Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein dissect Donald Trump's political collapse, tracing his drop from record highs to a 38% approval rating driven by unpopular foreign policy, specifically pro-Israel stances facilitating genocide, and an economy plagued by soaring housing and energy costs. They critique his economically illiterate tariff promises and defense of Chinese students in U.S. universities despite espionage concerns, noting defections like Tulsi Gabbard's and the influence of donors like Miriam Adelson. Ultimately, the hosts argue Trump's rapid decline mirrors a failed "Keep America Great" narrative, warning Republicans face electoral losses unless they address structural issues and the erosion of his cultural coalition. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Bush Youth South Carolina00:09:26
What's up?
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith.
He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
We are about to head out to New Orleans together.
Dave, I hit go live, but it's not showing.
It's going.
Give me one second.
Sure, sure, sure.
That's a good point.
Can we try that again?
Yep.
Hold on one second.
Let me see it on the screen.
There you go.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith.
He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
How are you feeling today, Robbie?
Doing well.
We're about to head out for Skank Fest.
And for anyone who's already in New Orleans, Wednesday night, I'm doing a show in Mandonville, LA, which I believe is like a half hour outside of New Orleans.
Got a cool roadside music venue type place.
So if you're out there, I got some great local openers.
It's going to be a fun show.
Awesome.
Awesome.
Sounds good.
And of course, then we will be out at Skank Fest for the week.
Oh, yeah.
And then Poughkeepsie.
I believe that that is our last, me and Rob's last show of the year together.
And I believe the first show is sold out.
I believe there are still some tickets.
I haven't checked in the last couple of days.
I believe there's still some tickets for the late show, but November 22nd, Poughkeepsie, New York, laugh it up.
One night only.
It'll be both of us.
And we got Chris Fega coming up there as well.
Always a fun time.
And then in the new year, we're coming all over the place.
I always say it like that.
Then people clip it and make gay jokes.
You people are so immature.
We will be traveling together, sleeping in separate hotel rooms, hanging out in the same hotel room a lot during the day, but whatever.
ComicdaveSmith.com for all those ticket links.
All right.
So for today's show, I really, I think that pretty much the theme of the whole show is going to be this.
If you guys want to put some questions in the live chat, I'll try to respond to some if we have time.
Partoftheproblem.com, of course, is where you can watch the show live and ad-free and uncensored.
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So the theme for today's show is Donald Trump.
What the hell is going on with him, man?
Because I really do just at this point, it is, it's kind of hard to overstate what a disaster this whole thing has been.
And just on every front, on every front.
And I thought it was something that's that's worth going over.
I think it's really important to do this because, you know, much like, I mean, obviously there was a bigger time period here, but, you know, things are moving quicker than ever these days.
But if you, you know, when Donald Trump successfully hijacked the Republican Party and took over and became president in 2016, well, the way he ran was a complete repudiation of the George W. Bush administration.
You know, he looked at Jeb Bush in a Republican primary debate in South Carolina of all places, Rob, the military state of South Carolina.
You know, you're talking about, well, you're talking about the Republican, you know, party primary in South Carolina.
It's hard to overstate how much military influence there is over that crowd.
And Donald Trump looked Jeb Bush in the eyes and said, your brother lied us into war.
Not the war didn't work out well or the war wasn't prosecuted well.
Like he said he lied us into war.
The charge is of like the most profound war crime that you can commit.
Genuinely, that is an accusation that should be punishable by death.
The idea that you lied a country into a war that got a million people killed and thousands of our own soldiers killed and cost trillions of dollars.
But anyway, I just say that to make the point that obviously at that point, Donald Trump, for whatever reason, whether it was a political calculation or he was just telling the truth, because it was a good, it was both, right?
It was a good political calculation and he was telling the truth.
But he recognized that, like, no, the path going forward here is to just totally repudiate this.
Like, you know what I mean?
Like, it's not to try to defend this.
It's not to try to say, like, there were a lot of other kind of milquetoast establishment Republicans who would have said, like, well, Obama was even worse than Bush or something like that.
He was like, no, that's not the game we're playing.
And likewise, in a similar fashion, I think the time is now that for Donald Trump.
I think the time is for all of us to admit that this whole thing is just a disaster.
You know, I sent you, I sent you this morning, Rob, this piece.
I was reading a piece in the Economist about Donald Trump's approval rating.
And just to kind of get like a picture of this, because I don't really think like I'm exaggerating much, right?
But the reading from the piece here.
Okay, let me, this I found particularly interesting.
Donald Trump essentially had he came in like a year ago.
Donald Trump won this incredible election.
He comes in with his record high approval ratings, the highest approval ratings he's ever had.
More importantly than that, I think his agenda was wildly popular with the American people.
Donald Trump wins a year ago.
Donald Trump wins every single swing state, wins the popular vote.
And even more seemingly impossible, or what had previously seemed to be impossible, he captured the culture, the youth, the energy of the whole country.
You know, John Jones is doing the Trump dance after he wins the fights.
He's at every UFC event.
Like he's just, he was with all the cool kids on the big podcasts.
Today, Donald Trump has his lowest approval ratings that he's ever had.
Donald Trump's approval ratings are around, this last poll had him at 38%.
He's right around where George W. Bush was after two disastrous wars and an economic crash.
And particularly this, I thought was crazy.
The biggest shift away from Mr. Trump, I'm reading from the Economist piece here, has been amongst Americans under 30 years old.
His net approval amongst that group was positive three when he returned to the Oval Office.
It's now minus 40.
Now, I'm sorry, but like one of the most incredible things that Donald Trump did was kind of win over the youth in a way that like nobody really thought.
Like it was inconceivable in 2016 that Donald Trump would have carried the youth.
And yet he was positive three when he came in to office this last time.
He's now negative 40.
The future generation was open to this, maybe even supporting this, and now want nothing to do with it at all.
That is something that's really worth examining.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
I'm going to, I'm going to guess that foreign policy particularly turns off the youth.
And I mean, I had a rough run when I got out of college.
I came out of college during the Great Recession in 08.
I definitely moved back home for a while, worked every odd job you can imagine.
It literally took me 10 full years before I got an office, like what I would have thought would have been the starter job out of college of like a typical nine to five office job in sales.
But I don't know what the climate is now for these kids coming out of school, but I certainly know that they don't like the Israel situation.
And I'm going to guess that the job market isn't fantastic right now.
And you put those two things together for young kids and I could understand why they're not too pleased with the current administration.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, this demographic is overwhelmingly considers what Israel's doing to the Palestinians to be a genocide.
And they overwhelmingly hate the levels of control that the Israel lobby and the Israel government have over the United States of America.
The $20 Trillion Pitch00:14:33
And Donald Trump's out there bragging about being the most pro-Israel president ever.
And he's been funded and facilitating the genocide the whole time.
He's been in there.
So yeah, that sure as hell doesn't help with them.
And like you said, the economic stuff is all a disaster for these kids.
And even if like the wars are not, it just doesn't capture people's interest of you actually being America first.
So if you're out there and you want to pretend like you really care about what's going on in this country and you're spending all this money on what people don't like, and that's mostly what they're hearing about in the news, you're going to lose your client base.
Yeah.
No, I think that's exactly right.
And there's, and, and, you know, just in every way, he's just been signaling that he's not with them, not with the cause, that this isn't serious.
It's like a fundamentally unserious administration.
And I remember, you know, Rob, I, so I, I remember this was, I think when, when me and you first started podcasting together or like around that time.
So I remember talking about this.
First of all, I remember saying before me and you were podcasting together, I used to always say this back like in 2015, 2016.
I thought make America great again was one of the most brilliant campaign slogans ever.
Like it's just, it's incredible.
It's it people really underestimate this type of stuff.
And this is the stuff that Donald Trump is really good at.
Like it's really only his only true talent ever has been being the best self-promoter in the history of the world.
And so he's very good at this.
But there's something amazing.
Look, the make America great again is four words, but it says so much.
Like there's so much information that's loaded into those four words.
And it's a simple thing that everybody can kind of get on board with.
Like it's like, we were once great.
We have fallen off.
We want to return to that greatness.
Like there's a lot of information in those four words.
A whole worldview is like encompassed in that.
That there was, you know, like there was this, we, we were great.
That greatness was compromised.
It was compromised by people making decisions who had power that our goal is to return to this greatness.
And that is a slogan that appeals to like almost, you know, not the entire electorate, but like a large percentage of people, especially when you're coming off of the eight years that followed that great recession that you were just talking about and the phony Obama recovery.
This is a huge part of why Donald Trump carried the Rust Belt and carried the purple states and, you know, and won in 2016.
And then I remember talking to you about this in 2019 when Donald Trump's re-election campaign started.
And if you remember, Rob, his slogan for the campaign was keep America great.
And I remember me and you talking about this and saying, this is not a like, this does not have the magic of make America great again.
And the major reason why keep America great just doesn't really work is because now anyone who doesn't feel great isn't really on board with that.
You know, make it great again is vague enough that anyone who doesn't feel great could go, oh, this is going to be great.
But keep America great is telling people that your current situation is great.
Now, if that's not the case, there's a real disconnect there.
Oh, you're saying I keep this.
I don't get some imagined better.
I get to maintain this.
They're just very, and then me and you were talking about this in 2019.
Then 2020 hits and it's lockdowns and riots and, you know, just chaos and tech censorship.
And it's like the worst year in modern American history for most people.
I mean, the amount of like job insecurity and anxiety and isolation and depression and fear of the germ itself and all of this shit.
Just the crazy.
And he had that slogan.
He was already married to that slogan because they had made it the official slogan of the campaign.
And so Donald Trump imagined, Rob, is running by the end of 2020 on keep it going.
Keep America great.
Like great?
What do you, so it was just, it was a disaster.
And if, you know, if people want to get tribal and loyal to Donald Trump or something like that, maybe you want to look away from this, but we're going to play some video clips on this show of Donald Trump's interview that he just did with Laura Ingram.
And I'm telling you, it's much worse than that.
I mean, maybe it's not worse than saying keep America great at the end of 2020, but it's up there.
And I'm telling you right now, I'm just, I'm getting ahead of this thing.
This is, if something doesn't change here, the Republicans are going to get stomped in the midterms.
And if something doesn't change here, they're very likely going to lose the presidency in 2028.
Like, and tell me if I'm wrong, Rob, and you and an audience member yelling at the screen or you guys at part of the problem.com in the chat, tell me if you think I'm wrong, but let's look at some of these clips here because I don't think you can overstate like what a disaster some of them are.
Do you want to say anything else before we get into them, Rob?
Or you want to roll right in.
Okay.
All right.
Let's jump in.
Oh, right here we go.
Somebody that's.
And why are people saying they're anxious about the economy?
Why are they saying that?
I don't know that they are saying.
I think polls are fake.
We have the greatest economy we've ever had.
We have, we will have over $20 trillion come into our economy.
And it's largely because of my election, but it's also largely because of tariffs.
Even somebody that's...
And why are people saying they're anxious about the economy?
So this is the, and there's another clip about the economy that we'll get to in a second that's even worse.
But look, this is As we, Rob, we covered this for the entire year of 2024, me and you, the entire year.
This is Joe Biden's economic defense.
It is, it is identical.
It is the exact same thing.
If you remember, this is what they rolled out for the entire year of 2024.
This was their economic pitch.
No, you're just stupid.
I know you think the economy is bad, but that's because you're so dumb.
And actually, the problem is just that you've been manipulated to feel that the economy is bad.
And look at this fancy chart I got here with a big number.
$20 trillion is coming in.
Like, oh, you know, it's like, look, between, and I don't know, Rob, you might know these charts better than me, right?
But like, when you look at whatever the numbers are, it's so goofy.
But if you look at like Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump, like those terms, so the last, you know, eight or the last two, eight terms plus this, this one year or whatever, they've created what?
Like 70% of the money that's ever been created in the history of the world or something like that.
Like, you know what I mean?
You look at those charts, like the amount of money creation.
So yeah, you could say, look, trillions, tens of trillions, you know, all this money, but that's not what people are talking about.
So here you have, this is the message of Donald Trump.
You know, it's like, oh, why do people have such economic anxiety?
I don't know, because they're wrong, because they're stupid, because they've been fooled.
And I mean, like, how much do you need to look around, Rob, before you go like, okay, Israel's getting every bit of funding that they need to keep destroying Gaza.
Ukraine's still being funded.
Epstein's still being covered up.
Where's government spending?
Okay, it's higher than it was the last year.
My point basically is not only do we get Joe Biden's presidency, but we also get Joe Biden's defense for the economy.
Like if there was a way to seize defeat from the jaws of victory, to take this monumental, historic victory from a year ago and just have blown it all, you know, just blown it all in a year.
There's your message right there.
Everybody concerned with the economy, you're wrong and kind of stupid.
And the real victim here is Donald Trump.
It's not even a coherent pitch because let's just go with that 20 trillion is accurate.
Firstly, he's stating it like he's already collected 20 trillion.
I think the most faith, I really got to dig in and debunk this, but I think the most favorable position is over the next 10 years or 30 years, they might see $10 trillion in tariff revenue.
Now, that doesn't equate for any lost taxes or economic development because of increased costs.
But let's just go with $20 trillion is coming in from tariffs.
He doesn't mean that they've already collected $20 trillion.
I don't think that's going to take much to debunk.
We have not made $20 trillion in the last four months that he's had a tariff policy.
Or anywhere close to it.
So let's just go with that there is $20 trillion coming in from tariffs over an extended period of time.
Then the pitch would be, I'm the first president that actually solved the nation's debt.
And I understand that right now you're seeing an increase in costs and you're seeing a halt in economic development.
But the favor I just did for your grandkids and the economy in three or four years from now, as we're actually paying down the debt, I'm the first true conservative.
That would be the pitch.
But when people are not in a favorable economic environment and prices are going up and you're telling them about firstly a phony sum of money, $20 trillion is not coming in.
You're also not even applying it for the debt.
So what exactly is the pitch here of the $20 trillion coming in?
Or you would at least need the next line of listen, I understand all of your prices are going up and you don't have a job, but I'm tariffing people and $20 trillion are coming in and I'm going fully socialist.
So I'm actually going to start sending you the money directly.
And you can thank China for the fact that you don't have to work anymore.
I can't actually get you a factory job, but look, you got a check coming from China.
The point I'm just trying to make is that this pitch of, oh, well, there's $20 trillion coming in from tariffs.
So now explain to me.
So what's the pitch?
How does that help me?
I'm an American.
I don't like my job.
I'm driving an Uber.
I got a college degree.
Don't have a job that I want.
Don't know how to afford a home.
How does $20 trillion in tariffs coming in help me?
Yeah.
No, that's right.
No, you're right.
It's a totally incoherent pitch, but also, you know, right.
Like, I agree with everything you said there.
And I think at the heart of it, like you said, you got people in these situations.
Like you're, you're right.
You said you're a kid with a college degree.
You come out of college.
Now you're working at DoorDash and you have 200 grand in debt.
And the average single family home is going for 600 grand in your area.
And you're like, dude, I mean, I make, yeah, like, look, I mean, I don't know, the median household income is still like, I think around 70 grand in the country.
So that's the median household.
You know, you're a 22, 23 year old.
Maybe you're coming out.
You know, you're working at DoorDash.
What are you making for that?
40 grand a year or something like that?
You know, you're making 40 grand a year and you're 200 grand in debt and the average house goes for 600 grand.
You explained to me how you get ahead in life like that.
And so you're in that situation and then the price of everything is getting more and more expensive.
And then Donald Trump's going to tell you, nah, dude, what do you have economic anxiety for?
I got 20 trillion here.
Like, do I have 20 trillion?
Like, what does this even mean?
It's just, it's so bad.
It is so bad and so pathetic.
$20 trillion.
And listen, I didn't like green energy or windmills, but what I do like is nuclear power so that I can hand over all of the nation's resources to AI developers who are already extraordinarily wealthy.
Because if we want to stay ahead of China, we don't need free markets.
We need the government to intervene and make sure that there's enough energy supplies for this AI tech development.
Yeah.
Well, that's right.
I mean, look, I do think that there is a, as I think Hayek would have said, a fatal conceit, which I think is what you're getting to here, right?
Like there's this fatal conceit from the Republicans.
If they are, even if they're saying tariffs are how you get rich or something like that, it's like, oh, so like taxing the people who are ripping you off, that's kind of what you're getting at here.
Like, so you've already conceded the entire moral framework to socialism.
And look, you guys, everybody should be aware of this.
I mean, you can just see the writing is all on the wall.
It's obvious that, look, all the energy goes to Donald Trump because the regime is just so corrupt and so criminally corrupt and is destroying the country.
Donald Trump gets in there on this promise of drain the swamp, doesn't drain anything.
Things are more expensive than ever now.
And who comes in to fill that void?
The socialist left saying, here's your answer, because they're always going to have a quicker answer.
And their answer essentially is that, look, I mean, all of this government interventionist stuff is socialism to one degree or another.
And Donald Trump's essentially going, we need socialism to fight, you know, Israel's war, right?
Like we need a government program of taxing Israel.
We need socialism to bomb whatever, Venezuela.
We need socialism to bomb Iran.
We need socialism to fix the economy.
We need social.
And it's just pretty easy eventually for a leftist to come in and go, I say we need socialism to make your rent cheaper.
Who wins in that argument?
Who wins 100 out of 100 times?
And you almost can't even blame the young people for going more in that direction at a certain point.
And, you know, as you saw with the Mamdani thing, then essentially all the establishment can say is he's an anti-Semite.
Well, why is he an anti-Semite?
Manufactured Oil Ugly00:15:15
Because he doesn't support Israel.
And they're like, we like that about him.
Okay, next?
Like, what?
Okay, we also don't support Israel.
What the hell are you talking about?
Then, especially in this environment where like everybody who is critical of Israel has at least once been called an anti-Semite.
So now you're just calling him an anti-Semite.
It's just, they're like, yeah, that's what we get called.
Okay.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
All right, let's hear, let's keep playing because it actually gets worse than this.
The economy was listed as a top concern.
I know you know this for voters in New Jersey, New York, Virginia.
I know you've been all over the affordable affordability issue today and for the last several months, eggs, gas, dinner costs for Thanksgiving way down.
But other things, as you noted, have gone up.
Beef, coffee, auto repairs.
Is this a voter perception issue of the economy?
Or is there more that needs to be done by Republicans on Capitol Hill or done in terms of policy?
More than anything else, it's a conjugate by the Democrats.
They're saying they just have to say, you know, they put out something.
Say today, costs are up.
They feed it to the anchors of ABC, CBS, and NBC, and a lot of other and, you know, CNN, et cetera.
And it's like a standard, I'll never forget they had used a word like manufactured.
Do you remember the word manufactured?
It's a manufactured economy.
Nobody uses that word.
Every anchor, broken, manufactured, they do exactly what they say.
It's such a rigged system.
So are you ready?
Costs are way down.
Gasoline is going to be hitting $2 pretty soon or around $2.
Gasoline is at $270 now.
And it was at $450 under Biden, under Sleepy Joe.
When gasoline comes down, when energy comes down, and everybody agrees energy is down, we're drilled, you know, drill, baby, drill.
We're going like wild.
We produced more gasoline, oil, and gas in the last month than we ever have before by far.
And we're going to also end up filling up the national strategic reserves, which were taken out by Biden in order to try and win an election.
Didn't work out too well.
They capped in.
That's supposed to be for war, for national emergency, not to get.
So are you saying that voters are misprecedenting how they feel?
So when I took over, you remember because you said Biden did that too, because he was saying things and great.
I think so.
Synonymous Biden and Kamala, you know, because you didn't know who the hell was campaigning.
I mean, it got to a point.
So I was up by 20 points on Biden or some crazy number.
And they said, all right, let's get him out.
We'll put a new one.
This never happened to anybody.
All of a sudden, I have somebody new.
And they had the six-week honeymoon, you know, which was standard in the world of politics.
You get a little honeymoon and she had her little honeymoon, but then eventually people got to know her too.
And then they had the 16 minutes catastrophe where they, you know, changed her answer.
Housing costs are.
I just thought, I don't know.
I just loved the way it just adds.
Like, I got to say, first of all, because we get into just like how ridiculous and how terrible this answer is.
Again, it is, Rob, it's like, you know, that the Facebook meme where like there's four pictures and everyone just turns into Joe Biden a little bit more.
Like he's just Joe Biden by the end.
But I also got to say, there's this quality about Donald Trump that is this energy, this big ball of charismatic narcissism that when utilized correctly is something people really like about him.
But then when it misses the mark, it really is an ugly thing.
Because that's how narcissism is.
It's actually a very ugly thing when you really get a look at it.
And so when Donald Trump is, when he's pissing off all the worst people in America, when Donald Trump is the candidate and all the people who ruined the country are like, I'm very offended by him.
Well, now, you know, he can kind of do no wrong.
And no matter what brash thing he says, you're kind of on his side because, you know, screw those guys.
And then when, you know, Megan Kelly's like, you've said horrible things about women and this.
And he's like, only Rosie O'Donnell or whatever.
You're like, you know, it's like, yeah, I get him.
And you don't even mind a little bit of his own egotistical stuff in there when he's promising to win for you.
But it's such a different thing when the question is, okay, you're the presiding ruler now and you're not winning for them.
And then he transitions to just bragging about himself, just bragging about the election that he won, just bragging about how nice the White House looks or how, you know, it's like that really does not work.
Like I just tell you guys right now, this just is not going to resonate.
But again, he's to the broader point.
He's doing exactly what Joe Biden did during the years of high price inflation under Biden.
Remember, Rob, where they would pick one thing and they'd be like, hot?
Yeah, beans are down.
Hot dogs are still reasonable.
The buns are three times as expensive.
So probably you're going to have to go with that buns.
But the dog itself, you could still afford, you know, and you're like, dude, what are you?
I mean, this attempt at gaslighting, you know, I know we made this point a lot.
It almost feels like we're regurgitating the stuff we were saying about Joe Biden because Trump's saying the same stuff.
But this is not, you know, if you want to try to convince people that climate change is real, well, like, okay, a lot of people could buy the, hey, listen, the scientists figured this out.
They got their charts and graphs.
They're looking at data and they're putting together, you know, projections that you probably aren't educated enough to understand, you know?
And you could do this with a lot of different things.
But when it comes to the economy, when it comes to are things more expensive, you're telling people to ignore their lying eyes.
This is what Joe Biden was doing during the years of price.
What regular person, everyone I know, everyone I know, including the people who are really high earners, because I know a lot of people who make really good money, everybody I know, but everyone who has a job, what all adults are talking about today is how expensive everything is.
Like everybody's talking about this.
It's the running conversation that everyone and every one of their friend groups has.
Like, what the hell?
Like, I just got a coffee for $6.
What the hell is going on?
None of this makes sense to any of us.
You know, like, I like just the money.
We don't even understand money anymore because it's been debased so much.
Like, I'm so out of touch.
Like, I, I told you, you know, like, I go to like a burger joint for my family and get like four burgers and some fries and a soda.
And you're like, what, what do I owe you $130?
Like, all right, I guess that's what money is today.
Like, I, to me, that was not, that's not what money is supposed to be.
That's like we went to a fancy restaurant and sat down or something.
But the idea that you're going to tell people that prices are down when they are not.
It's just objectively not true.
Yes, there are certain prices that you can find in an economy filled with, you know, like a few billion different prices.
You could point to a few that are down, but overall, they're, they're up and up substantially.
They're up like three and a half percent year to date on just by the CPI.
And the CPI never accounts for the real increase in prices.
So like, yes, prices are worse.
They're everything you had to deal with under Biden, but higher than that.
And you're, if the, the strategy is to say, nah-uh, that ain't true.
That's the Democrats winning Congress and the presidency.
Now, I hope people understand like how dire the situation of that is.
Like, it's not a joke, man.
The last time they were in, they really tried to like cramp down on free speech and freedom in general in this country.
And they're going to be coming back with a vengeance.
This shit is going to lead to them taking the country back.
All right.
The first thing I'm going to say is important is I moved in my chair and it made a fart noise.
And that wasn't me.
I'm smart enough to mute the thing and stare at the camera if I need a pass win.
So that was that was a very Trumpian response, though.
Whatever you think you're seeing and hearing, that's just not happening.
And I would know I'm at least professional enough to mute my mic under such circumstances.
But once again, you know, this is a decent pitch to go, listen, I'm working on oil prices.
And once energy is cheaper, you're going to see costs come down.
The problem is, I think a lot of people are actually seeing increased energy costs, which is because of the data in AI centers.
And a lot of that stuff is not on an oil grid.
But I don't know the specifics on that.
But what's just another contradiction is if you actually get to $2 oil pricing, I'd have to research this, but my guess is that shuts down United States oil drilling.
Because I remember in the past, the lower price, like fracking is really only profitable, like at some of the higher prices.
And so I'm just going to guess that there's a contradiction in there as well: of I got oil down to $2 a gallon.
And also, we're going to be drill, baby, drill.
Cause I think if you get it down to $2 a gallon, it's no longer a drill, baby, drill environment.
Right, right.
No, that's a good point.
That's a good point.
Yeah, I just don't, I can't.
The real fundamental problem here, right?
And this is that we, and we laid it out on yesterday's show, but is just that like Donald Trump doesn't have either the knowledge or the balls to just tackle the real problem.
And that is really at the heart of all of this.
You know, we have an empire that we cannot afford to maintain and a welfare state that we cannot afford to maintain.
Now, I said I'm really talking about the entitlements.
We can't afford any of this shit.
We're going broke and we're printing the money to make up for it.
And this is debasing the currency and it's leading to the prices of everything going up.
And if you're not going to take on that and you're also not even willing to like expose the stuff that the deep state's doing, like Epstein stuff, well, there's drain the swamp.
That's it.
You know, at this point, we're just kind of, you know, there was this old, um, there was this old episode of uh The Office once where they um, it's been a while since I watched this, but they like uh they send like they're filming a commercial for Dunder Mifflin.
And so they send a crew over to the Scranton branch to go.
And Michael's very excited because they're like, you're going to get some creative input on this.
And he has this whole concept for the commercial.
And then they play the commercial and they're like, it's like at the end of the commercial is the branch people waving.
And they're like, oh, that's the part you get to be creative with.
Like, you don't have to wave.
You could do thumbs up.
You could do.
And he realizes he can't actually, he doesn't actually have creative control over this whole thing.
He's got this little tiny splice at the end.
And there's really not that much you can do with it.
And it's kind of like you say you're going to drain the swamp.
Okay, but we're not going to cut the Pentagon, you know, because that's like, I believe in a larger Pentagon budget.
Like, okay.
Also, I won't touch entitlement programs because I don't want to lose the votes of senior citizens.
Like, okay.
Also, I won't really release the Epstein information because, you know, I don't want to upset powerful people or maybe I'm protecting myself or whatever.
Also, we're not really going to prosecute Obama, even though we said we have the proof that he's guilty of treason.
And at a certain point, you're like, well, then what are we even left with here?
What does drain the swamp mean?
And it means what we're seeing, Rob.
We got Chauncey Phillips.
An NBA coach was gambling on NBA games.
All right.
You know, that's the type of shit we got.
And then it's like little.
And look, I'm not even saying like, you know, I don't know.
I'd have to sit down and go, is Donald Trump refilling the strategic reserves of petroleum?
Is that like a good call or a bad call?
Like, I don't know.
I'd have to sit down.
But all I know is that this is tinkering around the edges.
This just does not even grapple with any of the major problems that we have, like the major, major problems that we have in this country.
And of course, a huge component of that, I would argue the major component of that is that the entire system is run by the War Party.
And the War Party ain't interested in any of that shit.
War Party ain't interested in sound money because you can't be a world empire with sound money.
So, you know, it's just like Donald Trump's in a position where once you're abandoning all of that, then all you have left is this.
And I'll tell you, part of the reason why it's a um, and I'm not like, I'm not a Republican.
You know what I mean?
Like, I don't know.
I've voted Republican before and I've supported some Republicans, but really only a handful.
Ron Paul.
And I guess I supported Rand Paul early in 2016 and Trump this last time and a couple others, but like, and Thomas Massey, obviously.
But like, so I'm not just saying this, like, hey, guys, I want our team to win.
It's like, I want the country to win.
I see the Democrats as being the biggest threat to the country.
But again, as I've made this point before, Rob, what is JD Vance going to run on after this?
Like, once you've said that, what's he going to say?
It's like, now, seriously, this time, we're really going to drain the swamp.
You're, you know, you're tanking the entire credibility of the administration.
I mean, look, Rob, like, am I exaggerating here?
Brunt Work Boots Ad00:03:21
But if you just, I think we got our finger on the pulse to some degree of this world.
We live in this world, you know.
If you just think about forgetting even the polls, right?
Because I understand people don't trust polls that much, but like also when you have the same poll had him at record high, now has him at record low, you know, okay, there's something there.
But forget even the polls, just in the hearts and minds of the people, the esteem that Trump was held in a year ago compared to now, it's like you kind of can't even measure how much he's fallen.
And it's not just him, it's all of them, dude.
Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, Tulsi Gabbard, you know, Bobby Kennedy, all of them.
They're just all like, they've, and when you seed that energy, politically speaking, what you're also putting in jeopardy is the fact that, and correct me if I'm wrong on this, Rob, but over the last few years, this is the only time in the history of my life where the culture's moved to the right.
There's there's never been a period of time the culture was steadily moving to the left always.
It was they used to run on this feeling of inevitability.
You remember how every time you'd ever be in an argument with like a social justice warrior, they would just say, You're on the wrong side of history, as if it was a given that history is moving in their direction because it kind of seemed like that for a long time.
And for the first time, we actually really moved the, and you put all of that in jeopardy when the administration that that cultural shift, you know, uh, um, was embodied by fails at everything.
It's really dangerous ground.
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You know, not that this is a perfect analytic, but earlier into Trump, man, the pushback I was getting anytime you criticized him.
And I don't, firstly, I don't experience that anymore, but I don't really see people like out with Trump hats, Trump signs, Trump that you know what I mean.
It seems like very quietly, it's like the backpedaling out of the room, like the Peter Griffin, or I think it's the Homer Simpson meme.
The Homer Simpson into the bushes, yeah, yeah, where he just backs back in.
Backpedaling Into Bushes00:15:42
It feels like you're right, all the enthusiasm for all these characters is seemingly not there anymore.
It almost in a way feels like, I don't know, I'm trying to think of the right example, but you know, like in a TV show or something like that, like you're like trying to make, you know, there's like a girl who's trying to make a guy jealous or something like that.
So she's like all over another guy because she wants that guy to see, but then that guy like leaves.
And then she's like, oh, okay.
Yeah.
No, I don't actually like you.
Like I was just trying to make that guy jealous or something like that.
Like it's like Donald Trump was this tool to piss everybody else off, but then you take them out and he's just there and you're like, oh, well, I don't know.
And I will tell you, again, I try not, you know, it's hard.
This is something actually I was talking about with Constantin Kissin on the trigonometry podcast the other day, which was very good, by the way.
I really enjoyed doing it.
I really appreciated those guys.
I thought the whole spirit of the thing was they really, they didn't come in and try to like win and get me, which I kind of was, you know, I wasn't sure, but I thought, but we really just had like a conversation.
It really wasn't a debate.
It was just like a good conversation about all this stuff.
But anyway, this, this kind of like this idea came up where we were talking about how like we're all a little bit blinded by our own perspectives and our own algorithms and the worlds that we're in.
And so sometimes it's tough to get a gauge.
But I just use, like I said, I use the Steven Crowder appearance of mine as an interesting gauge to me because like the same way I used that Charlie Kirk appearance, because you're like, yo, this is like the MAGA, you know, base home.
This is where the most hardcore Trump loyalists should be.
And I'm sitting there on both of those things.
Like the topic is you're calling for this guy to be, you know, tried for war crimes and executed upon conviction or something like that.
And I'm like, yeah, that's right.
And here's why.
And the audience is just overwhelmingly like not only just not only not turned off by that, but just like, I'm listening.
Yep.
And so I, you know, I don't know what you can say.
And like, as we've talked about many times, obviously there was 2024 was an unbelievably unique situation.
You know, Donald Trump had, like I said before, he had captured the culture and all this stuff, had made a completely new coalition.
He had flipped like the paradigm upside down.
He was carrying young people.
He was winning a higher percentage of blacks and Latinos.
And he carried independents.
And he won over the middle than he was even able to carry the defected liberals, right?
Like he was able to carry that.
There were a lot of liberals who over the last, you know, 10 years, particularly over the last five years, were like, yo, this is a little bit too crazy.
You know, this was a huge voting block.
It still to this day is a big chunk of America that there were like people who were pretty much liberals who were like, okay, but like men competing in women's sports.
What?
Wait, what?
Locking down the country?
Wait, forcing an experimental vaccine into people?
Wait a minute, pretending a brain-dead senile guy is sharp as a tack?
You know, there were just like things where it was like, yeah, that's a bridge too far for me.
This is represented by Tulsi Gabbard and Bobby Kennedy and Nicole Shanahan and Jillian Michaels and just like a lot of people like that.
And Donald Trump carried that, you know, group.
And so now you had a situation where Donald Trump was bringing in the people like Bobby Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard and, you know, some who at least much more anti-war than the establishment was.
And Donald Trump had also been now the victim of this crazy law fair where they actually tried to put him in jail.
He was, there were multiple assassination attempts.
He was coming back and there was this new coalition.
And it was like, hey, there are possibilities here that we maybe never really accounted for.
Okay.
It was something that at least warranted like taking a second look and really trying to grapple with the moment.
But the fact is that this is not the first time Donald Trump's been president.
It's the second time.
And the first time ended in 2020.
It ended with Donald Trump failing on the most important moment of his life.
And it was his failure.
You know, don't get me wrong.
It was a lot of people's failure, but it was his failure.
He was the president of the United States of America and he was the one who declared the national emergency and he was the one who made Fauci the face of the pandemic response and he was the one who went out of his way to attack countries like Sweden for not locking down and attack governors who weren't locking down enough.
Donald Trump failed 2020 miserably and he left America with Joe Biden and he is failing again.
And he might leave us with something even worse than that.
So particularly for those of us who did support him in this last election, I think it's kind of extra incumbent on us to be the ones pointing this out.
That like, hey, there was a possibility here.
It's been more than clearly signaled at this point that essentially none of those positives are going to come.
You know, I think we've gotten what we could get already out of the Trump administration.
I don't think we're getting anything else.
Certainly feels like the current climate.
It's just teasing Venezuelan words, more spending, you know, more central planning.
It's none of what we hoped for.
Yeah.
Although I guess at least we're not being censored by Democrats at the moment.
Yes, at the moment, that is true.
At least, listen, we are reaping still, we're reaping some of the rewards of the cultural shift over the last few years.
And that's great.
But if we want to keep shifting things in that direction, I think we got to keep telling the truth about these things.
All right, let's go to the next clip here.
Unbelievable deal.
China's paying tariffs to the United States, not the United States paying tariffs to China, which has always been the way it was.
Nobody can believe these deals.
But so when somebody makes a statement about he's devoting time to the world, well, the world is the United States because if the world's in trouble or if the world is ripping us off, you know, the world was ripping us off before I came here.
Europe was getting massive tariffs.
They were sending us nine, 10 million cars a year.
We were sending them none.
They were not taking our agriculture.
We were taking massive amounts of their, it was so unfair.
Now we have a deal where $950 billion is coming into the United States because of me and because of tariffs.
So if I don't do all these things, our country is doing very poorly.
So, you know, it's easy to say, oh, don't worry about the world, but the world is turning out to be our biggest customer.
The world was on fire.
And we could have been in that fire very easily if you didn't have a president that knew what he was doing.
There is Donald Trump.
There you go.
Slightly different than the America first message that he wrote to the White House saying, well, actually, it is all about the world.
But even what do you have here, right?
Aside from just the insulting economic illiteracy about they were sending us more cars than we were sending them.
Like, oh my God, you know, you know what's crazy, Rob?
Is that my car dealership?
They've sent me more cars than I've sent them.
Every time I've gotten two cars from them and they've gotten none from me.
I just give them cash.
Clearly, that means something.
Like, what is even your conception of what economics is?
It's just totally ridiculous.
Rob, you know, I have a huge trade deficit with my local supermarket.
They just dump food.
I've never given them food once.
I just give them cash and they give me food.
So obviously they're making me poorer, right?
Something.
But the point is that the question gets asked of Donald Trump that your supporters feel like you're too focused on foreign policy and not focused enough on this country.
And then he could sit there and say his whole thing, tariffs are great and everything is great and this is working so great.
But again, now you're in the Joe Biden.
Now you're in the Barack Obama position of defending your recovery that the entire country is telling you they are not feeling.
But you're going, no, no, no, it's so great.
And then this, and I got to say, this really reminded me of Obama.
Because if you remember, Rob, which, you know, you're a little younger than me, but you're old enough to remember the Obama years.
If you remember, that was their whole economic pitch.
It was the pitch through the entire eight years where people would go, we are not feeling this recovery.
And they'd go, yeah, but if we hadn't spent all this money, it'd be even worse.
They just use the unfalsifiable counterfactual.
Dick Cheney on terrorism.
Yep, that's right.
That's right.
It's all the same thing.
If we hadn't done this, it would be even worse.
That is even though it theoretically could be true at times.
It's not true in any of those cases, but like it could theoretically be true that you did something and things are bad, but it could have been worse if you hadn't done the thing.
Like that's not logically impossible to be correct, but it is the weakest goddamn political slogan imaginable.
That is how that is what you say when you're getting ready to lose an election.
I know things are really bad, but I deserve credit for it.
All right.
The it could have been worse campaign.
I know you don't like what's going on, but it would have been worse.
I know it's not good, but it could have been worse.
That is, that is the worst political messaging, you know?
And that's what you're, that's what you're left with when you're pretty desperate because you don't have anything real to defend.
Here, I'll go to, I think we had a couple questions in the chat.
I'll go to one before we play the next.
Oh, here is a question for Rob.
I came across a discussion between Rob and Scott Horton on the store on the Star Wars prequels and their parallels to the American Empire.
Well, the parallels to the American Empire and the Iraq war.
Can you please do this again?
It was fucking awesome.
There you go.
Well, for anyone who has never checked out Run Your Mouth, it is a great podcast and there are multiple episodes with Scott Horton, including a very nerdy breakdown of Star Wars and what we could learn about our political climate.
And then this past year, we did a conspiracy debunker where we got into, it's the second half of the episode, but you can hear Scott's thoughts on 9-11.
And I don't think you'll find that anywhere else.
So go check it out.
Yeah, it's interesting because I know it pisses a lot of people off that Scott Horton's not a 9-11 truther, but he is right about everything he says.
I mean, he's just got an undeniable case.
There's a lot of just there's a lot of popular conspiracies about 9-11 that really just don't stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny.
It was very, I really liked that episode a lot.
Run Your Mouth is great, by the way.
Anyone who listens to this, you're crazy if you don't listen to Run Your Mouth.
Okay, I thought there was another one here, but maybe I missed it.
Oh, yeah, Dave.
Oh, there's a good question because this is actually something that you had sent, Rob, to the chat here.
But Dave, did you see Miriam Adelson just threw 20 million at Massey's next race?
Yes, I did see that.
And yeah, I think we're, you know, I've been talking to some people about that.
I think we're going to try to do like kind of a big social media thing and really kind of push awareness about this.
But isn't it crazy?
Again, like Donald Trump himself in a clip where we almost debate, I mean, I think you argued against me and you were probably right.
But we almost like, it was debatable in that clip where you're like, is he attacking her?
Like, is he subliminally attacking her?
But in that clip where he just goes, basically just says that, yeah, she loves Israel more than she loves America.
And man, her and her husband were at my office every goddamn day.
And yeah, they're my biggest donor, but and I did so much for Israel for those guys.
You're like, what the fuck?
And then she is throwing money into Thomas Massey's race.
This is the dynamic that it's funny because there's been, you know, so much talk of Nick Fuentes in this world lately, but this is the dynamic where like you will never get rid of Nick Fuentes as long as you have this going on.
It's just too crazy.
You know, and I appreciated when I was on trigonometry, I talked about this a little bit.
I think the guys were pretty open to that because I'm kind of going like, look, guys, okay, I know there's some things about this, this guy and his people that you don't like, but let's just talk about like, come on, this is so weird.
You got these people who are like crazy influential power brokers who very clearly have loyalty to a foreign government and that they're going to try to unelect a wildly popular congressman.
And is, I mean, Thomas Massey, how many terms has he served now?
He's won many elections there in Kentucky.
Clearly, they like him.
Clearly, he's unlike most congressmen.
He's got like a national movement that's behind him.
And you're like the most America first congressman, you know?
And you, out of loyalty to a foreign government, are going to try to unseat him.
I mean, what can you say about that?
That's just so intolerable for any self-respecting nation.
So yeah, yeah, I did see that.
And it is in some weird way, I almost love the optics of it.
You know what I mean, Rob?
Because it just makes it so like, how do you even argue with this?
Here's Donald Trump saying she cares about Israel more than America.
And here she is trying to undermine the most America first congressman.
And why?
Why does she not like Thomas Massey?
Well, very simple.
There's one reason.
He doesn't support Israel.
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Foreign Students vs Gold00:07:07
All right, let's get back into the show.
Any thoughts on that one, Rob?
Well, I think obviously Massey is the best we've got.
And I was actually going to talk to you at SkankFest about that because I think the race is in May and we should get involved however we can because he needs to stick around.
And I certainly think it showcases the flaw of Donald Trump and his pretend America first movement when he just absolutely can't have Massey around because Massey is sometimes right and sometimes he's more interested in truth than he is in just swearing allegiance to Donald Trump.
And that completely undermines what Donald Trump's trying to do or stated differently, it keeps it somewhat in check.
And when he's doing some of the most nefarious things, such as, hey, there was no Epstein situation, or it is making it harder for American beef producers.
There's a whole list of topics.
Massey's clearly right.
And so we need some people that will actually talk the truth in government and hopefully, you know, put the other people on the record as being wrong and bad so we can correct things.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
And, you know, after my experiment with the Mises Caucus takeover of the Libertarian Party and after the successes and failures of that project, you know, I've been, I haven't been focused on any grand political project, you know what I mean, since then.
And I'm like, you know, I think I'm going to return to just telling the truth about these things and doing shows and doing big debates and big podcasts and stuff and just doing kind of what I do to move the needle as best I can on the biggest issues of the day.
But if there is a political project that I'm like, oh, yeah, sign me up for that.
It's like, it would be, yes, we support supporting Thomas Massey in this race.
And then it would be, I saw Tucker Carlson went on this big we should primary Lindsey Graham and get rid of him.
And I'm like, yeah, there you go.
I'm for that.
I'm for getting rid of Lindsey Graham and keeping Thomas Massey.
Sign me up in whatever capacity I can serve in those roles.
Happy to help.
So yeah.
Okay, let's play.
Let's do one more clip and then we'll call it a show.
Folks are not thrilled about this idea of hundreds of thousands of foreign students in the United States.
We have about 350,000 Chinese.
One point during COVID, you were going to, you know, push to get them out, but that was pulled back.
You've said as many as 600,000 Chinese students could come to the United States.
Why, sir, is that a pro-maga position when so many American kids want to go to school and there are places not for them and these universities are getting rich off Chinese money?
Sure.
Never said about China, but we do have a lot of people coming in from China.
We always have China and other countries.
We also have a massive system of colleges and universities.
And if we were to cut that in half, which perhaps makes some people happy, you would have half the colleges in the United States go out of business.
Well, I think that's a big deal.
Are they fans of that?
You would have the fans of the United States.
Yeah, but you would have, as you know, historically, black colleges and universities would all be out of business.
You would have a system of colleges and universities would be able to get a lot of people.
So we're dependent on China to keep our universities.
But I think it's good to have, I actually think it's good to have outside countries.
Look, I want to be able to get along with the world.
They're not the French.
They're the Chinese.
They spy on us.
They steal our intellectual property.
Do you think the French are better?
Yeah.
Really?
I don't know.
I'll tell you.
I'm not so sure.
We've had a lot of problems with the French, where we get taxed very unfairly on our technology, where, you know, they put 25% taxes on American products.
Look, assuming everyone treats us badly, because that's the way I am, but we take in trillions of dollars from students.
You know, the students pay more than double when they come in from most foreign countries.
I want to see our school system thrive.
But at the same time, I want to, I know you and I disagree.
We're never going to agree on it, but that's okay.
And it's not that I want them, but I view it as a business.
We have millions and millions of people.
Also, I want to get along with countries if possible.
You know, people are shocked.
Remember, Hillary Clinton said, we'll be in a war.
I stopped eight wars in the last nine months.
I don't want to be in wars.
If I am in a war, we're going to win the thing fast and it'll be violent.
But you know what?
I don't want to be in wars.
But one thing, you don't want to cut half of the people, half of the students from all over the world that are coming into our country, destroy our entire university and college system.
I don't want to do that.
End it there.
That's basically it.
I mean oh, that he goes on to say, Maga was my idea and I know what Maga is, or something like that.
It's like man, that's again something you just never want to be saying.
That's what you're saying to your own movement.
You do what I tell you and you like what I say.
I decide what Maga is, all right well, we decide who we're going to support, and good luck with that.
But look, the whole thing here is, I mean, right.
I guess the point here is And I'm not even saying like, oh, no, you know, no immigrant should go to college or something like that, or that, you know, like, I'm, I'm sure there is an argument somewhere to be said for like, if some brilliant Indian doctor or will be in the future doctor wants to come over here and go to medical school, that it might be good for us to have more brilliant doctors over here.
So like, I don't know, there's, there's arguments that could be made.
But I think more here, the point of this is there's really two major points here.
Number one is just how out of touch the messaging with what was resonating with Donald Trump's base is.
You know, the fact is that in this country, we have tens of millions of illegal immigrants here.
Somewhere between 30 to 50 million illegal immigrants in the country.
No one really knows exactly how much.
And the people are against that.
They believe that, you know what I mean?
Like there shouldn't be this high levels of immigration, particularly illegal immigration.
And Donald Trump ran on build a wall, deport them all.
Now he's trying to make this argument that in fact we really need all of these foreign students.
And then there was, I thought the moment there that was very interesting was that there is this kind of disconnect.
And it's, it would almost be impossible for right-wingers like Laura Ingram to not have arrived at this place by 2025.
But when Donald Trump goes, then the whole university system would collapse.
And she goes, so what?
Good.
Like, what?
So you're telling me that the justification for this is that we have to prop up one of the most corrosive and corrupt institutions in America, academia?
Like, Donald Trump, when you talk about draining the swamp, what did you ever even think the swamp was?
It's just, I don't know.
Obama Swamp Comparison00:01:40
There was something about this where you could just go like it almost like it almost reminds me of Barack Obama, but like so sped up because we're talking about over a year.
But, you know, if you think about where Barack Obama was in 2008 in the public consciousness, when he was giving a speech in front of hundreds of thousands of people and he was just giving these beautiful speeches about, you know, the sea level stopped stopped rising and we took back our country and like all this stuff, just beautiful, these beautiful rah-rah America speeches.
It's kind of like this universally beloved figure with these crazy high approval ratings, approval ratings up in like the high 70%, I think, when he first came in.
And now you look at Obama and he's just like this old liar and everyone's making fun of his wife's dick.
Like, you know, like it's just like this fall from grace.
And it just seems to me like Donald Trump's done that in a year.
And okay, he was never quite an Obama figure, like as popular as Obama was at that time, but like the energy and the vibe factor, whatever they were calling it, you know, for a while down to now this, it's just a pathetic fall off.
It just represents like the collapse of this administration.
I'll give you the last word, Rob, and then let's wrap up.
I agree 100%.
I got to catch a flight.
Goodbye, everybody.
See you in New Orleans.
See you at Skank Fest.
Come over, say hello.
And that's it.
Later dude.
We'll be doing a big pay-per-view part of the problem event over there, too, if you guys want to order it.