going to read a few chats and then we will wrap this episode up.
And then I got the great Ari Shafir coming out here.
We're going to record a state of the union in a few.
Run your mouth podcast, porchstore.com.
Porchstore.com, run your mouth podcast, comicdave Smith.com.
All right.
Tyler says, my 83-year-old dad is Tucker pilled.
Well, that's pretty, that's pretty good.
That's about as good as you could hope for an 83-year-old dad.
That's awesome.
Yeah, Tucker's the man.
Boomer Dad does this too.
Yep.
Buy it.
And then I need to come every time they want to use it.
I know.
That's why I'd literally, I'd rather just have it at my house.
I'd rather just have it at my house and we will solve this together because it's hard enough explaining it to them in real time, but to do it over the phone is just, it's impossible.
It's not going to happen.
Okay, let me read.
If anyone wants to get a question in real quick in the chat here, I could get to one or two more.
Tucker has been instrumental in bringing the older generation to podcasts.
That is actually a very, very good point.
And I think that's true.
I think that I think that Tucker, you know, being the Fox News guy and then transitioning and being so huge was probably one of the people who he had such a loyal fan base that and it was just like, you know, more than Bill O'Reilly, it almost like the podcast world wasn't as developed for him.
But with Tucker, who I think also had a younger audience than Bill O'Reilly.
But he did have some older people.
And I think people loved him enough that it was like, okay, all right, dad, you got to join X and you can still watch Tucker.
And they might be motivated to actually figure out how to do that.
All right.
Guerrilla Feet writes, Dave, why come to Montana in the middle of January?
Well, I don't know.
That's when they booked me.
Seems like a great time.
What's the problem with Montana in January?
Is Montana, what, because it's the middle of winter or whatever?
Middle Winter Reality00:01:13
I mean, I don't know.
We need to be there.
We're going to go to Big Sky.
Yeah.
We also, you know, we live, we live in the Northeast.
So it's not as if we're not in winter, in the middle of winter.
I mean, Montana, sure.
Does it sound like they probably haven't gotten snowplows there yet?
Quite possibly.
Are we going to get stuck?
Maybe.
No, you know, it's it's there's all it's just logistic stuff.
That's when I had a free weekend and that's when the theater was free.
And so that's when we're doing it.
Okay, let me see what else.
Okay, last one.
I'll read this.
How telling is it these historians blast Cooper without doing the type of research on him they accuse him of doing on World War II?
That is a good, that's a pretty good point.
It's a good, it's a good way to phrase it.
It is, yeah, it is pretty wild.
It doesn't really make any sense.
And it does kind of reveal their own, yeah, the lack of the lack of the quality that they're demanding in him because they actually don't know what they're talking about.