Dan Crenshaw joins Dave Rubin to dissect the GOP's internal strife, attributing current animosity to Democratic political malfeasance and base-catering tactics. While defending U.S. support for Ukraine against inflationary fears by warning of Russian dominance, Crenshaw highlights China's role in testing Western resolve ahead of a Taiwan invasion. Despite public rhetoric, he maintains good faith dialogues with figures like AOC on veteran care, yet warns that future divisions between Trump and DeSantis could fracture the party unless united by the urgent tactical security threat posed by Mexican cartels. [Automatically generated summary]
I'll never forget, before we took one vote, I won't say who, but one of the leaders of this 20 stood up and McCarthy asked him, what else do you guys want?
Let's just settle this before we go out there and look like fools.
What else can we do for you?
And he just couldn't answer it in front of everyone.
That was a really frustrating moment.
So that's actually where all the animosity came from, because it felt like it was just for show.
So I said to you right when you walked, you just walked in two seconds ago, but I said to you right when you walked in that we offered, I told Republicans and Democrats alike, about 20 on each side, that I'm in DC for three days.
I will interview anyone.
And I will treat everyone with respect and all that stuff.
Basically, every Republican said yes, except Mitch McConnell who has a, he fell and I think he hurt his leg or hip.
I think he might be in the hospital at the moment, so I'll accept that one.
And frankly, if you only care about catering to your own base, it's actually still good for that, because your base still loves watching you go toe-to-toe with somebody who disagrees with you.
But legally speaking, like you need to do it so we can go after these dealers in a cohesive
way, which is a way that's not happening right now.
Prosecutors have a really hard time prosecuting, not even just fentanyl, but fentanyl analogs.
Something slightly different that does the exact same thing.
I mean, marijuana is a Schedule 1 drug.
We can debate that separately, but the point is, this shouldn't be that controversial to make fentanyl a Schedule 1 drug.
By the way, it's already temporarily a Schedule 1 drug.
It expires soon.
I don't want to get too much into this particular issue, but the point is, it's really not that controversial, and fentanyl is hurting everyone across the country.
I think two Democrats maybe voted with us on that.
You know, the things that should be bipartisan, that really shouldn't be that controversial, they find reasons to make them controversial.
Now, I think when we were in the minority, we might have done the same thing every once in a while, like, you know, nitpick some silly things.
But I would say only every once in a while.
I think it happens a lot more with Democrats, and it certainly happens a lot more in the House.
The reason being is that if you're, you know, if you're a politician, you're sitting in the minority, Maybe you do kind of like a policy, but you also don't really want to take heat from back home for voting for it from your own base, because your first election is always your primary.
You know it's going to pass.
Just vote no.
The no vote is the easiest vote in the world.
And a lot of people just vote no on just literally everything.
Well, meaning like, let's say the squad crew is gonna create more of a headache for them than their own base that might just be like, ah, we'll let it slide on this issue.
Because I think a really interesting moment that we had that you probably don't even know about is I think the first time, maybe the second time we met was at a Turning Point USA event during the first Trump impeachment.
So this was right before Christmas.
I guess this is like 2018 or something.
And I'm sure you remember the moment where you actually brought up your card.
It was the card that you said no on impeachment.
Is that what it was?
So you actually brought that up on stage to Trump in the middle of his speech.
He called you on and you brought up the card and you signed it for him.
That night was the first night that I ever met Trump in person.
And that was basically when I started saying I could support this guy because you supported him.
And I was like, I like Crenshaw.
Then having met Trump, I was like, I like him personally.
That put some of the pieces together.
That feels like a long, long time ago, doesn't it?
Just the way the world in 2018 felt compared to 2023?
Okay, so since it sounds like you're extending a hand to AOC, just on my show this morning that we just finished an hour ago, I played a clip of her speech during the Parental Rights and Education Bill that just got passed, and she's screaming how this is fascism.
That if parents know these things, that this is fascism.
And all the bill is, as I basically read all the bullet points, It's just so that parents know what's being taught.
I'm just saying, the way it works up here is like, we just ignore it.
Hey, will you co-sponsor this?
Yeah, sure, great.
Right.
Which is healthy, actually.
Because what's interesting is I do think a lot of the emotion leaves the room when behind closed doors.
And that's a good thing, frankly.
I haven't actually specifically talked to her about this psychedelics bill.
I just know that she's promoted something similar.
This is one of those weird things where it's me, Matt Gaetz, and AOC all on the same page about something.
It's just an example, but my comments about X, Y, and Z don't necessarily need to affect her opinion on this bill, and her comments on X, Y, and Z don't necessarily need to affect my opinion on this bill.
Well, it's about a greater good.
It's about getting military people treatment that they need.
I'm just saying, I'm trying to make people feel somewhat better about DC.
That's all I'm trying to do.
I'm just saying, we can fight like hell on that.
Like, she's totally lying and totally wrong, and I would say it publicly.
It's completely disingenuous.
It's complete grandstanding.
And all the Democrats have been saying it, by the way.
They're all using the same line.
Like, this kind of sky is falling rhetoric.
I'm just saying, we can fight about that and probably still do a bill on something else that we agree on.
It can happen, and it should happen.
If you let your entire life and entire career, and certainly Washington politics, be driven completely by emotion, we'll definitely never get anything done.
Because it largely is already driven too much by emotion.
Right, it's interesting because the rhetoric is so out of whack with what most people think of the country even, you know, because most of what they're running on to me seems like radical anti-American ideas and all of the woke stuff.
And then the other day, Hakeem Jeffries was suddenly talking about American exceptionalism and it's like, well, Pick one, guys!
But then I kind of think that's almost baked in.
It's like, we say every extreme thing, so people have no freaking clue what's going on here.
And then you get left holding the hat, like, hey, I'm trying to be sane.
The intellectually honest and consistent people, yeah, do get left holding the hat a lot of times.
Because sometimes my own side wants me to really go extreme, and I'm like, that's not really intellectually honest, whatever the example is.
And so I tend to look for people on the other side who also share that same kind of intellectual honesty and consistency, who kind of maintain some sort of consistent equilibrium.
That being said, as just a Republican strategist putting that hat on, I like it when they do that because it's so easy to debunk.
You know, it was like the Georgia election law, the Texas election laws.
Those were so easy to debunk.
They looked ridiculous and they did lose those battles.
So, it does drive us crazy when they do that, but we do also have to take a step back, think about it unemotionally, and think, this is an opportunity.
So I can tell you really wanna talk about the McCarthy fight for at least 17 minutes consecutively.
Let's do literally two minutes on it.
So you were basically in McCarthy's camp.
Then it was sort of getting nasty for a couple of days.
The media loved it because Republicans were fighting with Republicans.
Okay, fine.
Are you happy in the end result in that it does seem to me that the Republicans are standing up a little bit more and maybe the fight did actually give it some teeth or do you think it was gonna end up that way either way?
I mean, what really bugs me about that whole week was that nothing really changed from day one to day five or whatever it was as far as the substance of the so-called demands, right, this rules package we passed.
It had already been agreed to and it was a pretty uncontroversial rules package.
And I can't talk specifics because I don't really know exactly.
But the point is, is the actual written down rules, the supposedly, Again, I think there was a narrative out there that they were fighting for this, like, more transparent, better, more Republican, more Democratic rules package.
Well, there was one tiny change, which is like the motion to vacate changed from five votes to one vote, which is like nothing.
So I mean, that's splitting hairs at that point.
So that's what was frustrating.
It was frustrating, too, because, I mean, you know, I'll never forget, before we took one vote, I won't say who, but one of the leaders of this 20 stood up and McCarthy asked him, like, what else do you guys want?
Let's just settle this before we go out there and look like fools.
What else can we do for you?
And he's like, and he just couldn't answer it in front of everyone.
That was a really frustrating moment.
So that's, that's actually where all the animosity came from, because it felt like it was just for show.
What do you make of the general sense that, and I definitely feel this as, you know, I left Cali and I'm in Florida now, that the red states and blue states, the divide right now is so wide that it can only get wider, at least temporarily.
Do you think that's a fair assessment?
And are you okay with it, if it's a fair assessment?
You probably saw that incredible moment on Realtime a couple weeks ago when Bill basically said to Bernie, what's the difference between equity and equality?
And he literally said he didn't know.
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I mean, that should have... That was interesting, because it's like he's never thought of it.
So, wait, I want to back up though to Russia for just a sec.
So, because I think we have a little bit of a difference of opinion here.
As a general rule, I believe in strength to stop your enemies and I believe in deterrence and all of those things.
There's something that feels different to me about this thing because we're so screwed up internally right now, like because of inflation and all of the craziness of the last couple of years that we're giving all of this money and that people are just like, yes, give them four more tanks and three more planes and pay for this.
And it's like, we know that's not gonna end it.
And he has nukes.
So it's not, so I think I probably agree with you on like the blue sky, like policy, what should foreign policy look like?
I just think we have a bunch of incompetent buffoons running this, and that changes my equation a little bit.
You can always find a reason to want to solve this problem instead of that problem, but they're not mutually exclusive.
Giving money to Ukraine for weapons has zero inflationary effect, for one.
I think you'd have a much higher inflationary effect if you looked at the counterfactual.
So if we're going to say we should never support Ukraine, you do have to operate with a counterfactual in mind.
And that counterfactual is this, we never, okay fine, we never gave them anything, they were never our ally, we don't care if Russia takes them over for all we care, you know, it doesn't concern us at all.
Right, because it's also that every week we play a clip of him or Blinken or one of these guys saying, well, they shouldn't negotiate and we should just continue.
And it's like, well, I just don't think, you know, right before the election, was it right before the election?
I think Mitch McConnell said that the Ukraine war is number one on Republican voters' minds.
And it was like, I played that clip on my show and literally, the amount of email I got of people being like, it's not in my top 20, not to say what you just said is not important, but people when they're like, I can't order a freaking couch because it now takes six months, they're like... It annoys people, I get that, and certainly that's not our most important thing in the world, but it is important.
The only defense of those kind of comments is you've got to remember who's listening.
It's not just your voters, it's the Russians.
And so that's actually, that's part of strategic deterrence.
Make them think we'll just never stop.
That has to factor into his calculations as well.
Um, now what?
But I'm, since I'm not at the top levels of government, I'm a little bit more free to say what should happen.
And it's kind of what I just said.
I think it should escalate to deescalate.
Um, and you do have to force some kind of resolution that just stabilizes the situation.
It's not, it's not ultimately important to Americans that like a few miles of Ukrainian territory is impeded upon, um, at least to the voters, but you do have to set up permanent deterrence in this case.
Um, and you actually should think it's pretty important that Ukraine doesn't get taken over by Russia.
There's a lot of narrative on our own side that it's just this backwater country that doesn't matter.
That's, economically speaking, just totally false.
I'll give you some examples.
It is the breadbasket of the world for a reason.
They're still doing those exports, so there's a reason things haven't completely gone to hell yet.
I think it produces most of the world's neon, which is used for semiconductors.
So that's in every single thing, every little part of your life is based there.
Quite a bit of our steel, or at least pig iron ore, comes from Ukraine.
There's a lot of resources there that there's a reason Putin wants it.
Again, he's rational by Russian standards.
There's a reason he wants this particular area.
And for him to control that much is not in America's interest.
Now, is it worth us fighting a nuclear war over it?
No, it didn't say that either, but we're not.
And we're not even close to that.
We've not lost a single American.
We don't plan to lose a single American.
We've just written a check for less than 10% of our defense.
I mean, so just speaking of cost benefit, I think there's massive benefits here with very little cost.
We've got to convince like moderate liberals and independents that conservatism is just simply a better way forward.
Um, you know, there's a tendency in American politics to look to the worst of the other side and they're like, you know, so they'll, they'll pick the person on the other side they hate the most and be like, this is why I can't be with you guys.
And because we could, because we, and it's because we so rarely talk about our principles.
Um, I think that's a problem.
That's why I tend to try to talk in philosophical terms to get people like, let's start from the foundation here.
Let me explain to you how I get to this policy that you think is just the devil.
Um, you know, when it's not and you know, let's go from there.
I'm very worried that it implodes and that there's massive division in the party.
I'm staying out of it.
I mean, I'm not going to comment one way or the other who I like better because...
Everybody's just a little angry and upset at each other, and there's really no benefit to doing so.
It's early.
It's early, too.
So, you know, DeSantis, will he announce?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure he will.
But he hasn't.
There's only a handful that have, and so we'll let this play out.
But I'm absolutely worried for our party, and, you know, how these divisions manifest, and more importantly, what it means for our Potential for victory in 2024.
It actually shows how bad this situation really is.
So, you know, this is our number one tactical security threat.
We have strategic security threats.
Russia, China, those are strategic security threats.
long-term security threats as far as, you know, keeping chaos out of the world because that affects Americans.
But this, this is a near-term, tactical, major security threat right on our border.
These cartels are small armies.
They can battle the Mexican army.
They've bought off much of Mexican government.
You know, my reaction to AMLO saying what he said to me was, wow, tell me you're bought off by the cartels without
telling me you're bought off by the cartels.
I mean, because I never came after him.
He just, you know, I go after the cartels.
I don't go after Democrats on this either because I'm trying to get them on this bill.
That would simply give Biden the authorization for military force.
It doesn't mean you roll tanks in tomorrow.
It just means you have authorization.
Ideally, we do that with Mexico, just like we've done in many other operations around the world.
So I think this is my major focus, is the cartels in Mexico, the fentanyl they're producing and shipping across our border, poisoning, murdering Americans every single day.
I will focus on that a little more so you get a little juice behind you and you will walk over to AOC's office within the next couple weeks and tell her to respond to my email.