April 19, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
38:45
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| We're doing the book tour and all of a sudden I get this email that the Huffington Post is saying that George W. Bush plagiarized some of his book. | ||
| What's he talking about? | ||
| Because I knew that he and a former speechwriter had worked on all of it together. | ||
| So I read it. | ||
| Oh my gosh, so this reporter for Huffington Post wrote that in Bob Woodward's book from like three years ago, there's a passage in there in which Bob Woodward quotes somebody who was a source close to the president who said this about the Iraq war. | ||
| And therefore they said that George W. Bush, who had then written that in Decision Points, that therefore he was plagiarizing Bob Woodward. | ||
| And I was like, obviously he's the source close to the president, is the president, you dumbass. | ||
| Sorry, can we say that on here? | ||
|
unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| Hey, I'm Dave Rubin and this is the Rubin Report. | ||
| Reminder, everybody, get all our videos and audio podcasts absolutely ad-free and early at rubinreport.com. | ||
| And more importantly, joining me today is the host of The Daily Briefing on Fox News, Dana Perino. | ||
| Finally, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| I'm glad to be here. | ||
| We've been wanting to do this for a long time. | ||
| We have been wanting to do it. | ||
| We wanted to do it in person, which is why we never did it via Skype, but these freaking pandemics. | ||
| Is there anything worse than a pandemic? | ||
| I mean, it really did get in the way of a lot of things. | ||
| It really did. | ||
| So clearly you are, you're not in studio at the moment. | ||
| You are, you are at home and you've been, you've been kind of sharing, you're trying to, I think, do something similar to what, to what I've been trying to do. | ||
| Just kind of like share your life a little bit more, your dog, what you're eating, what you're cooking, all of that stuff in the midst of this thing. | ||
| How is life in the midst of a pandemic? | ||
| Well, life is good, right? | ||
| That we're here and that we're busy and that we're working. | ||
| Life for me, I have to say, I just don't have complaints or room to complain. | ||
| I try to live my life with a lot of gratitude. | ||
| And then you go through something like this where you see what other people are going through. | ||
| Sometimes I find myself kind of holding my breath. | ||
| And I realize that it's because I'm really worried about, well, people's health, number one, but I also am worried about all of these people who are now having to ask for government assistance, where they never would have done that in their life. | ||
| Like, they'd rather die than ask the government for a dime. | ||
| And yet here, the government has had to force people to not work. | ||
| and force them out of jobs, and now they're in a position of having to apply for unemployment. | ||
| The government is trying to be generous, but it's also, it's the government and it's hard and it's lumbering and it's | ||
| just difficult. | ||
| So, whereas things for us are pretty good and actually, I kind of needed this forced pause, | ||
| because I was so overscheduled and trying to please too many people and doing too many events and dinners and | ||
| things. | ||
| So the fact that I've had time to reconnect with my husband and I've cooked more in three weeks than in probably 22 years. | ||
| And I like that you put the pictures. | ||
| You put pictures even admitting some of these things are experiments, and they seem to be working. | ||
| Yeah, I made, I got, so I have a Peloton, and one of my favorite instructors is Hannah Marie Corbin, and I read an article where she talked about what she eats in a day. | ||
| And she recommended this cookbook called Oh She Glows, and it's a vegan cookbook, and I'm not a vegan. | ||
| Grew up on a cattle ranch, so I'm not a vegan, but I know I need to eat more vegetables. | ||
| So I've been making some recipes out of that book, and Peter likes them, and I like them, so I made sweet potato enchiladas, and it felt like a big accomplishment. | ||
| But Dana, have you taken my advice that I gave you on your show last week and started growing romaine out of the butts of other romaine? | ||
| Have you done that yet? | ||
| I have thought about that so many times. | ||
| I am going to try the butts of the romaine. | ||
| The thing is, okay, so my day starts before 6am and it ends at 9pm. | ||
| So, I've literally been housebound for three weeks, and my husband, who normally works from home, he's done any of the errands that we've had, mostly going to the grocery store or picking up from local restaurants that we support. | ||
| So, I haven't been able to get the romaine butts, but I'm going to. | ||
| But you're going to. | ||
| All right, fair enough. | ||
| So I like that you said this thing about that you needed sort of this unforced break. | ||
| Do you think a lot of people are suddenly feeling that? | ||
| Like, just the way life is and how fast everything seems to move and social media and the 24-hour news cycle that you're well aware of? | ||
| That we suddenly got this break, and of course it's not for a good reason, but basically, if you're okay right now and you've got a roof over your head and hopefully you have a couple bucks, That there really is an incredible opportunity to kind of look at your life and look at the world a little bit differently. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| If you read anyone saying like, what do you really want in your life? | ||
| It's that people feel over busy. | ||
| I made a New Year's resolution that when people said, how are you doing? | ||
| That's a couple years ago. | ||
| That I would stop saying, I'm so busy. | ||
| Because everybody is so busy. | ||
| Everybody is trying and striving and doing. | ||
| Nobody says, oh, I'm fine. | ||
| Totally kicked back. | ||
| I get eight hours of sleep a night. | ||
| Everything's good. | ||
| Everybody has stuff. | ||
| So I stopped saying that a couple of years ago. | ||
| And that was a good sort of mental shift for me. | ||
| But I know it in myself. | ||
| I have a very hard time saying no to opportunities that come my way. | ||
| Everything's amazing, especially like in New York City. | ||
| Would you, you know, would you speak at this event for this wonderful charity? | ||
| What about for this veterans group? | ||
| And I can be out weeknights, every single night of the week, and then trying to catch up on life on the weekends. | ||
| And what I've realized is that having to tap the brakes because we have to all do our part in this pandemic, It's been actually really good for me, and I don't have... I know that I can't hold on to this completely when all of us return to normal, but I would like to figure out a way that I could hold on to a little bit of it, because it is better for me. | ||
| A lot better. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's interesting. | ||
| It's one of the reasons why I like doing your show because even though you're doing informational stuff, you're doing like the daily grind political stuff, like there is this other feeling that I think you have that a lot of shows kind of miss, which is that there's something that's going on in the world at all times that doesn't have to do with politics exactly. | ||
| And I think for you guys, one of the cool things for me over the last couple of years, as I've gotten to know, I would say you, Greg Gutfeld, who's a good buddy of yours, and Tucker Carlson specifically. | ||
| It's like when we watch you guys, there's something a little bit different about watching someone on cable news than on the internet. | ||
| It's almost like, are these people actual humans? | ||
| And I think you've been able to now show that window, like, oh, there's a human here. | ||
| Here's the dog. | ||
| We're real people. | ||
| That actually has been nice during this. | ||
| You know, it's interesting. | ||
| I give Greg Gutfeld a ton of credit for actually bringing me along on that, because we started The Five in July of 2011, and before that, I'd been the press secretary, and, you know, that's a pretty serious job. | ||
| And even though I was in the public eye, I didn't do a ton of personal things. | ||
| Like, I wouldn't... Well, we didn't have Instagram or Twitter then, so I didn't really share my life, because I thought, who would care? | ||
| Well, then we start doing the five, and we would be asked, you know, what do you think about this? | ||
| And almost always, I was instinctively giving the answer as if I was still the White House Press Secretary for George W. Bush. | ||
| And at one point, Greg said, no, what do you think? | ||
| And it was about drug legalization, marijuana legalization. | ||
| I've never smoked pot. | ||
| I'm not into it. | ||
| I have a very unpopular opinion. | ||
| I don't think it's a good idea. | ||
| But I realized I just froze. | ||
| And I had never given my personal opinion about anything out loud. | ||
| And he pushed me a little and teased me a little and made it okay for me to kind of just more be myself and not have to be the press secretary so much anymore. | ||
| And so I get asked in interviews sometimes, is there something that people don't know about you? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| It's been 10 years we've been doing The Five, and I was on Red Eye. | ||
| There is pretty much nothing that people don't know about me. | ||
| So Greg actually really helped with that. | ||
| And then, especially on The Five, we take the news seriously, but we don't take ourselves that seriously. | ||
| And life can be sweet, and God meant for us to be joyous. | ||
| And I really learned that from President George Bush, too. | ||
| We worked very hard, but we were always celebrating the joys of getting a chance to serve at the highest levels of government for the best country the world's ever seen. | ||
| Yeah, so all right, let's back up to that for a second. | ||
| So for the people that don't know, you just referenced, but you were press secretary for George W. Bush. | ||
| That means you're the person. | ||
| I remember watching you back in the day. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really short hair. | |
| Yeah, and you're answering, or at least to the best of the ability of a press secretary, answering a lot of tough questions related to foreign policy and the economy and all kinds of stuff. | ||
| Can you give me some insight into what that job was like then versus maybe how it is now? | ||
| I mean, Trump barely has to use a press secretary because he's just kind of out there. | ||
| And then the networks now, CNN doesn't even cover those things anymore. | ||
| You guys cover it. | ||
| But how that sort of has changed over, you know, it's been about, what, 20 years or so, 15 years? | ||
| What's interesting, in January of 2009, so January 20th, 2009, the Bushes turned things over to the Obamas. | ||
| I was there for the last day. | ||
| And then Peter and I left for Africa. | ||
| We went to South Africa for two weeks vacation and two weeks volunteering at a PEPFAR site. | ||
| And I really, I wanted that time to reset my priorities, reset my marriage, reset my brain, and to get ready for this transition. | ||
| But I think back on that, and I didn't even have a Twitter account at that point. | ||
| And if you think, that was 2009, think in 10 years how things changed so dramatically. | ||
| And you think about the Obama campaign that absolutely smoked the Republicans on social media in 2008 campaign. | ||
| And then in 2016, President Trump realizes that he can talk directly to people, and he was very comfortable with that. | ||
| I don't know if George Bush ever would. | ||
| Sometimes I laugh and think about writing a book of tweets Bush would have sent, which probably would have been pretty funny. | ||
| But it has changed so much. | ||
| Now, I will say this. | ||
| I think for the country, briefings from the press secretary I always tried to turn down the temperature in the room. | ||
| I thought, why are we fighting? | ||
| I'm here to give information. | ||
| You're here to elicit information. | ||
| I always remembered, too, that those reporters have a job to do. | ||
| And part of my job as press secretary, I believed, was protecting their right to have access to the government. | ||
| But here's the other thing. | ||
| I truly believe that a press briefing, a daily press briefing, forces a White House to have really good process. | ||
| Because if they know that the press secretary is going to have to go out there, and she's going to have to answer these questions, then that means you better call her back first. | ||
| If there's problems and the policy isn't settled, everybody needs to get on the phone and get it done. | ||
| Another thing I used to do was, let's say we were at war when I was press secretary, so things are also different. | ||
| But let's say something was happening and it was a national security issue and somebody within the government suggested I say such-and-such answer at the briefing. | ||
| Well, what I did, because I was a reporter by training, is I would double-check and triple-check. | ||
| So I had my deputies and I would say, Gordon, can you call the National Security Council, see if this is what they say? | ||
| Tony's going to call DOD. | ||
| You call the CIA. | ||
| Let's meet back here in 20 minutes. | ||
| And if everybody has the same answer, I'll say it at the podium. | ||
| And if we don't, then I would go to the Chief of Staff's office and I'd say, we've got a problem here because everybody's not settled and we have to get this right because people's lives are on the line. | ||
| So in that case, I feel like forcing good process is really good. | ||
| But everything's changed so much. | ||
| Who knows if it'll ever go back to being a daily press briefing. | ||
| No, the president... Oh, he just finished. | ||
| Well, he does them. | ||
| He does them now. | ||
| I think he's starting to enjoy it in the briefing room. | ||
| Well, he's having a hell of a time in there, clearly. | ||
| I mean, from the little bit that I can, you know, I don't have time either to watch these huge things in their totality. | ||
| But when I watch them, I'm like, yeah, he's actually having fun. | ||
| But that sort of gets to what I wanted to ask you about, just sort of the general way we talk about presidents. | ||
| So it's like, I remember during the Iraq war and you being up there and all the things. | ||
| I lived on the Upper West. | ||
| of New York City, the most liberal place on earth. | ||
| And, you know, outside Zabar's, they'd have the book tables and every book was George W. Bush is the devil and evil and all of that stuff, where now the media, because he's not Trump, they sort of treat him like a nice guy. | ||
| He's also a little older. | ||
| He paints now. | ||
| So they he's kind of good now. | ||
| And Trump is the ultimate evil. | ||
| Do you see that sort of always churning through, like every 10 years where the media takes someone they hate Now they're good because they have a new bad guy, and that these pieces will always sort of shift around? | ||
| I have a great story for you about that. | ||
| Marlon Fitzwater was the press secretary for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. | ||
| Bush, so for eight years. | ||
| He was the press secretary for eight years. | ||
| I joke with him that he could never have done that in the age of social media, but he told me that, well actually I invited him to my house in October of 2008, I invited all of my staff from the press room. | ||
| I made them all read his book, one of the best books ever written in Washington, D.C., as a memoir. | ||
| It's called Call the Briefing by Marlon Fitzwater. | ||
| It's fantastic. | ||
| His storytelling is spectacular. | ||
| So he came, and we had a little book club. | ||
| And he delivered a message to all of us, and he said, you know, I know you're Feeling like your boss is really being dragged through the mud. | ||
| Our approval ratings were terrible. | ||
| This is right after the financial crisis, as you can imagine. | ||
| And he said, let me tell you a story about in 1992, in January 92, they had lost, or 93, they had lost to Bill Clinton. | ||
| And he said it was so mortifying to lose to Bill Clinton and He said, when we left that day, he said, I had my head was hanging so low because I thought no one will ever, ever understand and see what a great man George H.W. | ||
| Bush was. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, that changed. | |
| You know, time has a way of changing perspective. | ||
| And 43 used to say, when I would prep him for interviews toward the end, I said, sir, they're going to ask you what you think your legacy is going to be. | ||
| And he said, look, you know, last year I read three books about George Washington. | ||
| And if historians are still analyzing the first president, then the 43rd doesn't have a lot to worry about because he'll never know. | ||
| And he would point out that Abraham Lincoln died thinking that the country thought he was a failure. | ||
| So, yes, I think that the fact that 43 could help me lift my gaze from current crisis and current feelings and lift my gaze and understand there's a longer view, that really helped me in my life, actually, overall, not just in politics. | ||
| Yeah, I love that. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about just generally what it's like sort of working at Fox and being in the eye of the storm where often you guys are as critiqued as the politicians you're supposed to be talking about? | ||
| And this is a particularly unique thing to Fox where every given day we know that Media Matters is watching you guys, waiting for you to stumble over some word Then they clip that video, they get it out to HuffPo, they get it to Vox, they lie about timelines, Greg's dealing with a version of this right now related to coronavirus. | ||
| How, in a weird way, the stories then become about you, or that somebody's boycotting Tucker on any given day, just that whole thing. | ||
| So I have a ton of respect for the media relations department at Fox News because they are dealing with a... they are drinking from a fire hose every single day. | ||
| And we have strong personalities at the network and we have the freedom to say what we want to say. | ||
| I'm usually pretty... | ||
| Pretty much left alone. | ||
| I guess maybe I don't say anything that controversial or interesting for them to bother. | ||
| But I don't like it when someone who is expressing an opinion and then it gets distorted. | ||
| I really can't stand that. | ||
| And this is an example that I wanted to mention. | ||
| It just came to mind. | ||
| It doesn't have exactly to do with Fox, but it's a good example of my experience of dealing with the media. | ||
| And you mentioned Huffington Post. | ||
| So I did the PR for George W. Bush's memoir, Decision Points, when it came out in 2010. | ||
| And we're out there, the book is launched, going pretty well, although 43, boy, he had not done interviews in two years and he was not excited to see the press again, I'll tell you that. | ||
| But- I bet. | ||
| Well, he really, you know, often presidents disappear for a little while, but he sorta, he really just went under the radar. | ||
| Finally, there was that picture of him painting and people were like, oh, what happened? | ||
| Yeah, he said for a long time, he said, I don't seek the Klieg lights. | ||
| I don't want this attention. | ||
| And he knew that there was another chapter and that he had watched his dad be such a gracious former president. | ||
| And that's, that was his role model. | ||
| But back to the book tour. | ||
| So we're doing the book tour and all of a sudden I get this email that the Huffington Post is saying that George W. Bush plagiarized some of his book. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| Because I knew that he and a former speechwriter had worked on all of it together. | ||
| So I read it. | ||
| I'm like, oh my gosh! | ||
| So this reporter for Huffington Post wrote that in Bob Woodward's book from like three years ago, there's a passage in there in which Bob Woodward quotes somebody who was a source close to the president Um, who said this about the Iraq war. | ||
| And therefore they said that George W. Bush, who had then written that in Decision Points, that therefore he was plagiarizing Bob Woodward. | ||
| And I was like, obviously he's the source close to the president, is the president, you dumbass. | ||
| Sorry, can we say that on here? | ||
| Hey, you can say anything here! | ||
| Come on now! | ||
| I remember how mad I was, and it just so happened that the publisher of the book was also the publisher of Arianna Huffington's books. | ||
| So I was getting nowhere with the reporter to take it down, and so she said that she would call and get her to handle it. | ||
| And do you know they would not take it down? | ||
| And so I'm not a stranger to this behavior and how they treated him or other conservatives or Trump now today. | ||
| It's unfortunate, but you just have to work around it. | ||
| Yeah, but it must take a certain amount of your mental stamina during the day, right? | ||
| Knowing that these guys are watching, or even when you're just talking on your show, and you might accidentally say ass, and then you go, uh-oh, now what have I done? | ||
| Oh yeah, like that time that I said that the guy carrying the alligator with his mouth taped in the convenience store, and it was during one more thing, and I said, what an asshole, and oh my gosh, and that's unusual for me. | ||
| And it caused such an uproar, but we turned it into something funny. | ||
| And actually, the president of the company got a call from his mom, and she said, please don't get mad at Dana. | ||
| Don't get her in any trouble. | ||
| She didn't mean to say it. | ||
| It was an accident. | ||
| And besides, she was right. | ||
| The guy was an asshole. | ||
| He was, there you go. | ||
| Florida man. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about the general culture at Fox? | ||
| Because, you know, until I started going on a bunch of these shows like a year ago, I don't know, I probably thought whatever maybe the mainstream zeitgeist is. | ||
| But I know that, you know, I've been doing your show basically once a week for a while now, and I go on Greg and Tucker. | ||
| Nobody asks me anything. | ||
| You know, the first few times I went on Tucker, they would say, oh, do you have some ideas that you want to talk about? | ||
| But now you guys invite me, I go on, we don't discuss anything. | ||
| I know that I could say anything in those few minutes and you may not agree with me, but you'd be okay with it and we can joke around and the rest of it. | ||
| And people always say to me, well, Dave, why don't you go on CNN and MSNBC? | ||
| And I'm like, well, they don't invite me. | ||
| It's a point. | ||
| Well, I guess what's the point? | ||
| Also, nobody's watching, but, you know, they don't invite me. | ||
| I can't just show up. | ||
| I actually have shown up. | ||
| Or, what's the point if you think you're not going to be allowed to just be yourself and express your views and have that respected? | ||
| Yeah, but the meme would be, oh, Fox News is just pushing out talking points to everybody, but I just know it's not true because you guys let me say whatever I want. | ||
| Yeah, I've been there since April of 09. | ||
| I've never once been asked to say something, press a message, anything. | ||
| And this has never happened to me or to anybody that I know. | ||
| And I think one of the best things about Vox is a culture of respecting everybody as an individual, but working as a very close-knit team. | ||
| One thing that people might not know is that Sean Hannity has been The papa bear of so many careers at Fox, including mine. | ||
| When I first left the White House, he knew that I was interested in doing a contributor work or at least continuing to be a part of the conversation. | ||
| And so he recommended me. | ||
| And apparently Roger Ailes said something like, well, why do we need another Bush Republican? | ||
| We already have Karl Rove. | ||
| And Sean said, she's different. | ||
| Trust me. | ||
| Let me give her a shot. | ||
| And he started inviting me on his show once a week. | ||
| And eventually, that's what led me to my contract with Fox News. | ||
| And every step of the way, this man has been so encouraging of me. | ||
| Every step of the way. | ||
| When the five started, he could not have been more excited for us. | ||
| When the daily briefing started, he also is so excited. | ||
| And when I see him on occasion in the hallways now, he'll say, I can't hear what you're saying because your show is on during my radio show, but I had the closed caption on and you look amazing. | ||
| Your guests are great. | ||
| And everything you're saying, it's like so encouraging. | ||
| It's, um, it's been really rewarding in that regard. | ||
| And I think of a lot of these people that I work with as part of my extended family. | ||
| I look forward to seeing them every day and it's a wonderful place to be. | ||
| I'm glad you asked me about that because I don't always reflect on how great it is actually. | ||
| So the media has been leveled. | ||
| What do you think Dana Perino? | ||
| One of the things about this time is I've realized that I can actually do everything from home. | ||
| It's not ideal. | ||
| Television and putting on a television show like The Daily Briefing or The Five, that is a team sport. | ||
| And Fox is probably the leanest company I've ever seen or been a part of. | ||
| So there's not a lot of spare capacity. | ||
| So everybody trying to do things from remote, it's difficult, but we have done it. | ||
| There's never been a moment of dead air. | ||
| We are on air all the time. | ||
| But this morning I did two podcasts, one by Zoom, one by Skype. | ||
| I have done my shows from here. | ||
| What else did I do? | ||
| Oh, I wrote an article for foxnews.com about how boredom Can actually lead to great imaginations. | ||
| When I was a kid, I wasn't allowed to be bored. | ||
| My parents would say, get outside and play. | ||
| You have no excuse to be bored. | ||
| And if you look at like some of these internet memes are hilarious. | ||
| This guy Ian Pryor, he worked at the Justice Department for a while. | ||
| He took the theme song of Growing Pains and made a video with his family called Growing Bored, but it's to the same music and with all the video. | ||
| It is so good and it's amazing what people can do just from home. | ||
| Did you know that Alan Thicke wrote that himself and he also wrote the theme song to Facts of Life and a couple others? | ||
| I had no idea. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| I love the Facts of Life. | ||
| That was a great show. | ||
| It was a great show. | ||
| But what do you think about this? | ||
| Just generally that now people can get their news from a gajillion different things. | ||
| We went from decades of 6.30 p.m. | ||
| ABC, CBS, NBC. | ||
| Oh, I watched it all. | ||
| Yeah, but then we went from that, then we had cable news, now we have cable channels, you know, proliferating. | ||
| And then there's also this thing, the podcast, YouTube, other world, and now everybody's competing with everybody. | ||
| Like, do you find it hard to figure out what is true through that whole mess? | ||
| Not really, because I have trusted sources that I check, and I'm a pretty well-rounded news consumer, and I have a pretty strong sense of what's real and what's not. | ||
| And I'm also, as I mentioned before, I'm super cautious with my words and cautious with saying anything before I know for sure it's a go. | ||
| One of my great fears for the daily briefing is being one of the first people in broadcast news to put out one of those deepfake videos thinking that it's real. | ||
| So I think it's a time where it's like crossing a river of crocodiles every day. | ||
| And I don't know how it's going to shake out, but I also don't want to be somebody who longs for the past. | ||
| I'm excited about all of these great technologies. | ||
| And Fox, I think, has been really smart in trying to figure out a way to deliver product for our consumers that are still cable subscribers. | ||
| But also during this time of coronavirus, they took down the paywall for the Fox News app. | ||
| Um, so anybody that wants to watch Fox News can do it on the app, and then I think they can capture new viewers, whether that be on our Facebook channel or, I'm sorry, the Facebook page or the YouTube channel. | ||
| You know, I started this thing called Storytime with Dana. | ||
| Right when the coronavirus started, and every day at 3.30, I read a book to kids. | ||
| And I just started doing it on Facebook Live, but Fox loved it so much that they took it, and now they have it on Fox Nation, which is a streaming service. | ||
| FoxNews.com, the YouTube channel, Facebook, and Twitter, we get it all around. | ||
| So, it's a lot of experimentation, and it'll be fun to see where it all leads. | ||
| Yeah, so I know you're not a spokesman for the conservative movement as a whole, but do you think conservatives maybe had some branding issues over the years that I think actually are melting away right now? | ||
| I mean, I think I'm probably evidence of it, you know, when I go and you guys are all nice to me and I can talk and debate and all that good stuff, but that for a long time, maybe just the word conservative, it sounds kind of stodgy and old and it's like, why would a young person want to be conservative? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But everything cycles through the decades. | ||
| National Review, for me, my dad I think was a subscriber since I was a little kid. | ||
| I think he voted for Goldwater. | ||
| I believe that's right. | ||
| And so I just grew up in that world on a ranch and individual responsibility and states' rights, that was super important to all of us. | ||
| But certainly things have changed. | ||
| For example, I think conservatives for a long time were considered people who were against the gay rights movement, who were against gay marriage. | ||
| And over time, and not that long a time, if you think about it in history, over time, that melted away. | ||
| And so that, I think, allowed for people to give conservatism a different look, but part of that is what are you comparing it to? | ||
| If you are finding that you are out of sorts with some of the nonsense on the left, then you might take another look at conservatism. | ||
| And you look at somebody like Dan Crenshaw, the congressman from Texas. | ||
| I did his podcast this morning. | ||
| He's a younger, different kind of conservative. | ||
| And then you see him on Saturday Night Live responding with grace and humor to Pete Davidson, who had so casually attacked him, mocking his war injury. | ||
| So, there's a lot of great opportunity for conservatives, but it's a challenge, especially as you mentioned, there's all these different ways to communicate now, so how do you get your ideas to be persuasive for a larger amount of people, especially younger people? | ||
| That's a challenge, but I think it's going better than some in the media might think it is. | ||
| Huh, interesting. | ||
| All right, now I'm gonna ask you to put the press secretary cap on. | ||
| So I'll give you two things here. | ||
| One, if you were Trump's press secretary, would you want more responsibility and want him to rein it in a little bit? | ||
| And two, if you were Biden's press secretary, would you want him doing these live streams that are, in my humble opinion, coming off pretty terribly? | ||
| I think if I were Trump's press secretary, the one thing I would not want to be is blindsided and surprised. | ||
| And that's why I would never be Trump's press secretary. | ||
| But I already had that job. | ||
| They're never going to ask me. | ||
| But, you know, I think that it's incredibly difficult to think about knowing an answer at 11 o'clock, giving that answer at 12 o'clock and having it undermined at 12.06 p.m. | ||
| But that is how he operates. | ||
| Some people love it. | ||
| Some people think it's horrible. | ||
| The Biden question is a little bit more difficult. | ||
| I don't know what I would do. | ||
| They're in a real fix right now because Joe Biden is now the presumptive nominee. | ||
| He's gotten no bang for that buck after Bernie Sanders dropped out. | ||
| Everybody's sort of like, yeah, OK. | ||
| Then Biden says, I'm going to start my VP search. | ||
| And we're like, OK, well, there's about 10 women that you might consider. | ||
| So, oh, well. | ||
| I mean, people are just so zeroed in on, appropriately so, the health of the nation and the economic health of the nation. | ||
| And I think that if Biden were to come out and push too hard against President Trump right now and criticize the commander-in-chief in the time of a major, not just a domestic crisis, a global crisis, it would look like he was rooting for failure for the country. | ||
| So he's got to pick his spots very carefully and sharply. | ||
| And I just don't know if he's going to be able to do that. | ||
| Do you sense, though, that some in the media are rooting for the collapse of the economy and just that they view this as, oh, we didn't get Trump on Russia, we didn't get Trump on Ukraine, impeachment, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| That this, you don't think so? | ||
| Huh. | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I mean, I consume a ton of news. | ||
| I'm not naive to the biases, but there's a lot of problems out there. | ||
| I mean, like the food lines. | ||
| It's just the video you can see from overhead. | ||
| A three mile long car line to get food in Miami. | ||
| A six mile long car line to get food in San Antonio. | ||
| Those are just facts. | ||
| Those are happening. | ||
| And I don't think that they root for the failure. | ||
| They might root for President Trump to lose. | ||
| But I don't think that they root for failure for people. | ||
| I really don't. | ||
| Yeah, I hope you're right. | ||
| I mean, I see some people that are pretty mainstream voices that it's almost like they just want this thing to continue. | ||
| Well, I mean, that was true during the financial crisis of 2008, right? | ||
| They were like, oh, now it's good. | ||
| But it was like, well, If you didn't shore up the banks and you ended up with something worse than the Great Depression, what would have been the better choice? | ||
| And again, presidents can't worry about that. | ||
| President Trump has to, again, lift his gaze and not worry about the headline of the day. | ||
| Lift his gaze. | ||
| Look out. | ||
| People are going to judge this for years and years and years. | ||
| Forget about what they're going to say within the next 24 hours. | ||
| Are you making the best decisions with the information you have at the time on behalf of the nation? | ||
| And can you defend that decision? | ||
| Then that's a decision you should make. | ||
| You should defend it as much as you can and promote it, whatever you need to do. | ||
| But I wouldn't get so mired in, oh, they're against me, because I think self-pity in politics is pretty pathetic and pitiful. | ||
| And You just need to win, | ||
| just have to try harder to win the arguments. | ||
| It just takes a lot more effort. | ||
| That's why I always tell companies, if you think you're gonna have some problems, | ||
| always hire somebody that's worked in Republican politics or communications because guaranteed | ||
| they've had to work harder. | ||
| They've been through it once or twice. | ||
| Yeah. - Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think that Trump though sort of needs that in a way? | ||
| Like it's almost like him and Jim Acosta are just like a match made in hell sort of thing. | ||
| Like CNN needs it for eyeballs and Trump needs it because that's like sort of what gives him juice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a symbiotic relationship. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The symbiotic relationship, they feed off of each other. | ||
| But I was watching a press conference recently and I could, I heard myself saying, that's a ridiculous question. | ||
| That's a dumb question. | ||
| But look, our founding fathers were really, really brilliant. | ||
| And the first amendment was first for a reason, because it's most important. | ||
| So we have to safeguard it. | ||
| And if they want to ask stupid questions, that's so be it. | ||
| All right, I got two more for you, and then I know you gotta go do the five, because you do have a day job, too. | ||
| So one, I've been joking for about two years. | ||
| People always say to me, you know, Dave, are you gonna get into politics? | ||
| And I always say no, but if Ben Shapiro becomes president, I will be his press secretary. | ||
| Is that a crazy thing for me to say? | ||
| Do you think that's a crazy thing? | ||
| I've never said this out loud. | ||
| But I told Ben Shapiro, if he becomes president, I would come be his chief of staff. | ||
| Well, I would be thrilled to work with you, so maybe we are putting the pieces together here. | ||
| Oh yeah, this could come back to bite us both, you know. | ||
| We're going to be in those jaws, in the soup. | ||
| See, you thought you were going to get out, and they pull you right back in. | ||
| That's so funny, I never said that out loud, but it's true. | ||
| All right, so that aside, now really the most important thing. | ||
| Where is Jasper and tell us about Jasper and let's see Jasper. | ||
| So Jasper is eight years old. | ||
| He is here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jasper, hey, can you come here? | |
| Come, come. | ||
| Clyde always gets shy when I'm on your show. | ||
| So let's see if Jasper can show him up a little bit. | ||
| Jasper has been on TV a lot since he was a kid. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Since he was a kid. | ||
| Since he was born. | ||
| Come up. | ||
| Say hi to your people. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| This is Jasper. | ||
| Oh, look at this. | ||
| Wait, what? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now you're not going to do it? | |
| Come on. | ||
| Look at Jasper. | ||
| He's gorgeous. | ||
| He's eight years old. | ||
| Come on Clyde. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Oh, here's Clyde. | ||
| Yeah, Clyde's lazy! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Come on! | |
| There we go! | ||
| All right, we're half there. | ||
| One of the things I've found, Dave, is that dogs are a great equalizer. | ||
| There's no politics at the dog park for me. | ||
| We all love our dogs and they give us a lot of joy and, you know, whatever love you give them, you get back five times in return. | ||
| I'm so, so glad that you two plunged back in and rescued Clyde. | ||
| It makes me happy for you and your household and for Clyde in particular. | ||
| And I told you literally I had him like it was like the second day I had him and I'm walking him down the street and this guy who my neighbor for years who I've seen for years but never said hello to he goes oh that's Clyde I just saw him on Dana Perino's show. | ||
| So we're making the world a better place. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| I really had fun getting to know you. | ||
| Yeah, same here. | ||
| Well, thanks for doing good work in the midst of this craziness and showing people that you can be human and still like politics and taking good care of Jasper. | ||
| So have a great day. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you wanna watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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