Dave Rubin and Sage Steele dissect the Trump-Biden debate, highlighting Joe Biden's cognitive failures that forced moderator Jake Tapper to intervene. They critique the media's panic, citing pollster Frank Luntz's data on undecided voters and Megyn Kelly's analysis of Democratic insiders like David Plouffe urging Biden to step aside. The hosts condemn Jill Biden for lying about her husband's performance and expose the debunked "Very Fine People" narrative, arguing that the media cover-up has collapsed as undeniable evidence of Biden's disintegration forces a reckoning with his fitness for office. [Automatically generated summary]
And I thought, I'm doing your podcast in a couple weeks.
Yes, I can't wait.
So I thought this will ease us into that.
But we just watched this thing upstairs in the movie theater, and for all the people that were watching this on a regular size TV, we had their heads literally bigger than our bodies.
As I said on the show this morning, guys, it was like the bar is so low with Biden and it's so high with Trump that that's pretty much, I think, what we got.
We're gonna throw to a couple of things, but let's start with this because the main thing, really, and everyone knows, we can analyze it, we can show you all the clips, all that stuff, but the main thing was, was Joe Biden even going to be able to finish his sentence?
And right at the beginning, it almost ended before it began.
unidentified
We'd be able to write without his debt, we'd be able to help make sure that all those things we need to do.
And if you want to just look right to the camera, if you want to actually... I'm a solitary person, eligible for what I've been able to do with the COVID, excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with, look, If we finally beat Medicare.
First of all, it's super uncomfortable, I think, for everybody.
And I want to start with that.
I've been saying this since I interviewed him in March of 2021, right after he took office, that it's actually a heartbreaking thing to watch.
I don't care what side of the aisle you fall.
The human element of this, to see a failing man, is actually heartbreaking to me, number one.
Number two, shame on Jake Tapper in that moment for saving him.
Unfortunately, we need to be able to see all of this and then you make your judgment based on that.
But when you jump in and save him, it's wrong.
And we all had been guessing and speculating as to what are they putting in his body to make him as alert as possible, just like during the State of the Union.
So that was an unfortunate moment.
It was interesting to watch Trump during that moment as well, too, because he looked and he almost seemed like, are you going to be able to answer this?
I would say it's completely the reverse of the job of the moderator.
Is there anything even, I mean, we're gonna jump into a couple other things here, but it really all boils down to just the Biden cognitive thing, right?
Like, nothing that he said, there was very little that he said that was actually true, and you could see he just throws in all these words, and he's saying 80 things at once, and none of it kind of coalesces, but mostly you focus, and we were watching it with five or six other people, everyone's thinking the same thing, just Biden in the brain.
And also, it's not really about age in that you can be 85 and quite fit and competent and all of those things.
He just is not at this point.
There's something else clearly going on there.
All right, so let's dive into a couple other moments.
Actually, you know what?
Why don't we show this first?
Frank Luntz, who I make fun of this guy a lot because the pollster with the toupee seems very funny to me.
But Frank Luntz, who runs these polls, these live polls, as people are watching, he put up this tweet, and it was sort of interesting what the info he got back.
He said, after the first commercial break, I asked my focus group of undecided voters how many of them are more convinced to vote for Joe Biden.
Zero raised their hands.
Half of them say they voted for Biden in 2020.
It kind of gets to your point, like, there's no hope there.
There's no confidence.
It feels very, David kept saying to us up there something to the effect that it feels like this is all ending, like this could be the last one of these things.
Yeah, that this broken machine that is handing us these two people, and I say that as someone that likes Trump, basically, like it's just, there's something wrong about all this.
But you could not have watched that and felt, oh my God, Biden should be in charge of everything right now.
That said, just because the sitting president, I think most of us can agree, is just not in a good place health-wise, to say the very least, that doesn't mean that having debates should go by the wayside.
I think they're as important as ever.
It's the first time we've seen President Trump out there on stage.
I thought it was uncomfortable from the get-go because there was silence, there weren't people there, the cutting of the mics.
I thought was brutal.
That's part of this is the back and forth and the interrupting, even if it gets a little
bit uncomfortable there.
By the way, with Frank Luntz, another thing that I thought was so interesting that he
tweeted, and this was probably about halfway through, he said that he pulled the voters
in the room and they said that because Trump began to get vicious, those people are now
less likely to vote for him.
So we kind of get, you know, inconsistent answers from the people that Frank Luntz was polling, but vicious?
We've seen our friend Megyn Kelly do it a million times, and if you're up on your facts, you push back in those moments when you know there are lies being told.
And later on in the debate, they did say, OK, now you have 82 seconds left to answer the actual question that I asked, and they still didn't answer it.
So I was disappointed to see that they didn't push back more on Trump when he didn't answer about Israel.
They didn't answer about how are you going to deport these illegal immigrants.
We needed more of that.
That's what the moderator's there for, to get answers for us.
I don't know that I can do it much better than you did it just now, as I heard the last 10 minutes or so, but the only thing that this was about was Joe Biden's mental acuity or lack thereof.
There's nothing else that we need to talk about, actually.
We can talk about the lies and the confusion and all of that stuff, you know, the political part of it, But the simple truth was everyone that watched that debate in America was doing the exact same thing, going, holy cow, when is it going to break down?
How is he going to break down?
How is Jake Tapper or the mics being cut or whatever else going to run cover for him?
And we saw them do it a multitude of times.
That first moment that was in the first 10 minutes where he really started breaking down and mumbling, that could have ended it all right there.
But Tapper saved him.
And then, of course, just virtually everything he said was either the reverse of the truth
or a confusion or a projection, or it just did not make sense, which Trump made a point
of.
So I can sit here and tell you some nice things about Trump.
I thought he was controlled and measured for the most part.
I thought he was on message and was particularly good at hitting things on immigration and
drugs and stuff like that.
But I think that the system just got the signal tonight.
Joe Biden is toast.
And, you know, you mentioned two pillars of this sort of that there is Joe Biden's unfit ability to be president, which that has been obvious to everyone.
The more interesting one is the second part that you talked about, the media part, and that Joe Scarborough clip that you played.
We've played that on my show many times as well.
And it's like, you're right, he wants to be close to power, but I would say there's something even slightly more nefarious than that, which is that these people, in effect, are paid to lie.
Joe Scarborough has that job with his wife sitting next to him because they are paid to push that propaganda.
Joy Reid, who apparently now post-debate is calling Obama people and they're like all freaking out right now, she is paid to lie.
Now she's not paid to lie to necessarily suck up to Biden that much because she's more on the progressive side, but she's paid to lie when it pertains to wokeness and DEI and CRT and the rest of it.
So when you start understanding that, and I know you understand it as someone that came from cable news, then the rest of the picture becomes very clear.
But I don't see how anyone in their right mind could have watched that debate.
Even if you hate Trump and you have Trump derangement syndrome and you think all the January 6th stuff is legit and everything else, I do not know how one person in America could have watched that debate and thought Joe Biden is fit to be president.
Doesn't it feel like the system just finished him tonight?
Like this was the last chance that maybe he could be drugged up enough to go ahead.
I would say, you know, the biggest loser tonight may not be Joe Biden, because I don't know that he even wants this.
Who knows what's really going on in the recesses of his mind.
The biggest loser of this might be Barack Obama, because it's fairly obvious that this has been Obama's third term, that Obama people are running the show here.
Everyone knows Joe Biden.
Yes, it might say his name on the desk in the Oval Office, But he has not been the president.
The decisions are not being made by him.
I don't even think he's privy to half of the decisions.
He's signing things probably that he has no idea what he's signing.
I would say that Obama got his third term, as Obama said years ago.
Remember, if I could just not be the president, but have the mic in somebody's ear and all that.
And Obama now probably has to escalate whatever the plan is to replace Biden.
So, you know, Gavin Newsom showed up there, the devil incarnate.
He was on location.
Over there at the debate tonight, we will see what they do.
I heard your previous guest mention a couple other people.
Now Gretchen Whitmer keeps being talked about.
But they have a very thin bench and they have a very fractured party.
And that's why you know that I've been very focused on trying to take sort of moderate Democrats and people that have woken up to the lunacy of the left.
And encourage Trump to create the widest tent ever.
And I think there's an opportunity for that, which again, we don't even really have to talk about Trump here, but that's why I was really impressed with him.
Anderson, this was a game-changing debate in the sense that right now, as we speak, there is a deep, a wide, and a very aggressive panic.
It involves party strategists, it involves elected officials, it involves fundraisers.
And they're having conversations about the president's performance, which they think was dismal, which they think will hurt other people down the party in the ticket, and they're having conversations about what they should do about it.
Some of those conversations include, should we go to the White House and ask the President to step aside?
Other of the conversations are about, should prominent Democrats go public with that call?
This is going to be a rough next couple of months because the Democratic convention is now weeks away.
It's in August, in Chicago, and the Biden campaign is already trying to set it up such that the actual nomination will be done virtually weeks before that.
So he's locked in as the nominee.
What they'll do to stop it, I know not, but I think they're finally convinced.
No, well, so I'm not gonna curse on The Megyn Kelly Show, but I would basically say F you to all of these people.
They have now put us in this situation where we are a month away from a convention, as you just laid out, and they are about to swap him out.
So everything that we've been dealing with for the last year, in essence, thinking that it was gonna be Trump and Biden, they are done with Biden.
And they just put us through all of this on top of the fact that I think we could probably deal with it If the world was in a bit of a better spot, but we have this insane Russia-Ukraine war, non-war, that we're funding but we're not in, something like that.
The Israel-Hamas thing is actually secondary now to a much bigger war that could blow up with Hezbollah in Lebanon, and that could bring in several other countries.
Obviously, we're having economic problems here.
Just look at the interest rates, or go to the supermarket.
Like, there's serious stuff.
If things were just kind of working, Then I think we could put up with, you know, having a guy that was a little confused and everything else, and we would just joke about it.
But everything you said a moment before I came on about the way his mouth was, the staring off into complete blankness, the sentences that went nowhere, it's enough now.
If you've been pretending not to see it, if you're watching this and you were just kind of on the fence, you have to see it now.
This just in from CBS News and Ed O'Keefe, the White House reporter.
unidentified
There are at least some House Democrats who were gathered tonight watching this together talking about talking to the White House about having him step down.
That's how bad it was in their view.
Remember, House Democrats are on the verge of trying to get back the majority.
They're nervous about doing that in places in these battleground states where they're going to need a strong top of the ticket.
They may need to rely on a strong senator or gubernatorial candidate, and in some cases they don't have it.
Step down before the convention?
Well, or to at least throw up somebody else instead of the president that debated tonight.
Look, the truth is a time release pill and we are now seeing people who have laundered the lies and told us not to see what we see in front of us now being confronted with the obvious reality.
They can all, you know, it's interesting, Van Jones, he's sort of emoting there and he loves him and all of that stuff.
But it's like, dude, you knew.
You didn't just magically see something that came out of nowhere.
We have all known this.
So you have all been part of it, and now whatever, they've all been given the signal.
Oh, someone else is talking about it, now somebody else will talk about it, somebody else will talk about it, and we will get rid of him.
And by the way, if you're Joe Biden, for whatever's left, Of Joe Biden.
And by the way, I had two grandmothers that I lost to dementia and Alzheimer's related issues that I spent a lot of time with one of them, particularly towards the end, dealing with that and going to doctors.
So for all the glibness that we can make of this, it's deeply depressing.
But Biden should not have to spend his last few years in this situation.
This isn't the right ending of any man.
Being propped up there, which is why your comments on Jill Biden are totally right.
But look, as this ship sinks further, the rats are going to scurry.
And there's the other part of this, of course, Megan, is that there's a huge scandal here.
They have been drugging him, obviously.
People know what's going on.
There is some doctor that knows what's going on.
Does Corinne Jean-Pierre know?
I don't know, but I guarantee you Jill Biden knows, and probably the Chief of Staff knows, and a couple other people.
But now that the signal's out there, and there's blood around him, in essence, Somebody's going to break.
And then it'll be like, you know, I was the one I, a couple months ago, I was telling everybody we had to do something about this.
So we have completely, I would say, traversed into new territory tonight.
And it has almost nothing to do with any of the issues that will fix America.
Here is a statement from the Biden campaign on tonight's debate.
Tonight, President Biden presented a positive and winning vision for the future of America, one in which every American has a fair shot at the American dream, where every one of our rights are protected and where our president fights to strengthen our democracy, not tear it down.
On the other side of the stage was Donald Trump, dark, backwards window, terrible, terrible, terrible.
Trump's performance tonight reminded the American people why they fired him four years ago and reinforced just how high the stakes are this November for the future of our country.
Well, I agree with those last four words.
You know, I mean, this is a pathetic attempt to spin his positive vision.
This isn't going to fly.
For once, it doesn't seem like the media is going along, and they can't.
They can't.
Because to your point earlier, they've been exposed.
The jig is up.
We've seen it.
We've seen it repeatedly before tonight.
That bullshit, Duh.
Not deep fakes.
What is Kareem Jean-Pierre?
Cheap fakes.
The excuse is not going to fly.
It's a lie.
They've been lying and spinning.
And it's the country that's at stake.
Shame on them all.
Dave Rubin, my friend, so glad you could join us tonight.
Well, I would just say if you want absolute proof of what you just said right there, think about it.
When they talked about the very fine people moment, which is a complete hoax, and Trump addressed it as a hoax, Biden still was pretending it was real.
Jake Tapper, who many, many times on his show over the years has said it was true.
If Biden had not completely broke down tonight, all of the people That we just showed from CNN and MSNBC and everywhere else, they would have still been laundering that lie.
So it's not that they won't lie, it's that now it is so evident, it is so cataclysmically evident to everyone that they are going to have to either lie in a whole new way or who knows what tricks they have up their sleeves, but I think the dam has broken and we're in a very different situation starting right now.
Yeah, I think you mean Jake Tapper has admitted it's not true.
He's on record as saying this is, at least I saw a clip of him saying it's much more nuanced than you're suggesting, but that lie about whether Trump called white supremacists in Charlottesville very good people has been debunked over and over.
Yeah, yeah, it was truly like he hadn't seen the fact checks, including one that just came out the other day, which I just tweeted out tonight if you want to check my Twitter feed.