Dave Rubin, Josh Hammer, and Carol Markowitz dissect Florida politics, praising Ron DeSantis's pandemic response and school vouchers while condemning Gavin Newsom for allegedly coaching claims about a Biden-Harris 2024 ticket. They analyze Donald Trump's contradictory statements on gender identity and lockdowns, arguing these lies erode his credibility. Finally, the roundtable debates the House Republicans' impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden regarding Hunter Biden's business dealings, with Hammer supporting the move to expose conflicts of interest while Markowitz remains skeptical due to a lack of concrete evidence and political hurdles. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm Dave Rubin, and via your computer, we are live on the internet, whatever that is.
This is the Rubin Report and it is Friday, which means it's time for another Friday Roundtable extravaganza.
We've got a Florida bonanza For you, joining me is the senior editor at Newsweek and host of The Josh Hammer Show, Josh Hammer, and New York Post and Fox News columnist, Carol Markowitz.
Josh, Carol, my Florida friends, welcome back to The Rubin Report.
Let's see if we can blow up both of your careers today.
Actually, before we start, since this is a Florida Power Hour, and everyone knows Carol and I moved basically, I think, within two days of each other.
She fled New York, I fled crazy LA.
Josh, you were in Florida just a bit before us, but because we're gonna talk a bit about Florida and obviously the election and Newsom and all of the craziness and impeachment, blah, blah, blah, I think it would be nice to start with just saying something true.
about Florida, since everyone's always lying about Florida.
They're ramping it up, and it looks like somehow he's gonna sneak his way in.
We're gonna talk about this really crazy Trump, Megyn Kelly interview, and major, major kudos to my friend Megyn Kelly on that, who just did a really wonderful job.
And then we'll talk a little bit about the Biden impeachment inquiry and if any of this is gonna make any sense because obviously it's not he's not going to actually be impeached but does just shining some light on this stuff actually accomplish anything so let's start though with truly
Truly the man that I despise most on planet Earth.
I believe him to be a lizard person, not a human being.
And yes, you all know I'm talking about Gavin Newsom.
Here he is being asked whether Biden is going to run again.
The fact that they bring him in to ask him this question already gives you the answer.
I think the Vice President is naturally one lined up, and the filing deadlines are quickly coming to pass, and I think we need to move past this notion that he's not going to run.
President Biden is going to run, and I'm looking forward to getting him re-elected.
I think there's been so much wallowing in the last few months, and hand-wringing in this respect, but we're gearing up for the campaign.
And am I supposed to interpret that comment about the vice president that if for some reason the president chose not to run at this point, everybody rallies around her?
Carol, the fact that he is so emphatically saying that Biden is gonna run and that, you know, in essence, Kamala will be the VP and everything else, to me, that is the absolute proof that that is not what's going to happen.
So the Washington Post, to your point, Dave, did run a piece, I think it was earlier this week, might have been last week, just pointing out the myriad ways in which Kamala Harris is about as popular with the American people as venereal disease.
I mean, she is just woefully unpopular.
And, you know, Joe Biden is not particularly popular himself.
Kamala is even Less popular than he is.
Look, I mean, I have no doubt that a lot of regime-approved media types, The Washington Post, CNN, The New York Times, a lot of kind of Democratic Party ruling class.
Michelle Goldberg has written numerous Biden-skeptical columns at The New York Times.
David Ignatius at The Washington Post just this week had an explicit call saying, Biden, you know, get off the ticket.
Do not run for re-election here.
But to Carol's point, you know, the infrastructure has already gotten in place.
The mechanics are in place.
fairly bare bones at this point.
It's definitely something of a basement campaign, but they had this big ad that went out,
this economics ad that launched, I guess, was last Thursday on the night of the NFL season opener.
So the mechanics are in place.
Now, having said that, I think that there were two possible ways
that Biden could actually get off the ticket.
One is, as you alluded to, Dave, he's hospitalized and/or he dies.
I mean, the fact is this man is into his 80s.
His health is horrible.
We have no idea what could possibly happen, and no one is wishing for that outcome, obviously,
but it definitely is something that has to be contemplated.
The second possibility, it's this twist on the Hunter Biden indictment
that literally just dropped yesterday, because you and I both know that Hunter's not going to jail.
I mean, there's no way.
I mean, these three counts amount to a maximum of 25 years in prison,
but what if Joe Biden actually has to pardon his son to make sure that no plea agreement gets thrown out anymore,
that he actually will avoid and escape jail time?
And at that point.
Does he have to like not run for re-election because the optics of that are just so venal, so nepotism, so bad?
Maybe, maybe not.
But those are really kind of the only possibilities that I see.
I agree with Carol that Gavin Newsom is probably just gearing up for 2028 in all likelihood.
I mean, no state was freer during the pandemic than COVID-19, or excuse me, no state was freer during COVID-19 than the free state of Florida.
Gavin Newsom knows this, Andrew Cuomo knows this, Donald Trump for that matter knows this.
All these people that have been lying nonstop about Ron DeSantis' record during COVID in Florida,
they know better.
Donald Trump of all people really should know better because he literally moved here during COVID
in part because of tax reasons, but he chose to make this his home.
So everyone has been lying up and down about Ron DeSantis' record during COVID.
But more generally speaking, Dave, I think kind of the point
that Gavin's really getting at here is if I had to guess,
it's probably less about COVID, it's probably more about critical race theory
and new College of Florida and some of this kind of anti-woke culture war stuff.
Here is the kind of the point that I would make on that.
Every time the left...
Does anything whatsoever to try to implement its ideology into practice, whether it is cronyist contracts to contractors, to NGOs with the DEI bureaucracies on the campuses, the corporate boardroom indoctrination, all of it.
Anytime they do any of that, everyone just shrugs their shoulders and says, eh, that's kind of just the way it is.
When the right dares to lift a single finger to push back in the other direction and New College of Florida, what's happening there is a great example of it.
It's autocratic, it's fascist, it's Putin, it's Orban, it's Kim Jong-un, it's all this stuff.
I mean, what utter nonsense here?
I mean, these people are raging, scathing hypocrites here, and we should not be afraid to call them out on it.
Carol, Gavin Newsom is about to sign a bill that would literally allow the state to take a child away from their parents if the parents do not affirm, and by affirm they mean not affirm, the child's gender, and yet he's calling DeSantis authoritarian.
Yeah, I mean, that's what authoritarians do, right?
I think that people like him often point the finger at others to say, look, look over there.
It's actually him.
A school board in California decided to pull a book from its curriculum because they didn't think it was appropriate for children.
It was about Harvey Milk, but it also had some mentions of him having an underage,
a relationship with somebody underage.
I mean, it was just inappropriate for children, whatever you think of Harvey Milk.
And Gavin Newsom made sure that he overrode that school board and sent a copy of that book
to every household in that district.
I mean, to me, nothing is more authoritarian than forcing people to follow the things
that you want them to believe and to make sure that your ideology is the one put in front
of parents.
I think it's wild that this goes on.
And to me, the woke culture that we're experiencing has totalitarian roots.
You know, I was born in the Soviet Union.
I talk about that a lot.
I see the same similarities here where people like Gavin Newsom make you walk the line and make you say the words in the exact right way with exact, you know, right words in order to fit in and belong.
Otherwise, you're an authoritarian like Gavin, like Ron DeSantis.
And by the way, on the book front, you guys probably saw it, but the Senate had a hearing on book bans and John Kennedy from Louisiana read one of the books and it's all about anal sex and oral sex and lube and all this stuff.
And you could not play that press conference.
You wouldn't be able to play that hearing on Fox or on NBC or anywhere else, but somehow they want third graders.
But speaking of kids and these weird gender things, let's flip over to Megyn Kelly's interview with Donald Trump.
There's a bunch of clips that are going viral right now, although oddly the Trump surrogates aren't sharing any of them.
Makes you wonder.
But first here, Megyn, I think this is a fairly softball question.
Josh, the fact that he paused like that, that, uh, and he had to think about it and then, yeah, connected to birth, giving birth, which as Carol points out, that's actually sort of irrelevant.
What is going on here?
I mean, I thought this was the guy that was going to destroy the woke.
Yeah, that awkward pause and kind of that half giggle, you very rarely see Donald Trump kind of equivocate like that.
I mean, say what you will about the man, but he's generally very sure in his convictions, or at least he's typically sure about the words that come out of his mouth at any given moment.
But he was terribly unsure of himself there.
And you know, thinking back, I mean, back when Donald Trump ran the Miss Universe pageant
back in Atlantic City, New Jersey, I mean, he had transgender contestants right then and there.
I mean, he has, he's been very friendly in the past with Caitlyn Jenner.
I mean, I kind of wonder if maybe that's what was going on there,
if he didn't want to offend Caitlyn Jenner.
I'm not entirely sure, to be honest with you there, but this is not a particularly difficult question
to put it mildly.
And I would actually go substantially further than that.
Dave, I would say that a Republican candidate running for president of the United,
running for anything, Congress, Senate, running for dog catcher, it doesn't matter.
If you are calling yourself a Republican in the year 2023, and you cannot definitively say that there are two sexes, there are two genders, there is male and there is female, go home.
Get out of politics.
I mean, like, what are you doing here?
So to me, that answer, or lack thereof, I should say, is actually singularly disqualifying properly construed.
Carol, what do you make of the way that no matter what he does related to questions like this, and we'll do a couple other videos on this, that the base, which hates the woke stuff, when he does this, they just basically say, ah, we don't care.
I was shocked that he couldn't answer that really quickly.
I also grew up in New York.
I also had trans friends.
It doesn't change reality.
It's one thing to say, I'll call somebody whatever pronoun they want.
It's another thing to say that a man can become a woman, that he simply cannot.
It's fact and reality.
This is not an opinion question.
So the fact that Trump stammered on something so easy, It really, you know, begs the question, like, how much more can be uncovered about his beliefs if people ask him, you know, deeper questions?
I think he gets a lot of questions on things like January 6th.
I'd love to know more about his personal ideology.
Does he have some?
And what does he really believe?
And where does he think the country should go outside of not prosecuting Donald Trump?
What else does he want to see happen in the next few years?
It's also bizarre because he could have just said what we all know to be true, which you're both pointing out, which is, no, a man can't become a woman.
That could be the easy thing right off the top.
And then he could say, but you should treat people with respect.
And I'm, say, friends with Caitlyn Jenner, and I believe an adult can live as however they see fit.
There's so many ways to do this that would have made sense, but that stammering nothingness and the birth thing.
But let's continue, because this next one, this was not the sexiest thing to come out of the interview, but I have a feeling this one had Trump's lawyers just ripping the hair out of their head, because Megan asked him about, this is related to the federal case that Jack Smith is bringing, Megan asked him about did he potentially waive around a classified document to some people that did not have clearance on that, and listen to this.
All right, first off, I just wanna say, as I've said a million times on this show, I think that all of these cases going after him are purely politicized, and we only do it to one side, and all of that stuff.
But in essence, he's on audio saying, I'm not supposed to show you this.
Then he kinda claimed it was a newspaper, but apparently it was these Iran attack plans, and whether he's allowed to declassify them or not, or show them to people or not, it just seems to me, in the midst of all of this, you kinda, Josh, As a lawyer, you kind of don't go on an interview and just not be prepared to answer that honestly?
Right, I remember earlier this summer when that first Jack Smith indictment pertaining to the Mar-a-Lago classified documents, when that came out, I was reading through the fact pattern like we all were, and when we got to this particular anecdote that Megan's asking him about here, which happened at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club, and he's literally allegedly kind of Waving around these secretive Pentagon kind of contingency invade Iran, bomb Iran plans.
I mean, my very first thought was like, is this Peter Griffin and family guy?
And to Megan's point, and again to Carol's point, none of this is unfair.
These are extraordinarily legitimate questions for her to ask.
Even if you unclassified it, even if the Presidential Records Act, the civil statute, not the criminal statute applies, which is a legally debatable proposition, I think you might be right, but it doesn't really matter.
Because even if all of that is legally correct, why?
Why still do it?
Like, why do you have these documents in the first place?
I mean, none of this ultimately makes sense there.
And also, you know, from a criminal defense perspective here, I mean, how his lawyers have not gotten him to shut up and stop talking about this in front of the cameras is absolutely mind-blowing.
And it also shows why many kind of top-tier lawyers, frankly, criminal defense lawyers, want absolutely nothing to do with Donald Trump as their client, because he is probably one of the most horrible clients to manage ever.
So, you know, I think that that's what's so interesting here, and that's why he gets so angry and why he says, yes, you are coming at me criminally, which, you know, I'm not really sure what that means.
But I think that he sees, you know, the liberal media as anti-Trump, that Meghan should have been for him.
But you need to be able to answer basic questions.
Interestingly, to that point, my guys are telling me this right now, apparently Trump posted that very clip on his Truth Social, so he obviously doesn't think that there's any legal repercussions for what happened.
Let's just do one more from the interview because, again, Megan, we're all in agreement, and I think anyone looking at this objectively, she was not trying to get him.
She was asking basic questions.
She asked him about Florida and COVID and DeSantis.
The jab, as he called it, he's the one that calls it the jab, but all of it's just like endless lies.
Look, we could play you a million videos of Trump countering himself, but I wanna play just 30 seconds, because I've played it on my show many times before, so this is only 30 seconds of it.
This is Trump re-election campaign ad, and you tell me who likes Fauci.
unidentified
The president has listened.
To what I have said and what the other people on the task force have said.
Look, that's only a portion of it, and everyone knows there are all of the videos of him being very proud of lockdowns, and being upset with Brian Kemp in Georgia for opening, and DeSantis for opening, and everything else.
Okay, fine, we all get it.
Josh, is this one, look, we're all Floridian, so is this one just too close to home?
Is that why it's enraging us so much?
And do you think it translates to other people, or they just don't care about the lies, because they expect them?
The three of us are probably enraged by this because we're Floridians and we happen to like our governor a lot, but we're also enraged by this properly because these are lies and we should be enraged when people are lying to us and trying to make us question the very reality that we have lived with for the past few years.
It's actually very similar, Dave, to the whole Bidenomics shit.
So Biden and Harris, if they actually do end up being the ticket, they're making Bidenomics the centerpiece of the reelection strategy.
Bidenomics is terrible.
Bidenomics was a recession last year, 40-year high inflation, a horrific supply chain crisis, becoming a net energy importer again when Trump had us becoming an exporter.
So the whole thing is upside down.
That's exactly what Trump is doing right now when it comes to COVID.
Donald Trump was the most vociferous pro-lockdown guy.
He has still to this day not apologized N.I.O.D.A.
for Operation Warp Speed for the vaccines for any of that.
He is still doubling down on that.
The messaging is frankly just all over the place.
I mean, his chaotic kind of frenzy press release in late April, earlier this year,
where he came out and said that Cuomo did a better job than DeSantis when it came to COVID.
So, I mean, what does he actually believe?
I mean, he's saying basically everything.
I have no idea what he even purports to believe about COVID-19 in the first place.
But I do know one thing about COVID-19 in particular, which is that there was not a governor in America
who was even close to Ron DeSantis when it came to handling it.
And to your point, Dave, it's absolutely true.
I remember vividly in April 2020 when Brian Kemp said he was going to make Georgia the first state to reopen.
Donald Trump was furious at Brian Kemp.
And Kemp, to his credit, has now come out and saying as much.
The only question relevant, I think, for Republican voters, Dave, is does the truth matter?
So what DeSantis is specifically recognizing there is Meghan makes the point of saying to Trump's face, you gave him a Medal of Freedom award on the way out.
And Trump basically is like, I don't know who gave it to him.
I don't know how this happened.
He did sign the award.
It was literally the day before he went out.
But Carol, I wanted to ask you about the last part there that DeSantis made a point on, which is that when he's saying people in your business need to call out the BS more, I'd like to think that the three of us are doing a decent job on that, but there is a whole lot of money to be made and clicks to be had and views to be gotten in just endlessly going with Trump, no matter what.
Yeah, I think that clip, you know, the angry Ron DeSantis is my favorite Ron DeSantis.
And I like that he's getting pissed off because this guy is really questioning, I mean, not just the job that he did during COVID, but everything, right?
And the thing is that I feel like Trump doesn't have people around him to say calling, you know, DeSantis to sanctimonious is like a terrible nickname.
And like, you sound dumb when you say it.
And to say during an interview, like, I just, I thought that was so lame.
And it is personal to me.
Like, I know it is to you both also.
I moved here during COVID because of Ron DeSantis's leadership.
I remember all of it.
I've written cover stories about, you know, Ron DeSantis.
I've written cover stories about Andrew Cuomo.
I covered Florida like top to bottom and the idea that Florida had remained locked down or any of that it needs to be dispelled because truth matters but also the history of COVID matters.
It matters a lot to me that because it's not going to be the last pandemic probably that we all live through.
And we can't make the same mistakes again.
So we need to look at the bright spots like Florida and like Governor DeSantis' leadership and say, this is what we should do in the future and not what New York did, for example, killing 30,000 people and doing everything all wrong.
I wanna float a theory to you guys that I mentioned on the show this week, which is that we just don't know what it's like to have decent leaders anymore.
So when a decent leader comes out, many of us can't deal with it.
We're used to somebody that says crazy names and destroys people and lies about everything and gets all the viral clips.
And we have the reverse of that with Ron DeSantis.
I am henceforth calling this the Tim Duncan theory.
Tim Duncan was a basketball player, late 90s into the 2000s.
15-time All-Star, five-time NBA champion, 10 or 15-time All-NBA team, but nobody remembers him.
Nobody talks about him, because he was so consistently good forever, and there was no flash to it.
He retired the same year as Kobe.
Kobe's having parties.
He just announced, Tim just announces he's retiring one day.
There's something to that, I think, related to the way the internet works, that when DeSantis just does the right thing, we're just like, oh, he did the right thing, so nobody says anything about it.
I mean, like, when is the last time that the United States has had a highly competent president?
I mean, Reagan?
I mean, you know, maybe Bill Clinton?
I mean, at least for a brief stint there in the mid to late 90s during kind of the dotcom boom and all that.
But it's been a very long time.
It's been a very long time since American people have experienced a steady hand, kind of a national unifying vision as far as what, as far as presidential leadership there.
And, you know, one thing about the Tim Duncan-Kobe Bryant analogy, I mean, Donald Trump-Kobe Bryant as an analogy kind of sort of works because they both got a ton of free media, obviously.
I mean, Donald Trump, like Kobe, like Michael Jordan before him, was a global figure.
I mean, by the time that Donald Trump went down that gilded escalator in the summer of 2015 for the first time, his name was already universally recognized there.
So the cameras are already going to go to him there.
So, you know, DeSantis is passing the most transformative right-wing agenda in these United States.
I mean, the legislative session that just finished in Florida earlier this year, Dave, that the three of us lived through was absolutely dynamic.
I mean, I follow this stuff closely.
I don't know if I can think of another state legislative session that passed so much based awesome stuff.
I mean, for lack of a better way of describing it, across the entirety of the political, social, and cultural spectrum there.
But unfortunately, slow and steady sometimes, you know, doesn't necessarily attract the cameras the way that Kobe Bryant or perhaps Donald J. Trump does.
You know, I think that the moment, obviously, people love the show, people love the excitement, and if I'm giving advice to you, Dave Rubin, it would be to clip that, what Josh just said, and run it across the internet, like, Lib Josh Hammer loves Bill Clinton, and you're gonna get a million views.
And, you know, that's the path that we should go on if we're gonna follow this disastrous, everything is a show path.
Again, it's a free suggestion for you, but it's gonna, you know, millions of views coming up.
I leave that to the people of the internet to clip it as they see fit.
Let's just jump into the one other topic, because apparently they're at least gonna look into impeaching Joe Biden.
That's McCarthy's move right here, even though they obviously don't have the Senate, so the guy's not gonna be impeached.
Okay, fine.
But I thought more interesting than the decision to at least have this inquiry was the media's immediate reaction to this thing.
Don't look at that.
Whatever you do, don't look over there.
Check out this compilation.
unidentified
You know, the president has been in politics for a long time, and I think, as he would say, he's seen a lot of malarkey along the way, but this might take the cake.
What Hunter Biden may or may not have done does not even come close to the level of legal drama that's facing the former president of the United States.
A loving father who absolutely discussed business with his son.
What about the text from Hunter to his sister saying, I'm not going to make you give me give me half your salary like like pop does?
How come Hunter never gets asked about any of this?
How come none of them get asked about this?
There's no evidence because nobody has looked for any of the evidence.
Nobody has asked any of the questions that, you know, lead to finding the evidence.
I think the things that you have presented is evidence, but if people need more, they can simply ask questions, because I have last heard that that's what journalists are supposed to do.
I get that it's a Democrat, so they don't do it for them, but maybe they should start.
But Josh, if they want evidence, wouldn't the simple thing, and it seems like they have it, just be looking at bank accounts, just be looking at Hunter Biden bank accounts and Joe Biden family bank accounts and go, where did all of this money come?
How is it that Joe Biden is worth 20 or 30 or more million dollars?
How did Hunter Biden, with no skills, get this job at this thing?
On top of the fact that he's an artist, which the easiest, you know, quote unquote artist, the easiest way to money launder is have a crackhead Use a crayon and then give him a shit ton of money.
But part of the reason why Ken McCarthy had to do this is that the administration has been, shall we say, Less than forthcoming when it comes to trying to to suss out many of the details pertaining to these overseas dealings.
That's about one example of that.
Carroll's own publication, the New York Post, it was two or three weeks ago, they reported that the National Archives has been refusing to turn over over 5,000 emails that Joe Biden allegedly was cc'd on or sent using a pseudonym.
And you know, House Oversight Chair James Comer of Kentucky had previously already shown that there was a pseudonym It was kind of a long email that Joe Biden was sending to
people implicated in this Ukrainian stuff. Earlier this summer, Chuck Grassley, who's not
exactly kind of a strapping, kind of up and coming, kind of ultra-populous figure. The man is
literally turning 90 years old, I think in like two or three days, actually. He came
forward with a lightly redacted FBI form, FD-1023, that had allegations of Burisma founder, Mikolas
Lochevsky, talking about the firing of this corrupt prosecutor, Victor Shokin, and
the $5 million payment to the I mean, it all stinks to high heaven here.
So at a bare minimum, given the fact the administration is kind of gumming up the works and putting these various kind of mechanical logjams in place, you kind of have to Get the apex of your impeachment or subpoena power to try to figure out what the heck is going on there.
Never discussed with my son or my brother or anyone else.
Anything having to do with their businesses, period.
I did anything wrong, and I didn't realize he was on the board until after he'd been on the board, and at the same time, he has come forward and said it was a mistake on his part to be on the board.
I don't know what he was doing.
I know he was on the board.
I found out he was on the board after he was on the board, and that was it.
unidentified
The fact is, I was unaware of his investments until those occurred, and I've never discussed my son's business with him because I didn't want any conflict.
Because I'm with you on that, Carol, just from a media perspective, and obviously they don't have the Senate, so he's not gonna be impeached.
To me, I think you can argue it either way.
I think you can argue there's a reason to impeach, to go for the inquiry, because it at least shines a light on this so that instead of it just being discussed on shows like this and on Twitter, mainstream media kinda has to cover it because there's an actual impeachment inquiry.
So that strikes me as good.
But I also think you can argue it the other way, which is most people are just gonna think this is ginned up nonsense, because they're so brainwashed, and this will actually get him a sympathy vote.
One is kind of, as we just discussed, I think the administration has been genuinely less than forthcoming when it comes to the House Oversight Committee and the various other mechanisms that House Republicans have already tried to try to figure out, and the extent to which Joe Biden was knowledgeable about, and the extent to which he was involved in Hunter's overseas dealings.
The other reason, kind of just putting on my political analyst cap for a second here, is, you know, as we discussed earlier in the show, we're in the midst of a vicious Republican presidential primary, and the party is going to be Less than fully unified, I think, when we ultimately emerge from this, whoever the nominee is, come summer 2024.
And I do think that shining a spotlight on the villainous nature of our political foes, the Biden crime family, all of that, I do think that's probably going to drum up some sense of unity among the Republican base.
And that is ultimately what I come back to as far as kind of just the political optics of this.