July 28, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
49:07
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Trump and Haley both benefit from putting their differences aside. | ||
| Trump and DeSantis both benefit from putting their differences aside. | ||
| And they can do it. | ||
| Ironically, one of Trump's best political features is he takes nothing personally. | ||
| And everyone seems to think he takes everything personally. | ||
| He's got very thin skin. | ||
| And I don't think that's true at all. | ||
| I think Trump has very thick skin, and he can pummel you into the ground when it suits him, and then, when you kiss and make up, he can forget all about it. | ||
| There was a great clip, you remember in 2016, President Trump called Ted Cruz, Lion Ted. | ||
| L-Y-I-N-I-P-O-T-E-D. | ||
| It was just so vicious, and all these terrible mean things, really crazy things about Senator Cruz. | ||
| And then, then they kissed and made up after the primary, and what did Trump say? | ||
| I'm not calling him Lion Ted anymore. | ||
| That's not what I call him. | ||
| He's Beautiful Ted. | ||
| He's Beautiful Ted now. | ||
| What? | ||
| But that's actually mature and public-minded because it's really not about these individuals. | ||
| It's about doing good for the country. | ||
| Welcome back to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Mr. Rubin, good to be with you. | ||
| Michael, should we put on our glasses so we look like professional people talking about politics to begin the program? | ||
| So now Dave, you put on the glasses and it just makes you look smart. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I put on the glasses and it makes me look like a lesbian. | ||
| So I don't know, can I keep them? | ||
| I don't know if I can keep them. | ||
| For the record, you look like a lesbian either way, but I would say it ups the lesbianism ten to fifteen percent. | ||
| Oh, well then instead you'll just be blurry, I guess. | ||
| That's how it's gonna be then. | ||
| Now, Michael, before we do anything here, we've done this a million times, obviously, but we should note we are taping this on Thursday afternoon. | ||
| Donald Trump is going to speak at the RNC tonight. | ||
| Joe Biden, it now sounds like, could drop out at literally any moment. | ||
| So there's a lot of breaking stuff, and we will just sort of massage it along the way, because we are in the craziest political moment, well, certainly that I've ever been part of, and I suspect for you too, my friend. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The assassination attempt is, I think, the biggest political news in America since 9-11, and it will go down as one of the most important moments ever in American history. | ||
| So that happened now, what, four or five days ago as we're taping this. | ||
| But even before that, Things were moving so quickly. | ||
| And so now, if you had asked me, even after the disastrous debate for Biden, will he stay in? | ||
| I would have said, yes, he will stay in. | ||
| He's got all the cards. | ||
| The libs can whine and scream about it. | ||
| Chuck Schumer can come banging on his door. | ||
| It won't really matter. | ||
| Once again, we've now seen a re-clarifying of the political stakes here. | ||
| On top of that, the liberal establishment has been attacking the man as demented. | ||
| Without ceasing for a couple of weeks now. | ||
| So in this game of chicken between Biden and the liberal establishment, it looks like Biden actually might be blinking first. | ||
| I mean, it's mutually assured destruction, but it looks as though Biden is blinking first. | ||
| Is there a certain beauty in the ending of all of this? | ||
| I mean, we'll see what happens. | ||
| And I have no doubt that you agree with me that as an American, this is not good for our country to have a president with dementia and then, you know, maybe a shadow government that's basically trying to take him out now. | ||
| But what's happening to the Democrats right now through this coalition that could never hold of progressive lunatics, all with intersectional interests, and then the man with dementia and the VP that nobody likes, like, it's kind of perfect, right? | ||
| It's a beautiful thing to see. | ||
| I agree it's a little unfortunate and humiliating for our country, but it's beautiful to say I told you so. | ||
| I think a lot of us are saying things are really bad, but we did predict it. | ||
| We did see this coming. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| I mean, again, if I were Biden, I'd probably stick it out. | ||
| The fact that now you have Barack Obama semi-publicly, it is being reported, saying that Joe needs to seriously reconsider sticking in the race. | ||
| Chuck Schumer's office is not denying that Schumer went to Biden and told him to drop out. | ||
| And so the fact that this is all playing out in public actually makes me think, So that's a great point, and I sort of addressed that on my show this morning, because to me what's interesting about this is if they were trying to keep it quiet, they would keep it quiet. | ||
| Schumer can have a meeting with Biden without knowing it, but his office isn't denying it. | ||
| Obama is clearly leaking to the media So I think you're right. | ||
| This shows that Biden is being obstinate for whatever is left in his brain or who or whether it's Jill or the crackhead or whatever. | ||
| And they are now now they are throwing in the kitchen sink. | ||
| Now it's like, OK, we will go on full court press to make sure that nobody will publicly defend him. | ||
| And at this point, he really doesn't have many public defenders except the progressive, the more progressive wing, although now they got the signal from Obama. | ||
| So I think that's going to change, too. | ||
| Well, the question then becomes, at a certain point, if everybody is attacking Biden, why would he get out? | ||
| What does he have to gain? | ||
| The argument to get Biden out of the race is, sir, this will preserve your legacy. | ||
| If you stay in with dementia, it's going to tarnish your legacy and people will criticize you. | ||
| But yeah, but they're already doing that. | ||
| The narrative has already been established in everybody's mind that this guy is going to be chased out because his brain has turned to pudding. | ||
| So if the hope was, well, I'll get out and that doesn't become the dominant theme of the end of my presidency, well, that's out the window. | ||
| And then what does Biden stand to lose by staying in? | ||
| He's wanted to be the president since he was in the womb. | ||
| He doesn't like Kamala Harris. | ||
| I don't think he particularly cares for really anyone in the liberal establishment that is trying to chase him out right now. | ||
| So, why not? | ||
| Oh no, they're going to call him demented again? | ||
| They're already doing that. | ||
| Oh no, the New York Times or the Washington Post are going to come out against him? | ||
| They've already done that. | ||
| I mean, at a certain point, why not just stay in and give it a whirl? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's also possible that he doesn't know the degree to which he has derailed mentally. | ||
| Thus, this may all seem crazy to him. | ||
| Like he might think there's completely something else going on here. | ||
| Why are they all turning against me? | ||
| Because that is what happens, unfortunately, to people with dementia or whatever cognitive stuff he's got going on. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| Anybody who's had a grandparent or parent who has suffered dementia, you know that they're kind of the last to know. | ||
| I mean, that's just an aspect of the disease. | ||
| So perhaps that's what's going on. | ||
| Biden, for all his flaws, and we could talk about his flaws all day, he's always had a pretty good political sense. | ||
| He's a very skilled politician. | ||
| He was elected to the Senate before he was constitutionally eligible, and he's been there basically ever since in public life for over 50 years. | ||
| So, you know, I think if he knows anything, if he knows what the weather is, he'll have some feel for what's going on politically, but then if you're Biden, okay, you establish a little bit of an off-ramp, as he has. | ||
| He said, look, I would consider getting out of the race if the doctors told me that there was some medical condition. | ||
| He's giving him that little off-ramp. | ||
| He says, I was a transitional candidate, but But then in the same breath, this was all in an interview with BET, he'll say, but I didn't expect we'd be so divided and I can still get things done for this country and I'm still the man for the job. | ||
| The reason I'm going back on my promise to be transitional is because I'm basically saying I'm the only one who can fix it. | ||
| Almost the same line that Trump used. | ||
| So as of today, Thursday on the 18th of July in the year of our Lord 2024, I think Biden still wants to stay in, and I think he's still planning to stay in, as of now. | ||
| One other thing on this, and then I want to talk about the Republicans, because I think there's some really good stuff going on, and I know you were at the convention. | ||
| The other problem it seems to me that they have is, if Biden is to say, OK, I'm stepping aside, whether it's this weekend or whether it's Two weeks from now, or if all hell breaks loose at the convention, how can you possibly make an argument that he should serve the rest of his term? | ||
| And then are they saying, OK, we're going to have President Kamala Harris, but she's not going to be the person running against Trump? | ||
| Like, it's just all completely bananas. | ||
| What the Democrats are going to say is, no, it's simple. | ||
| You know, he'll do what LBJ did. | ||
| LBJ said, I will not seek, nor will I accept the nomination of my party. | ||
| And he finished out his term. | ||
| And then that was it. | ||
| The difference here is, first of all, LBJ was elevated to the presidency because of the assassination of JFK, so it was kind of odd circumstances. | ||
| But then also, LBJ was chased out of office because of the Vietnam War and the social discord domestically. | ||
| Joe Biden is being chased out of his party's nomination because his brain doesn't work anymore. | ||
| So, LBJ could easily say, look, I can finish out the job, but I'm just not electorally viable for the next election. | ||
| Joe Biden can't say that. | ||
| If Joe Biden can't run again, if he doesn't have the mental faculties to assume the office again, he probably doesn't have the mental faculties to do the job today. | ||
| That's a hell of a probably. | ||
| I think you mean quite literally, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I mean, that's kind of depressing. | ||
| You know, just one other thing on the, I don't want to spend too much time on the assassination because obviously it's being analyzed to death, so to speak. | ||
| But you know, you're right. | ||
| We're only five days off this thing as we're taping this right now. | ||
| And doesn't it really seem like it's beyond yesterday's news? | ||
| Already. | ||
| I mean, I know there's, you know, there's the conspiracy theories and we have to figure out what the Secret Service did wrong and all that kind of stuff, but that we just rolled right into the RNC thing and now the news cycle is already back on the Biden thing. | ||
| Isn't that just sort of a perfect example of maybe what social media and the endless scrolling of all of our devices and everything has done to us? | ||
| Like, we're just like, oh yeah, there was an assassination attempt and let's just move on. | ||
| And also the apparently miraculous nature of Trump's survival. | ||
| I think that's what is just glitching out people's brains, myself included, which is that in order for Trump to survive, forget about how it happened, forget about how the shooter got on the roof, forget about the security failures which, you know, could lead you down a rabbit trail. | ||
| Just, okay, the shooter's up there and There was a 15 degree to 20 degree turn of Trump's head a nanosecond before the shot went off in addition to a very slight amount of wind coming to Trump's advantage onto the bullet such that | ||
| it blew through his ear had any of those things happened at all differently at any other time the back of his skull would be gone and his brains would have been splattered on on the ground in pennsylvania this is so implausible yeah for someone you know if if you uh believe in God and Providence, and you believe that the cosmos is tightly wound and interwoven to achieve God's ultimate ends, even as we abuse our free will. | ||
| If you believe stuff like that, then you can at least make sense of it intellectually. | ||
| But for a great many people, it's so improbable, it seems so impossible, that I think it's easier to just move on and say, okay, without Any deeper thought would almost make you reconsider everything else that you've ever thought in life. | ||
| Right, well that's why to the backdrop of what has been a pretty spectacular three days at the RNC and what you can see is an extremely wide tent movement coalescing right now, it's like, man, that quarter of a millimeter or whatever we're saying that is, or that slight nod of his head, like, he could quite literally be dead right now. | ||
| They would have had the, you know, I don't know if, they obviously would have suspended or postponed the convention, but we wouldn't know who, like, Everything that we know basically at a cultural level would be completely upside down right now. | ||
| And you're right, that's really hard to capture and know what to do with outside of having some framework for how you think the nature of the universe is. | ||
| You know, I was just over there, as you mentioned. | ||
| I was there the last couple of days. | ||
| Flew back yesterday afternoon. | ||
| And I was initially flying in to do a lot of interviews, and I was going to go on a lot of shows, and I was hosting my show there. | ||
| But the first thing on the schedule was to play a drinking game with Don Jr. | ||
| I was going to play my yes or no game with Don Jr. | ||
| We've done it. | ||
| We've done it. | ||
| Yes, we've done the game. | ||
| And you don't know how to hold your liquor, my friend. | ||
| At least Secret Service was going to force us to use, you know, coffee or something. | ||
| We weren't allowed to bring booze in. | ||
| But I had been texting to set this up and, you know, we'd set this up a couple weeks ago. | ||
| Obviously, Saturday afternoon changes everything, Saturday evening. | ||
| And so I told the producers, I said, OK, we're not playing some silly drinking game with the president's son, you know, two days after his father was almost murdered. | ||
| And so I said, I just can't imagine the ambiance, the energy in the convention. | ||
| And so I got there. | ||
| Continue to maintain that it was the right choice. | ||
| I wanted to hear Don's perspective second by second as it happened. | ||
| I think he had a lot of wisdom to share about that near assassination. | ||
| But, for the rest of the convention, I will tell you, it was not somber. | ||
| It was not It was jubilant. | ||
| There was a lot of gratitude because people understood at some level how amazing it was that Trump had survived. | ||
| But it was joyous. | ||
| I mean, I've never seen... You know a lot of Republicans. | ||
| Republicans love to complain and whine and moan. | ||
| And that's almost their favorite hobby. | ||
| And I've never seen this many Republicans this joyful, this happy all at once. | ||
| So I think there's a couple reasons for that. | ||
| Obviously, Trump surviving and then being there is sort of the obvious one, right? | ||
| Like that's the big ticket one. | ||
| But I think it goes to something else that I want to explore a little bit with you, because you and I have some, we agree on a lot and we disagree on some stuff. | ||
| And I see, but we both love this country. | ||
| We both think that there's room for people like us to live in this country, unless you've shifted on that, in which case, you know, it depends. | ||
| You know, I mean, I think I think there's still room for it. | ||
| OK, good. | ||
| So even with the glasses on. | ||
| With that in mind, though, right, and I have no problem with, you know, lesbian looking guys over at the Daily Wire. | ||
| It's all good. | ||
| But with that in mind, though, I think that beyond the big ticket of Trump surviving, I think the thing that you saw there, and this is what I'm curious about, is that something has now happened with the Republican Party that many of us have been wanting to happen for a long time, which is open this thing up So that you're going to get a whole new generation of people and perspective of people and you're going to get the tech bros alongside the christian conservatives alongside the orthodox jews alongside secular people and you're going to have people that you know the more libertarian side of it and all of that under the umbrella of say freedom or america's good like that's the movement america's been waiting for and i think we're seeing it right there | ||
| Well, it's almost paradoxical, because what you're describing is true, but I think it's about half the picture. | ||
| And it describes half of what Trump is doing and what he's done with the GOP, which is, yeah, they're bringing in all these people. | ||
| I mean, there was a lady with a face tattoo who gave a speech at the Republican National Convention. | ||
| I wanted to ask your opinion on that, yeah. | ||
| You know, I thought the speech was quite good, actually, and Republicans have generally not done very well with the face tattoo community. | ||
| Yeah, Amber Rose you're talking about, obviously. | ||
| Amber Rose, yes, who I had never heard of until the RNC, but a lot of other people had heard of her. | ||
| I think she has something like 25 million followers on Instagram. | ||
| Not generally my milieu, and she's said and done all sorts of terrible things, so this is why she's getting some criticism. | ||
| However, I watched the speech, I said, OK, if she's pushing something like abortion or porn or something, that would be terrible. | ||
| We would hate that at the RNC. | ||
| But she didn't. | ||
| Her speech basically came down to, I thought Trump was bad. | ||
| The media told me Trump was bad. | ||
| My dad said Trump was good. | ||
| The media lied. | ||
| I should listen to my dad. | ||
| That is about as conservative a message as I've ever heard in my life. | ||
| The news lies and your dad is right. | ||
| That's pretty much the essence of a conservative hermeneutic. | ||
| But as you point out, there are all sorts of other people too. | ||
| And so the trouble with this is you want to bring in as many people as you can, especially at a convention. | ||
| You know, politics is the art of inclusion. | ||
| You gotta get more votes. | ||
| But you don't want to water down the message. | ||
| Because then you would lose your identity and then winning would be a Pyrrhic victory. | ||
| What have you won? | ||
| You've just become the other guy. | ||
| And what Trump has done so beautifully, I think the J.D. | ||
| Vance pick was a big part of this too, is he's bringing all these people in who might not traditionally be Republican or conservative. | ||
| He's attracting them, but he's not really watering down the message. | ||
| I mean, he's gotten criticism because he's not emphasizing pro-life in the platform this time. | ||
| But he's the most pro-life president we've ever had. | ||
| He's the first sitting president to attend the March for Life. | ||
| He appointed the judges who overruled Roe v. Wade, which we've been trying to do for almost half a century. | ||
| So I give him a little grace on that. | ||
| He's come out and said, look, we've got to get elected. | ||
| But he's got strong pro-life bona fides. | ||
| And so while he's broadened the number of people who can come and the types of people who are attracted to it, In a way, it seems to me, he's even focused the message. | ||
| He's made the message even more conservative than it previously was. | ||
| And I think the choice of J.D. | ||
| Vance as a running mate really, really underlines that effort. | ||
| Was JD the guy that you were pulling for? | ||
| My argument had been for a couple months that I thought Tulsi was the best choice because I thought that the disaffected Dem, to get them to vote for a Republican, you had to offer something. | ||
| And I thought Tulsi being a disaffected Dem herself, and now largely, you know, she's not a Republican, but like, you know, she sees what's going on over here and loves this country. | ||
| I thought that was the move. | ||
| Having Having now seen the response to JD for a couple days and having interviewed him a bunch of times and knowing he's a decent guy, it fully makes sense to me. | ||
| But was that the initial way you thought this thing should go? | ||
| I was pretty pro-JD. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I try not to lobby too much. | ||
| I try to give perspectives on, oh, this person has this advantage and this person here and there. | ||
| But I've been a longtime admirer of JD Vance since well before he was in the U.S. | ||
| Senate. | ||
| And, you know, to the Tulsi point, it might have been assassination insurance for Trump because the establishment hates her so much. | ||
| But I felt it would have been a bridge too far. | ||
| You know, she's still very liberal on a lot of issues. | ||
| She was a Democrat until recently. | ||
| It's probably just a little too much. | ||
| It would have been bold, certainly, but I don't know if it would have achieved what Trump needed to achieve here. | ||
| With J.D., what's important is One, his political identity is from Hillbilly elegy. | ||
| He's speaking to people from the Rust Belt, he's from Ohio, spent a lot of time in Appalachia, these states are important to win, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, you know the states. | ||
| So he speaks to that. | ||
| I like that he's a kind of just a A plane looking guy? | ||
| You know, he's not necessarily the front man of a rock band or anything like that. | ||
| Someone like Vivek really is kind of the front man, you know? | ||
| He just attracts so much attention all the time. | ||
| JD, while brilliant, while extremely accomplished, while all of these things, I think he's able to fulfill that supporting role and really bolster Trump's campaign and his platform. | ||
| He's got a clear vision and he leans into what is derided as populism or nationalism or whatever epithet you want to use for it. | ||
| But he is able to speak to a working man in a way that Chamber of Commerce Republicans have not been able to. | ||
| He's able to speak to people who just kind of want a good life, a good normal life. | ||
| They want to raise their families. | ||
| He focuses on things like family policy, you know, creating the conditions where Couples can just go out and get married and have kids and not worry about the economic factors that are preventing them from doing that. | ||
| He's an immigration restrictionist. | ||
| That was verboten for a long time in the GOP. | ||
| I think it's important to the development of his political thought. | ||
| He converted to Catholicism in 2019. | ||
| I don't think he did that cynically or for political advantage. | ||
| Usually, you don't go from Baptist to Catholic because you want to get an electoral advantage in America. | ||
| I think he did it sincerely. | ||
| Obviously, a lot of the conservative movement has been Catholic over the years. | ||
| And so, it makes me think there's a real foundation for his views, which are largely in line with Catholic social teaching and whatever people think about Catholicism. | ||
| I think is very much in the mainstream and can attract people who were old Union Democrats, who were old, you know, sort of working class people. | ||
| JD really brings that in and it's very exciting. | ||
| So as we talk about this sort of open tent without throwing the baby out with the bathwater as it pertains to values and things of that nature, I'm genuinely not trying to start crap here, but there was an interesting tweet by one of your guys, Matt Walsh over at the Daily Wire, basically saying that what he's seen at the convention so far Loosely, I'll say, he was basically like, ah, this is too much identity politics, people that don't really believe in conservatism or weren't conservatives five minutes ago. | ||
| He was getting smacked around pretty good on Twitter. | ||
| Clearly, I get the sense you don't agree with that notion, but is there anything you would want to add to that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know Matt. | ||
| On any political issue, you should identify the most curmudgeonly possible position to take that will be Matt's position every single time. | ||
| So yeah, he and I disagree. | ||
| It just struck me as short-sighted. | ||
| I understand the position. | ||
| You already laid out why that position could make sense intellectually, but it's just short-sighted. | ||
| You want to win elections? | ||
| You want to live in a country with people that think different things? | ||
| Like, come on. | ||
| And I think it's also important to recognize the moment, just even in the cycle of a campaign, which is, you know, when you're in the primaries, you are battling out ideas. | ||
| And so that's probably the moment for a little bit more consistency and purity and coherence, in as much as any of those things are possible in rough-and-tumble politics. | ||
| But that's where that goes on. | ||
| The purpose of the convention is first to nominate a candidate for office and then only just after that to bring in as many people as you possibly can to support that candidate and get that candidate elected. | ||
| So that's what the convention is for. | ||
| The convention is not for Perfectly coherent ideological purity. | ||
| The convention is not for some kind of academic debate. | ||
| The convention is not for any other number of things. | ||
| That's what it's for. | ||
| You're going to bring in disparate coalitions of people who don't agree on many things, actually, and you're going to agree on a common purpose. | ||
| So you don't want to water it down, but I don't think we're seeing that. | ||
| Trump is the nominee. | ||
| We know what Trump believes. | ||
| He's been consistent for eight years and he's really been consistent probably since the 80s on a lot of issues. | ||
| And so he's won the primary. | ||
| A big supporter of President Trump. | ||
| I voted for him in 16 and 20 and I'll happily vote for him in 2024. | ||
| And so if people show up with face tattoos and they say, hey, people like me can vote for Trump too. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks for doing that. | ||
| More power to you. | ||
| Right, and that's why you can have the VP, who's a convert to Catholicism, on the same stage just moments after a guy like Rick Grinnell, who's openly gay, served in Trump's administration, talked about how Donald Trump doesn't care if you're gay or straight or blah blah blah, and it all actually does make sense under the umbrella of freedom. | ||
| Does this all strike you as it's going to be in stark, stark contrast to what's going to happen about a month from now at the democrat convention i mean regardless of whether it's biden or kamala or anyone else like it's going to be this like the circus from hell it is it will especially and i'm off the grid for it i do my off the grid august thing man you're not are you you're not canceling you're sticking by i'm sticking look what can i do at the end of the day like if all hell breaks loose | ||
| I'd still like to be sitting on the beach not knowing about it. | ||
| Yes, you're probably right about that. | ||
| You know, if Biden remains the nominee, it's going to be especially crazy, because there's still going to be a fight. | ||
| Even if he's virtually nominated a month prior, which might be the case, let's not forget, we're all focusing on the end of October DNC. | ||
| Well, there's that Ohio ballot deadline that's coming up, what, July 21st, I think it is? | ||
| What do you mean end of Ohio DNC? | ||
| You mean end of August, right? | ||
| End of August is the DNC. | ||
| But the trouble for the Democrats is they pushed their national convention so late into the year | ||
| that there are ballot deadlines. | ||
| Oh right, the ballot deadline separate than the convention. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yes, but if you've got a ballot deadline before your convention, | ||
| it means you need some mechanism to get a nominee. | ||
| And this was bad enough when Biden was the presumptive nominee and the incumbent. | ||
| Now we don't even know if he's going to be the nominee. | ||
| So they have to get this sorted out before the convention. | ||
| What is that going to look like? | ||
| Let's say that the Democrats virtually nominate Biden or, I don't know, virtually nominate Kamala Harris or whoever else, Mayor Pete for that matter. | ||
| before the convention, before the Democrats have the ability to rough and tumble, you | ||
| know, punch each other in the face and figure out who their guy is going to be, well that's | ||
| going to look like, to use a popular phrase of the last several years, an assault on democracy. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| This could make 1968 look like child's play. | ||
| Well it seems to me that that is what's happening right now. | ||
| I mean, if you are ultimately making sure that your guy can't have a primary, which is what they did, and then you're going to change all the rules around the actual nominating process, and you're going to be secretly trying to push him out. | ||
| Do we call that a coup? | ||
| Is that an insurrection? | ||
| Is that? | ||
| I'm sure you can come up. | ||
| Give me one of your other old words. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You have all those old words. | |
| Mostly peaceful protest. | ||
| That was a different application. | ||
| That was a different thing. | ||
| I wanted something else. | ||
| Let me ask you something else that's close to home for guys like us. | ||
| I think the other thing that's happening right now is there has been a full on maybe completion of the shift from mainstream media to online media. | ||
| Like the mainstream, especially because of the Biden thing, has so I'm going to dirty up things in front of Michael. | ||
| It's so shot its load that there's nothing left. | ||
| They can't deal with that at the Daily Wire. | ||
| Don't worry, it's going on my channels. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| We'll believe that. | ||
| But I think that that's what's happening here. | ||
| The lies are so exposed right now. | ||
| They're so obvious. | ||
| They're so ridiculous. | ||
| The way they've covered the Trump assassination, every assassination attempt, everything has just so burst forth now that I think we finally, and the numbers bear it out too in terms of who's getting views and everything else, that that may be more important of a cultural shift than even the political part of this, just the shifting of the media finally. | ||
| Well, I can tell you even just from the perspective of the RNC, you know, I was there with all sorts of media organizations, some old school TV, some, you know, a lot of digital, some on the left, mostly on the right, and even from four, certainly eight years ago, The importance of the digital media. | ||
| You know that the Daily Wire booth was real busy. | ||
| Let's just put it that way. | ||
| I think that... I mean, look, I don't subscribe to television. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I haven't. | ||
| I don't think I've ever gotten my own subscription. | ||
| Sometimes if a roommate got it or something, I'd watch it. | ||
| You know, I'm 34. | ||
| Never have I personally subscribed to this stuff. | ||
| And I've been watching for a long time. | ||
| I think now, you know, this isn't some big new revolution in the new media. | ||
| The new media are kind of old at this point. | ||
| And so, you know, which means that the linear TV is ancient at this point. | ||
| And sometimes the political establishment takes a moment to catch up. | ||
| Let me tell you. | ||
| it's caught up. And so then of course there was that liberal push to censor the so-called | ||
| new media and big tech. But then we have someone like Elon Musk. One guy shows up, | ||
| spends $44 billion, buys the smallest of the big tech platforms. Elon Musk, kind of a liberal, | ||
| but a little bit of a right-wing liberal, and then increasingly seems to be more and more on our team | ||
| opening up the realm of speech for us again. | ||
| And then just a few days ago, committing to donating $45 million per month to a pro-Trump super PAC. | ||
| Here you're seeing the battle lines being drawn, not just politically, but within the media. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Short of the 45 mil, does that Elon Musk political evolution remind you of someone that you've been loosely working with for years? | ||
| You know, it brings me back to a friend of mine. | ||
| So yeah, a couple friends, but one that I actually have talked to recently. | ||
| Presently, you might say. | ||
| Presently, perhaps, perhaps. | ||
| Did you see, I just saw this right before we started doing this, that MSNBC, which they've been covering the RNC, I thought they were there. | ||
| Did you see this? | ||
| They're not there. | ||
| They've been using digital screens behind them to fake it. | ||
| You're kidding me. | ||
| I swear to you. | ||
| We'll put up an image as we're in post on this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I thought they were there and I was like, oh, I'm surprised they're there because you'd think they'd be getting heckled and blah, blah, blah, or that they'd even bother going. | ||
| But they have to pretend that they're, you know, nonpartisan. | ||
| But no, it's fake. | ||
| I thought they were there, only because I saw the images. | ||
| But then I thought it was weird, you know, because I went up, I did some TV, you know, in those booths. | ||
| And, you know, each outlet has its own booth. | ||
| It's a very cool shot, down on the convention floor. | ||
| But I didn't see MSNBC there. | ||
| I thought, oh, I guess I must have just missed them. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| You'd figure they'd have a pretty big booth. | ||
| So that's total fake news. | ||
| Really, the only left-wingers that I ran into were Cenk Uygur and Anna Kasparian of the Young Turks, who were Pretty chilly, actually. | ||
| They were just kind of staring at their phones. | ||
| They weren't really in the crowd. | ||
| I know they love me. | ||
| Maybe they were waiting for me. | ||
| They're huge fans of yours. | ||
| It's kind of sad because, you know, it's like you leave a town, or you leave a company, and you go on, you have a nice career, and you left a couple people behind. | ||
| So even for their perspective, though, You'd expect the right to be, you know, in their face or something like that. | ||
| Not really, actually. | ||
| Nobody cared. | ||
| Nobody cared. | ||
| People were walking by them, they were looking on their phones. | ||
| The GOP was so unified and so focused on the task at hand, which is to win in November, that there really weren't very many distractions. | ||
| Are you worried that we'll do a little black pill for a moment? | ||
| Because I think we're kind of, we're kind of going white pill. | ||
| And I think there's a lot of reasons for that, obviously, not only did Trump survive, but everything that you've just laid out here, the, my black pill version of this would be that this is all sort of peaking too early or that we still have three months till the election. | ||
| So quite literally anything can happen. | ||
| We just went into some things that could happen crazy, you know, in terms of Democrat convention. | ||
| But do you fear that, that there's so, like, the thing that we're feeling right now, and just knowing how fast news travels and disappears these days, that it will be almost unsustainable to November? | ||
| Or that a gajillion other crazy things can happen? | ||
| That's more to the point, Dave. | ||
| As we're speaking right now, President Donald Trump was shot in the head four, four and a half days ago. | ||
| And people aren't even really talking about it that much anymore. | ||
| So there there will be, I think, actually a gajillion other things that happen between now and then. | ||
| The Republicans can't get complacent. | ||
| We don't even know who we're running against. | ||
| You know, I mean, we're now seeing the first signs from Biden that maybe he will get out. | ||
| So we don't even know who we're running against. | ||
| It's going to take A lot. | ||
| I was pleased to see the Republican unity, though. | ||
| Another part of the RNC that received some criticism was the speeches by Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, because a lot of the Republicans think Haley is too liberal, or they think that Ron DeSantis was disloyal for running against Trump in the primary. | ||
| Everyone has their problems. | ||
| But, you know, I think President Trump should get those Ron DeSantis votes. | ||
| I think he'd be more than happy to take them. | ||
| I think President Trump would like to get those Haley votes. | ||
| There are a lot of kind of moderate Republicans who are, you know, there actually are a lot of those people. | ||
| It'd be good to get them on the team. | ||
| In November. | ||
| So that's all we can do right now. | ||
| All we can do is pull the party together, keep our eyes on the future. | ||
| We're not going to be able to predict the future. | ||
| We're going to have to respond to those events in real time. | ||
| No one was going to predict what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania. | ||
| But if we're all moving in the same direction, that's a good start. | ||
| Do you, since we're, I guess, insiders at this point to all of this stuff, do you ever think it's funny how like, you know, Trump on one hand, you can call Nikki a bird brain and DeSantis wears heels and all the names, and by the way, the names go every which way. | ||
| And then because it's politics, and I guess this is the good nature of if you really care about the country, that everyone can just put it aside where then Nikki is literally giving a speech You know, praising the guy who, by the way, she worked for and was quite good at that job at the U.N. | ||
| And he's nodding along with her, you know, just months after calling her bird brain and everything else. | ||
| The one, the two that seem like can't put it down is Gates and what's his name? | ||
| McCarthy. | ||
| Man, they hate each other. | ||
| And it's obvious and it's personal. | ||
| And I feel like that is not going to end well. | ||
| Well, and also, they have nothing to gain by softening up to each other. | ||
| I mean, I think that's really more to the point that you're making. | ||
| Whereas Trump and Haley both benefit from putting their differences aside. | ||
| Trump and DeSantis both benefit from putting their differences aside. | ||
| And they can do it! | ||
| Ironically, one of Trump's best political features is he takes nothing personally. | ||
| And everyone seems to think he takes everything personally, he's got very thin skin, and I don't think that's true at all. | ||
| I think Trump has very thick skin, and he can pummel you into the ground when it suits him, and then, when you kiss and make up, he can forget all about it. | ||
| There was a great clip, you remember in 2016, President Trump called Ted Cruz, Lion Ted. | ||
| L-Y-I-N-O-P-I-T-E-D. | ||
| It was just so vicious, and all these terrible, mean things, really crazy things about Senator Cruz. | ||
| And then, then they kissed and made up after the primary, and what did Trump say? | ||
| I'm not calling him Lion Ted anymore. | ||
| That's not what I call him. | ||
| He's Beautiful Ted. | ||
| He's Beautiful Ted now. | ||
| What? | ||
| But that's actually mature and public-minded because it's really not about these individuals. | ||
| It's about doing good for the country. | ||
| What would you say to the people that are just not getting what we're saying here about this wide 10 thing and why they should come around to this? | ||
| So, I mean, let's say the never Trumpers that have been thought of as Republicans over the years, and let's say the more liberal people who maybe are waking up to the craziness of the Dems, but just still have that thing with Trump, because those are the, those are the few groups that could make, well, I guess the never Trumpers on the Republican side probably don't move. | ||
| But I do think the disaffected libs still can move. | ||
| That's been really the driving part of my show for the last year. | ||
| What would you say to them at this point? | ||
| The question you gotta ask yourself is, what do you want? | ||
| What do you want out of politics? | ||
| What I want out of politics is a better country. | ||
| I want a country that is more conducive to my flourishing, the flourishing of my family, and the flourishing of my countrymen. | ||
| We used to call that the common good. | ||
| That's what I want. | ||
| I want the country to have more opportunities for good stuff and fewer opportunities for bad stuff. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And then you gotta ask yourself, okay, who brings you there? | ||
| Is it Biden? | ||
| Well, you know, it's so raw for us right now because we're still in the Biden administration, during which everything has gotten worse. | ||
| And maybe you've got a hobby horse about some foreign conflict. | ||
| Maybe you've got a strong position on immigration. | ||
| Maybe you're a nerd about financial policy or tax policy. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| But what I'm asking people to do is what we ask our politicians to do, which is Maybe disregard for a moment some of your personal hobby horses and just look at the bigger picture here. | ||
| What gets you a better country that is more conducive to your flourishing, that does not cross any particular moral lines of non-negotiables? | ||
| Who is more inclined to do that? | ||
| And I think if you ask that question honestly, Unless you have a really, really fringe, bizarre, extreme ideology, you've got to go with Trump. | ||
| You know, you think of the never-Trumpers or the really driven, crazy libs who just hate Trump's, the cut of his jib or something. | ||
| They generally have personal problems with Trump. | ||
| And okay, we have personal problems with all sorts of people, but we're not engaged in a personal battle right now. | ||
| We're not engaged in a personal question. | ||
| It's a political question. | ||
| It's about the public. | ||
| Who do you think is going to advance the common good? | ||
| So to that end, do you think that Trump will be able to do some of the things that maybe he couldn't do last time? | ||
| So right now, obviously, we know we have seven to people are saying 12 million illegals just in three and a half years on top of what we probably had 12 before that. | ||
| So let's say there's around 20 million. | ||
| But if even if we're only dealing with the ones that came in in the last three years, we have a certain about 10, let's say. | ||
| There's a push to, and they were chanting it, you know, deport them all or kick them out or whatever it might be. | ||
| Do you think he'll be able to do some version of that, which obviously he couldn't get done the first time around? | ||
| And then in terms of the economy, do you think it just sort of shifts around, sort of like it did the first time with him, meaning that just by having him around, around the world, people will be like, oh, capitalism's back and then that'll just kind of start freeing markets? | ||
| He'll be more successful on the economy immediately, because yes, foreign countries will recognize that he's just, it's funny to call Trump stable, because people think of him as so erratic, but he really is stable. | ||
| He's far more stable than our demented current president, and he actually is a very stable genius, to quote Donald Trump, I think fairly accurately. | ||
| So I think that will help on questions of trade. | ||
| I think it'll help on questions of foreign conflicts. | ||
| Do you think the war in Ukraine and the war in Israel and Gaza, which has kicked off under Biden, kicked off really in large part because of Biden's weakness? | ||
| A hundred percent. | ||
| And those kind of conflicts create a lot of economic problems all over the world. | ||
| So yes, I think, to say nothing of Trump's tax policy and how the Federal Reserve will react to Trump and how, you know, the list of all the additional economic questions. | ||
| On the question of deportation. | ||
| That question is going to come down to, one, can we also win the House and the Senate? | ||
| Because the House and the Senate will be able to throw up some obstacles to Trump. | ||
| And then, two, can Trump get enough of his guys into the bureaucracy? | ||
| Because the administrative agencies really make the laws and kind of run the country, but there's been a big help just over the past few weeks, which is that the Supreme Court overruled It was basically the very definition of the deep state. | ||
| When people say deep state and they don't know exactly what they're talking about, that was the definition of deep state. | ||
| of agencies the power to interpret laws and to basically write their own rules. | ||
| So it was basically the very definition of the deep state when people say deep state | ||
| and they don't know exactly what they're talking about. | ||
| That was the definition of deep state agencies that we don't elect doing things we didn't | ||
| elect them to do. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a general but basically on the money description of it. | ||
| And so, you know, that really weakened the independent power of the executive agencies. | ||
| So if President Trump can wield executive authority over the executive agencies that are already supposed to be under his control, And can really get his guys in there. | ||
| That's going to dictate whether or not he can effect these kinds of policies. | ||
| And this is why, by the way, you have the Biden campaign focusing on Project 2025. | ||
| You know, this boogeyman. | ||
| I think under Project 2025 the Costco hot dog goes to a buck sixty. | ||
| Project 2025 is being accused of all this nonsense that the Libs are making up. | ||
| I haven't had a hot dog from Costco in a while. | ||
| Is that more or less than it costs now? | ||
| It's probably a buck. | ||
| A dollar fifty. | ||
| Oh, it's a dollar fifty. | ||
| The country will be over when that price goes up. | ||
| Yeah, okay, okay. | ||
| But Project 2025 is being accused of all this nonsense that the Libs are making up. | ||
| It's a brilliant endeavor, spearheaded by the Kevin Robertson Heritage Foundation, | ||
| but bringing together a ton of other conservatives. | ||
| And President Trump has, I won't even say, distanced himself from it. | ||
| He's just observed. | ||
| He said, look, I don't directly do very much with this, so stop trying to pin this on me. | ||
| But Project 2025 is a great thing. | ||
| And the movement behind it is, I think, totally, you know, obvious, which is personnel is policy. | ||
| So, you know, you can write up all the greatest white papers and even laws in the world. | ||
| If you don't have people who are actually going to enforce those laws and regulations, then they and a buck fifty Can't even get you a cup of coffee anymore because of inflation under Joe Biden, but it'll be completely worthless. | ||
| So that's the question. | ||
| Can Trump get enough of his guys in there, now that we have a little bit more control over the administrative state, to wield this authority? | ||
| I'm hopeful that we can. | ||
| Let me pin you on the immigration one, or on the deportation one. | ||
| I mean, do you think, just logistically, that we would have to be sending National Guard into cities? | ||
| I mean, there would be massive things that would have to be done that I don't know that people are ready to really grapple with. | ||
| By the way, I'm for a certain amount of deportation, for sure. | ||
| This is psychotic, what's going on here. | ||
| But I'm just talking about in the sort of realistic version of it. | ||
| Do you think America is ready for what that would take, even if he could? | ||
| Not to the fullest extent of literally deporting every single illegal alien in the country. | ||
| Not only would it be a great strain on resources if they even existed to do it, but the American people almost certainly wouldn't stomach it. | ||
| However, that doesn't mean do nothing. | ||
| Even if you shut down the border, you still have to deport a lot of people. | ||
| So the first place to start would be deporting criminals. | ||
| That I think you could do pretty easily. | ||
| The next thing you could do is deport people who have criminal records, kind of dodgy backgrounds, even if they haven't committed some new crime in the United States. | ||
| You know, then you start... | ||
| We actually do have a fair bit of information on these people, even catch and release. | ||
| This is how the FBI is able to go pinch an ISIS-K terror cell of some eight people in the United States. | ||
| They were apprehended at the border. | ||
| They were released into the country because the Biden administration has some kind of death wish for us or something. | ||
| But the U.S. | ||
| government actually can go in and find these people. | ||
| So the question is going to be one not of strict ideology, but of political prudence. | ||
| How many people, and where is the limit of the gravity of these people's presence in America, how many people can you remove, and over what time scale? | ||
| You have four years, one term, and who knows then if J.D. | ||
| or some other Republican will get additional terms. | ||
| You could make a big dent into the well over 11 million, probably closer to 20 million, illegal aliens that are in the country right now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then, of course, you also have to deal with the fact that the Democrats are going to unleash Antifa and BLM Hamas and all of that just because he's president again and doing all that stuff. | ||
| Knowles, to end this, I thought maybe we could put on our glasses together for a second here. | ||
| Let's get the glasses on so we look bright at the end of this thing. | ||
| Leave us with something. | ||
| Something deep about America, something hopeful about the future, something... Oh! | ||
| I should also note, where do the MSNBC hosts fall in that deportation thing before you... Do they go before or after the hardened criminals? | ||
| They go before the terrorists, actually. | ||
| They go before ISIS. | ||
| They are the first on the list. | ||
| Other than my doppelganger, because I have a kind of feeling of kinship and affection for her. | ||
| You know that Media Matters is going to be all over this one. | ||
| Wait, do they exist anywhere? | ||
| I think they're folded? | ||
| What happened with them? | ||
| I think it's like one guy, because they still do hits on me, but I've noticed now it doesn't even have bylines. | ||
| It just says, by Media Matters staff. | ||
| I think it's just like David Brock or whoever. | ||
| It's like one dude, you know, at a computer. | ||
| You and I had some, to me, some of the best press that I've ever gotten over the last three years. | ||
| Like, it used to annoy me five years ago when they would lie about me, it would annoy me, and then over the last couple years I was like, oh, they're directly quoting me. | ||
| That is what I believe. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I would just retweet it when they try to put some hit out. | ||
| No comment, I'd just retweet it. | ||
| And then now, because they're so short-staffed, they don't even tweet them out as much, but I'll still see it pop up in Google Alerts. | ||
| So then I'll just take a screenshot, and I'll at least publish it. | ||
| I'll say, hey guys, they found a good clip of me today. | ||
| Make sure you head on over to Media Matters. | ||
| Or who knows, if it goes really big enough, then we could be attacked on the liberal cable channels, and then you would see basically me attacking Oh yeah, didn't Joy Reid or somebody say you were a Trump, what were you, a couple days ago? | ||
| Oh yeah, she really went after me pretty hard. | ||
| The one that comes to mind recently, not to spike the football on beating all these crazy libs, but To spike the football in all these places. | ||
| Spike, spike away. | ||
| There was one of these guys, Jamal Bowman. | ||
| Great guy. | ||
| Everyone knows how much I love that guy. | ||
| He called me a Nazi hell-bent on keeping only white men alive and in power because I said that transgenderism isn't real and so he tweeted that out and Jamal Bowman was thrown out of office and the real just Cherry on top of that, Sunday, is he was thrown out of office in large part because his constituents viewed him as anti-Semitic. | ||
| And wait a minute, didn't you grow up basically in that district? | ||
| Yeah, I was a little bit north, but I was right there. | ||
| I spent a lot of time in his district. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Well, now that we both have our glasses on, can you end? | ||
| We've done a whole interview here and I always say you're noted for you bring up lots of old names and documents. | ||
| That's your bread and butter sort of thing. | ||
| Give me something deep to leave this program with. | ||
| Something historical, but present. | ||
| Something effervescent, yet profound. | ||
| Something deep, but light. | ||
| Horace, the ancient poet, once wrote in Latin, Odi profanum vulgus et archeo. | ||
| I hate the common masses and I exclude them. | ||
| And there's a lot of wisdom to this. | ||
| There have been all sorts of awful mob movement. | ||
| You think of the Jacobins in the French Revolution. | ||
| Sometimes they go really... But we're in this moment now where the common people are basically normal and civilized. | ||
| And the supposedly fancy elites are all extremely vulgar and profane and all the things that you... And so we're in this moment now Where I think we almost have to invert Horace's bit of wisdom, and my Latin is not good enough to do it properly, so I'll just do it in English. | ||
| We shall exclude the profane and vulgar elite. | ||
| We'll do so with the common people, joining in from all different perspectives, and I look forward to writing some beautiful Latin poetry after that. | ||
| Maybe we'll have a new Virgil of the Trump era. | ||
| I will contemplate that, Michael. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I will see you soon. | ||
| Dave, thank you for having me. | ||
| What's his name again? |
Export Selection