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Nov. 16, 2022 - Sean Hannity Show
29:50
Ari Fleischer - November 15th, Hour 3
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This is an iHeart podcast.
Coming up next, our final news roundup and information overload hour.
All right, news roundup, information overload hour, 800-941-Sean, our number, if you want to be a part of the program.
So the president and his big announcement, everyone anticipating that he's going to announce he's going to run for president in 2024.
This did not go well or sit well with Joyless Behar over at the hard-hitting news show, The View.
Here's what she said.
Now Dean Trump is a wounded animal.
This is the exact time when Merrick Garland should swoop in and indict announcing.
Well, that's exactly why he's announcing.
And already Merritt Garland is a day late in the dollar short.
He should have done that this morning before this guy announces, but he didn't do it yet, which makes it now it looks as though it's political, which is what Merritt Garland was trying to avoid.
Oh, there it is.
She's going to freak out.
Trump derangement syndrome of any kind.
Anyway, here to talk about this and also this breaking news story we've been following all day.
You have at least two dead Russian missiles landing in Poland across the Ukrainian border.
The rockets, you know, I don't know if this is a message of Putin, who's been accelerating his brutality and murder and mayhem and targeting of civilians.
I would tend to think it's not an accident.
And now the question is, is what is Joe Biden going to do?
Ari Fleischer is with us, by the way, his new book, A Huge Success, Suppression, Deception, Snobbery, Bias, Why the Press Gets So Much Wrong.
Sir, welcome back to the show.
How are you?
All right, Sean.
Thank you for having me.
Okay, so now we have Russian missiles landing in Poland, a NATO ally, and killing people in Poland.
What is Joe Biden's reaction?
I don't know what his reaction will be.
I know what ours should be.
Sean, if two cruise missiles landed in the United States and whether they killed anybody or not, we should fire two cruise missiles back at whoever did it.
If you don't do that, you invite more aggression.
And I do happen to think this was probably an accident.
I can't believe even Russia could be so reckless as to do it on purpose.
Why would you think it's an accident?
He's been targeting schools.
He's been targeting apartment buildings.
He's been targeting civilian areas.
He's been targeting even sources of sustainable water.
He's been doing everything imaginable to maximize the death of innocent people not even involved in this war.
Yeah, but he's been doing all of that in Ukraine.
And the reason I say it is their missiles aren't very accurate.
They have far fewer precision-guided missiles than we do in their arsenal.
And so it is possible that they just have a bad targeting system where it lands within 10, 20 miles of the target as opposed to exactly on target.
But it doesn't matter whether it was accidental or on purpose, Poland got hit.
And Poland needs to respond in kind.
This is what you do when you get hit.
If you don't, and you're in a war zone, you're going to get hit again and again and again.
And other nations and neighbors will get hit again and again.
You have got to draw the line.
You've got to stand up.
And you have to do it fast.
So shouldn't it be a NATO response, not a U.S. response?
Well, I said a Poland response.
It should be a Polish response.
And a NATO response, that's going to require time, deliberation, meetings, invoking Article 5.
Poland needs to respond and respond immediately.
But it has to do it, I think, with the support of NATO.
And it should be, yes, we support Poland's decision and let it be known that they support Poland's decision.
It's right to defend itself and its borders.
I agree on that, but it's just a timing issue.
NATO is going to take days to do this.
NATO is not a fast-moving machine.
Now, if they could do it fast and invoke Article 5, meaning an attack on one is an attack on all fast, that'd be great.
But my history with NATO is they tend to get bogged down and take time.
And if you want to send a signal to Russia that you can't do it, if you do it, we're going to punch you right back.
You don't have a lot of time.
Now that raises issues of escalation, the problem Putin is having is he, and this frankly even surprised me.
I thought he'd roll through Ukraine and there'd be very little resistance.
I thought it was more Western Europe's problem, our Western European allies' problem than our problem.
We've committed billions and billions of billions of dollars.
I feel like as per usual, people don't fight wars to win them.
They fight for a stalemate.
They fight for a tie.
If they would have used overwhelming force in the beginning, I think this could have been ended very would have ended very swiftly.
I know the American people are getting tired already that it's taken so long.
And frankly, the fact that they're not given, they didn't give the weaponry to win the damn thing.
And if you'd give them the weaponry to win the war, it'd be over by now.
Yeah, and you know, the corollary to that, Sean, I'm not sure it would be over by now.
Even if we had given them better, more advanced weaponry earlier, these wars don't tend to end very soon.
I mean, war is war.
Russia is not exactly, they're much worse than we thought, but they're certainly not weak.
But the real lesson here, Sean, is Taiwan.
What you just said about provide advanced weaponry and provide them more weaponry and do it early is exactly what we should be doing with Taiwan.
That is the lesson of Ukraine.
Don't wait until the nation's under attack to give them what they need.
Give it to them now, and that way they'd never get attacked because deterrence works.
Yeah, it always has.
And we've always agreed on that.
All right, so we expect President Trump making his announcement tonight at Mar-a-Lago.
I've been working my sources, and what I'm gathering is that is in fact what's going to happen.
You know, you just never know.
Sometimes sources are good.
Sometimes sources are.
I'm getting alternative viewpoints from people, but that should be what happens tonight.
That's what I'm expecting to be what happens tonight.
If he doesn't, what would he do?
Well, an exploratory committee could be a possibility.
A, it could be, you know, a change to let's focus on Herschel Walker first and then worry about our future later.
There could be, you know, I've heard any number of theories, but it seems to always fall back that this is going to be a full-fledged announcement.
But the announcement, as it's been described to me, doesn't mean that he's running out and he's going to hit the campaign trail.
He's just basically telling people that, look, I'm the guy that can fix this mess we're in.
So now, there are other people that have, I'm sure, will be getting into this race at some point.
Wouldn't you expect the same?
Absolutely.
There's no coronation.
Okay, so now here's your president.
He was mocked, ridiculed, made fun of in 2016 when he, or 2015, 16, whenever he made the announcement, and went on to take some of the most prominent names in the Republican Party and defeat them handily.
Does he have a different road this time?
He does have a different road because there are going to be fewer cars on it.
In 2016, there were some 16 or 17 candidates running against Donald Trump, and he systematically took them down and kept the biggest plurality of about 35% for most of the early primaries.
And then he expanded it when it became really a race between him, John Kasich, and Ted Cruz at the very end.
And then it was over.
This time, Sean, if it is just Ron DeSantis against Donald Trump, just the two of them potentially, it's a fair fight.
I could see a scenario in which Donald Trump wins.
I can see a scenario in which Ron DeSantis wins.
And, you know, I do expect Chris Christie or Larry Hogan, the governor of Maryland, to get in.
They won't matter.
That wing of the Republican Party is not going to have any say in this primary.
But a genuine bona fide outsider, a conservative can definitely give Donald Trump a run for his money, and Trump can give them a run for their money.
So it's a fair fight.
Even if it's two outsider conservatives against Donald Trump, I see a fair fight.
Any more than two?
No.
Donald Trump wins.
He'll have the biggest plurality.
All right, we continue with Ari Fleischer, former White House press secretary and the author of Suppression, Deception, Snobbery, and Bias, Why the Press Gets So Much Wrong as we continue.
Perhaps I'm a little naive.
Why is it that I don't like when Republicans are killing each other?
And look, we can go back.
We can take this to Senator McCain and George W. Bush and go back to the primaries in 2000.
And if you remember, it got ugly.
I mean ugly in South Carolina in 2000.
Yeah, and I'm a big believer in primaries.
I think primaries.
That's Ari Fleischer saying, I'm a big believer.
I like ugly.
I like people on the same side.
Out of the primary comes a new direction for a party.
I don't like coronations.
Unless you are so popular and you've earned your coronation, as George Bush did in 2004, nobody primaried him when he ran for the president.
Well, it's different when you're an incumbent.
I mean, I actually can, I'm not sure we're going to see anybody primary Biden if he's really hell-bent on running.
I think it would be a mistake for him to run.
I don't think he's up to the job, but I would not imagine a lot of people are going to challenge him.
Am I wrong on that?
Well, and I think that'd be a mistake for the Democrats in this instance.
But let me go back to Donald Trump and the issue of primaries.
He's not the incumbent.
Republicans are divided.
There's a legitimate question about whether or not Donald Trump's gut and his penchant for getting policy right because of that gut outweighs the fact that Donald Trump is a bull in a China shop and everywhere he goes, he breaks China.
It is a question, is Donald Trump too hot to handle?
That's a legitimate question.
It should get settled in a primary.
If there is a steady outsider, does that outsider have a chance to beat Donald Trump?
As you know, Sean, Donald Trump accomplished a tremendous amount of policy good for this country, from the destruction of ISIS to energy security, energy independence, the lowest child poverty rate since 1958, pre-pandemic, the development of a vaccine.
Donald Trump has tremendous good on his side policy-wise.
But he comes along with baggage.
And is it so much baggage?
He can't win over the middle.
We'll lose independence again as we did in 2022.
Or is the newcomer going to be flawed?
And that's why you need a primary.
You need to let it air, let it vent.
I hope it doesn't get personal.
I hope it doesn't get nasty.
I suspect it will, Sean, because Donald Trump is tough.
I think the others comes after that.
You know what's interesting, though?
I think there's a very big unknown right now.
We can't project out two years.
We can't possibly do it.
We have no idea how bad this economy is going to get.
We have no earthly idea what world events could occur in the interim.
Look, you were there on 9-11, 2001.
You were in the room with the president that day, and you were with him in the days to follow.
And you lived through that.
And that changed his presidency on a dime.
And he then became a wartime president immediately.
And that was, you know, nobody had anticipated such an attack on American soil.
You know, one thing that I wonder is if things get that dramatically bad, do you look at somebody and say, look at them differently and say, okay, this guy's the fighter for this moment?
You know, I'll use an example.
People say, Hennity's comparing Trump to Winston Churchill.
Well, B.B. Netanyahu just became the prime minister of Israel.
He was kicked out two other times, and now he's won a third time.
Winston Churchill was despised.
Nobody thought he'd ever be prime minister.
But when the moment came in World War II, guess what?
They called on Winston Churchill and blood and tile and tears and sweat won the day.
And so they win the war.
Then they threw him out.
But then they brought him back.
It's so interesting how these polarizing political figures, you know, it's sort of like a love-hate relationship.
You never know what conditions might bring anybody back, right?
All of that is true, which is, again, why I say let the people decide.
I would not say it should be a coronation.
Everything you said could happen or nothing could happen.
We have the same situation we have today for the next two years.
Neither you nor I know what will happen over the two years, but what we do know is we have a process in place to settle intra-party disputes.
And we have an intra-party dispute.
We have a fight over who should lead the party.
Donald Trump has the incumbency going into it, so to speak.
Will there be a challenger?
And this is why I said to you, it's not going to be like 16.
I don't think many people have the courage to take on Donald Trump in the Republican Party.
I think one or two people might, other than Hogan or Christie, and they don't count.
Who will that be?
Will it be DeSantis?
Will it be another conservative, a real populist, a real outsider, a bona fide outsider?
That's what time will tell.
And you better be strong if you're going to take on Donald Trump.
You better be ready for that fight because he's going to give it to you.
I think somebody's going to take up that mantle.
Yeah, I would argue that that is probably true.
Timing-wise, if I was asked, I'm not sure this is the right time.
I think it's very early.
We're just off of an election.
However, I think he's just laying a stake in the ground and saying, I'm in.
Guys, come out.
Let's go.
That's how I interpret it.
We'll be covering it tonight.
Hannity, it's actually happening in the 9 o'clock hour, and we'll carry it start to finish.
Breaking news straight from the source.
This is the Jean Hannity Show.
I'm 25 now to the top of the hour, toll-free.
Our number is 800-941-Sean, if you want to be a part of the program.
And here is your president, Joey Biden, in China, having a hard time reading a reporter's name.
Because remember, they told me to call on so-and-so first.
I'm only supposed to follow my list.
They get mad at me and everything if I answer questions.
You're always asking me questions, and I'm going to get yelled at.
And I'm not going to get my ice cream or anything.
Anyway, here's Joe.
But I'm confident that Russia will not occupy or defend Ukraine as they intended from the beginning.
I got a hard show reading this.
Reuters, Natanjan Bows.
Okay.
Now, by the way, and then Biden saying, that was, by the way, in Bali.
Biden, after meeting with President Xi, says, oh, I don't believe there's any imminent attempt from China to invade Taiwan.
How do we define imminent?
White House reporter grabbed and shoved after a human rights question in Bali, White House pool TV producer, knocked off balance, pushed by a man wearing a white mask with a Chinese flag on it as she asked President Biden whether he would talk about human rights in his meeting with President Xi.
No surprise here.
Afghanistan leader has now imposed Sharia law all across the country.
What a shock.
Linda, you know, I don't know if I guess.
I guess Liam is too young for TikTok, but TikTok, according to Senator Cotton, now is employing hundreds of foreign workers with ties to the communist Chinese.
That's not particularly good.
Let me tell you something.
It is a very scary thing.
And anybody who doesn't think that TikTok is on a way in to the hearts and minds of our next generation in the most corrupt and sick way is out of their minds.
TikTok is communist China all the way every day.
By the way, Biden unexpectedly skipped the gala dinner at the G20 summit in Bali in Indonesia, returning to his hotel room for the evening.
He was exhausted, apparently.
You know, they didn't give any real description of what the last minute change was all about, which came at the end of a full day of meetings.
My guess is he was really tired and everything.
He's an embarrassment.
Well, they did stress he doesn't have COVID, but they didn't give any other explanation.
He doesn't have COVID.
I'm like, okay, why did he skip the dinner?
Yeah, and not only that, is COVID now the answer to everything?
Like, he's 80 years old.
There's like a thousand other things he could have, not the least of which is the inability to pronounce a name.
He was exhausted, to use your terminology.
Say exhausted.
He was exhausted.
He was totally exhausted.
I think what's more scary is we're looking at what's happening in Poland.
We've got, you know, Russia killing these two innocent people.
And whether it's NATO or Poland or whoever responds, you know, we've got our lowest SPR levels ever.
We are not ready to respond.
He's got nothing to say.
Let's get to our busy phones.
800-941-Sean, if you want to be a part of the program.
Let's say hi to Joe is in beautiful North Carolina.
What's up, Joe?
How are you?
Glad you called, sir.
Well, well, 30 years of listening to you since down there in Atlanta, I finally get the honor of speaking to you.
Well, let me ask a question.
Have I changed a whole lot since I was down in Atlanta from 92 to 96?
No, sir, you did not.
And I knew right then, when I started listening, you had just kicked up on the Richard Jewell, and you basically took a standback attitude and said, I'm going to wait just a few minutes and see what happens.
And I knew right then, I said, this guy is going to make it.
If nothing else, I'll listen to him forever as long as he's on the air.
I knew right then, and I never looked back.
As a matter of fact, how's my Pure Talk phone sounding to you?
I'm just excited.
Honestly, I don't know what to say.
I mean, I'm very humbled by your support.
It's an honor to be behind this microphone every day.
I don't know what I would do without it except talk to myself and the funny farm somewhere.
But I'm very, very grateful.
By the way, you know who else was listening that day?
I think you know this story.
Richard Jewell was listening that day.
And he told me later I was the only one that didn't rush to judgment.
I heard it all.
I've heard.
I listened to you from, I listened to you.
I might miss a day or so every once in a while, but 99% of the time I've got you on.
I did have Rush on while he was around.
And here's my point.
I'll get to it.
I did a little research while I was waiting to get on, and I pretty much answered my own question.
And that was, there's no way that we can ever get a supermajority to drain the red ink out of Joe Biden's veto pen.
I know that now.
Okay.
And I also know that winning the House is a very, very important thing.
Okay.
But since just 12 hours ago, I learned about people in Texas that were at the voting booths, the voting workers.
that were manning the stations and the voting closed and the people are videoing with their phone.
They're videoing the machines running by themselves and rolling up numbers that there was no input to make them roll those numbers up.
And everybody's going, what in the world is going on?
That's happening in Dallas, Texas.
By the way, Governor Abbott is now looking into voting irregularities that occurred and issues.
For example, in Harris County, they experienced delayed openings, paper shortages.
How do you have a paper shortage on election day, right?
Missing keys, understaffing, voters waiting for hours.
He says I'm calling for a full investigation and the allegations of election improprieties in our state's largest county may result from anything from ranging from malfeasance to blatant criminal conduct.
And he's demanding answers.
So you're not the only one.
All right, here's the question.
Here's the question.
What are you going to do?
What can I do?
What can the average American citizen do to get your plan enacted?
In other words, we have to get a grip on this.
We've lost control of our elections.
I almost didn't vote this past time simply because I knew it wouldn't count because it's not a matter of who you vote for.
It's who's counting the votes that matters now.
And we've got to get a grip on this or we're going down the tubes even faster than we already are.
We've got to get the plan enacted.
We cannot do it without the right people elected.
And then we have to use their system to get elected.
It's frustrating.
Look, forget what side of the aisle you're on.
Democrat, Republican.
If you look at this mess in Arizona and we're still waiting on some of the results for some of these house races, especially in California, and you look at the mess in Alaska and the mess in Nevada, and then you look at your state of North Carolina did a phenomenal job.
You know, the state of Florida did a phenomenal job.
Most states have done a phenomenal job.
And you can't look at this and walk away feeling any or having any degree of confidence in the integrity of this system.
And we're so much better than this, which is my point.
And unfortunately, you do have a party that likes it chaotic.
You know, you do have a party that doesn't want voter ID.
You do have a party that thinks it's to their advantage to have all this early voting.
Look, if we can't change the system, which right now we can't, some states can and hopefully will, and maybe they all should go to paper ballots.
They are voting, make it a holiday, and have partisan observers watching the voting and the vote counting.
If we can't get to that, we have to, Republicans, conservatives must embrace early voting, and you're just going to have to do it whether you like it or not.
When you're starting voting on election day, 30 points down, that's a lot of ground to make up.
And that's what's been happening.
And, you know, one thing I think every state needs to adopt as well, there shouldn't be any voting until all the debates are over.
You know, a lot of things happen in debates.
People change their minds as a result of debates.
And that didn't happen.
That perfect case in point would be Pennsylvania.
Nobody, they were the complicit media hid John Fetterman, hid his radical record, never asked him questions, let him hide in the basement.
And we barely saw the guy, and I don't think that's even the reason why Oz didn't win there.
I think the reason had to do with the top of the ticket.
And Maastriano, you know, has these very rigid positions on abortion in a purple state.
It doesn't fly if you don't have exceptions for rape, incest, and the mother's life.
I'm speaking purely politically here.
It did not fly.
He lost by 14 points.
The most of any Democrat Shapiro won by the largest margin any first-time governor is won by in like 70 years.
That ought to tell you that that's and then, of course, Oz got double-digit, you know, ticket splitting, but you know, double-digit ticket splitting is almost impossible to achieve.
I believe, I believe that Okra Winfrey, I believe that she, when she harpooned him in the neck, I said right then, can you believe it?
And that was that a playoff the Harfo name?
It sounds like it.
No, that was just that was just, I couldn't, I didn't want to say she shot.
You should have taken credit because it would have been perfect.
Hey, listen, how is the Mantis X laser?
Oh, man, I'm telling you.
She said, Joe, she said, listen, I need more practice, but I don't feel good about going to the range and burning up all that money.
I said, well, I heard Sean and Linda talking about this praying Mantis or Mantis something that was Mantis.
I'm not a praying Mantis.
Well, you attach it to your firearm.
Now, look, Linda, what was your score the first time?
I know we talked about it earlier.
It's a nine.
I know.
It's a nine.
It really is between a nine and an 11.
Okay, and what was my first score?
Do you remember?
100.
Yes, it was.
But I was a marksman when I was 10 and 11.
But I have not fired a weapon, to be honest, in a long time, except for my burner, which I love.
It's a gun that shoots projectiles of pepper spray and what do you call tear gas, and it incapacitates people.
But they have these inert practice projectiles that I use.
Anyway, so I used it, and I immediately was right up there.
And the guys were kind of shocked.
They're like, you shoot better than 99% of trained police officers that we know.
Anyway, so I felt good about that.
Go ahead and order it.
Linda, actually, for her to get, what was your first score?
Nine?
Are you enjoying this?
I think you and this call are having way too much fun on this.
Yes.
What was your first score?
It was a nine, then an 11, then a 43, then a 70.
What a nine means.
A nine means you're aiming at a house and you miss the entire house.
That's just me.
Get a nine.
No, it means I may have hit the door.
Trigger.
Get your trigger worked on so it's got a little bit easier to pull.
I'll tell you what I'm going to do, Joe.
You've been listening to me for all these years.
I want to say thank you to you.
Stay on the line.
I'm going to get your address and we're going to mail you out a book, Live Free or Die, and I'm going to send you a Mantis X system, okay?
You're the man, and we love you in North Carolina.
We always have.
And we loved you in Georgia.
We loved you in South Carolina, where I've lived.
And the bottom line is you've got to stay right there because you give us hope, and we need it.
I appreciate it.
And yes, we do miss Rush a lot.
Nobody can replace him.
But let me tell you something, Joe.
I have hope.
You know, we won the House of Representatives, and people not understanding this yet.
I think the moment that Nancy Pelosi hands over that gavel to probably Kevin McCarthy by the looks of it today, once that happens, I think people begin to put a smile on their face and they're going to feel awfully good about it in January.
I promise you, maybe people have to see that to understand the power of that, but that means the committee chairmanships are now ours.
That means that the power to subpoena is ours.
Investigative powers are ours.
That means the power of the purse is ours.
This is a dramatic change.
Nope.
You know, look, look, everything that I said, I really thought that Arizona was going to be a stretch.
I thought Nevada was going to be a stretch.
When we talked about New York and Michigan and Washington state, that was a huge stretch.
But we talked about it because we didn't want to leave anything on the table and have a close election and regret not looking into it.
None of this surprises me.
And I will say this, two months before Election Day, when I found out that the gubernatorial Republican candidate in Pennsylvania had no exceptions on abortion, I made some phone calls and I'm like, if this is his position, we're dead.
And it turned out to be the case because they just hammered him on it.
And I knew that case, but you won in North Carolina.
We won down in Florida.
Hopefully Herschel can pull this out.
That would be a huge win.
We won in Wisconsin.
We won in Ohio.
You know, we won the House.
I'm not looking at a glass.
I'm not being pollyannish about it.
I'm just saying we did what I thought our bottom basement number would be.
And we're going to have a much better map come two years from now.
So I'm very hopeful.
I really am.
Listen, stay on the line.
Let me send you Mantis X. You're going to love it.
Now, is this for a friend of yours or for you?
No, it's for me and my wife.
All right.
I'm giving it to you and your wife.
I'm wishing you a happy Thanksgiving and a Merry Christmas ahead of time, okay?
Thank you, sir.
It's the same to you.
I'm very honored to have your support.
I'm humbled by it.
I appreciate it.
All right, that's going to wrap things up for today.
We'll load it up tonight.
Hannity, Fox News.
In our hour, Donald Trump makes his announcement.
Is he running or not?
We will know.
We'll have full coverage of all of it.
Nine Eastern, Sety DVR.
Hannity, Fox News.
See you tonight.
Back here tomorrow.
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