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Sept. 11, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
01:16:04
20240911_trump-vs-harris-debate-the-verdict
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
Trump Takes The Bait 00:14:58
He took the hook, he took the line, he took the singer, he took the entire freaking boat.
No, no, my rallies are bigger than your rallies.
She also had the host on her side.
It was his failure to jump in and get the answers he wanted.
He didn't take the bait while she was sneering and jeering at him.
If we want to go for a round two, I say as a staunch Trump supporter, bring it on.
Well, Donald Trump and his supporters have rightly complained for weeks that Carmela Harris is dodging questions on her record, her platform, and her litany of U-turns.
Last night was a massive opportunity to ask those questions and to land a decisive blow in the race for the White House.
But Trump didn't take it.
Harris laid out a series of glaring traps for the former president like a cartoon mouse.
Distracted by the cheese, he became ensnared by all of them.
Right off the bat, she was asked a simple question about the economy and responded with babble.
When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?
So I was raised as a middle-class kid, and I am actually the only person on this stage who has a plan that is about lifting up the middle class and working people of America.
I believe in the ambition, the aspirations, the dreams of the American people.
What does any of that really mean?
Trump didn't capitalize on that word salad.
In fact, he allowed Harris to deflect and distract him all night in a way he wouldn't normally allow to happen.
When Harris was pressed on the crisis at the border, which should have been a home run for Trump, she snared him with rage bait about his rallies, and it worked.
You will see during the course of his rallies, he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter.
He will talk about windmills cause cancer.
And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.
People don't go to her rallies.
There's no reason to go.
And the people that do go, she's bussing them in and paying them to be there and then showing them in a different light.
So she can't talk about that.
People don't leave my rallies.
We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.
That's because people want to take their country back.
Our country is being lost.
We're a failing nation.
In fishing parlance, Carmela put out the rod and caught a big one.
Remember, at that point, they were supposed to be debating Carmela's record on immigration.
Instead, she got exactly what she wanted.
Trump was visibly irritated and never really got unirritated.
Well, today, the big headline on immigration is that Trump repeated a crazy story about Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs.
On abortion, where polling shows that Trump is weakest, he ranted about babies being executed after nine months.
Not until the very end of the debate in his closing statement did Trump deliver the message he should have been hammering all night.
So she just started by saying she's going to do this, she's going to do that, she's going to do all these wonderful things.
Why hasn't she done it?
She's been there for three and a half years.
They've had three and a half years to fix the border.
They've had three and a half years to create jobs and all the things we talked about.
Why hasn't she done it?
That was the line, which he should have hammered for 90 minutes.
Americans felt richer and the world felt safer.
When I was in the White House, he should have said, you guys have been asleep at the wheel.
But it was too little too late.
Harris was the clear winner.
Today there's a lot of talk about the apparently biased ABC News moderators.
And I think Trump has a point.
They roasted him with barbed questions and rapidly fact-checked him throughout, while Harris gleefully repeated bogus claims about Project 2025, find people on both sides, the bloodbath and dictator on day one.
But Trump must have known all that was coming.
He should have had better responses.
He's got 54 days left to come up with a better response.
Well, joining me now is the host of Tommy Lohren as Fearless on Outkick, Tommy Lehran, host of the Michael Knowles Show, Michael Knowles, founder and CEO of The Young Turks, Check Yuga.
Taylor Swift was sadly unavailable.
And host of No Lie with Brian Taylor, Tyler Cohen, Brian Tyler Cohen.
So Check, you're the only one without your name on the title.
What's the matter with you?
Because our network is gigantic.
It's not just about me.
Let me start with you, Check, because you've repeatedly called me a Trump sympathizer, a Trump whisperer, a Trump supporter, all these ridiculous things.
I'm very happy, as I tweeted earlier, to say to you that I think Carmela Harris not only won the debate last night, she won it quite comfortably.
And I was very surprised by that.
I thought she began nervously, but grew in confidence.
Trump started confidently and then pretty much lost the plot and responded to a lot of her deliberate goading in entirely the way she would have hoped.
So I think it was a big win for Carmela Harris.
It may not move the needle in the immediate aftermath in terms of the election, but in terms of momentum and in terms of what happened to the Democrats after the last debate, you got to say it was a good night.
Yeah, Piers, look, in your intro, you're fair and you're right.
Kyle Myers definitely won and Donald Trump clowned himself.
But you're kind of rooting for Trump and you could tell that you were disappointed in how it went.
So I get it.
You guys are friends.
It's okay.
I'm actually, you've always missed Katagram, just to be clear.
I'm not disappointed.
I just, I genuinely thought he was going to win.
They're different things.
And he didn't win.
And that's a problem for Trump and a good night for Carmela Harris.
And so they're different things.
You know, I don't have a horse in the race.
I can't vote for anybody.
I do know Trump way better than I know Carmela Harris.
But I'm always trying to be fair.
I've told you this before.
And I think I'm being fair now when I absolutely say Carmela won.
Yeah, I hear you.
Look, your bias, whether it's slight or significant, is irrelevant.
Don't sweat it, okay?
I'm not biased.
You know what?
You know what, Piers?
I pardon you.
All right, let's move on.
So, yeah, so seriously, look, I was on here after the Biden-Trump debate, and I said Biden got annihilated, and he did, right?
You have to be fair and objective.
And I think you were in the intro here.
There's no question that Trump got annihilated here.
And MAGA has the same problem that the establishment has.
The establishment thinks that everybody thinks like them.
And they think, oh, my God, doesn't everybody love the status quo?
No.
The overwhelming majority of the country constantly wants change because their lives are not as good as the millionaire anchors on television.
But television anchors just cannot get that through their heads, right?
And they love corporate rule, but the rest of the country doesn't.
And MAGA has the same problem because they think, oh, doesn't everybody know that Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs?
I saw an out-of-context video online that right-wing media told me was Haitians.
Oh, that's it.
All the immigrants are eating cats and dogs.
Look, MAGA, you're not getting it.
No one else thinks that.
First of all, it's not true.
The local cops say it's not true.
Everybody says it's not true.
But not only that, the rest of the country doesn't think like you.
So when you say stuff like that, you sound unhinged.
When you insist Trump still won the election as Trump did last night, you sound unhinged.
When you talk about post-birth abortions, that's not a thing that exists.
I know in your mind, you think it does, but A, it doesn't in objective reality.
That's just called murder.
And there is no such law in America at all.
Right-wing media lied to you through and through and tricked you.
But most importantly, the people that are going to decide this election are not MAGA, are not establishment.
They're guys in the middle.
And when they see Trump talking about eating cats and dogs and executing babies, he looks nuts and it drives them all into Kamala Harris's arms.
So if you're MAGO, you should be furious at Trump tonight for today.
Let me go to Tommy first on this.
Tommy, I want to play that clip where he talked about the Haitian migrants eating pets.
Let's take a look.
What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country and look at what's happening to the towns all over the United States.
And a lot of towns don't want to talk.
It's not going to be Aurora or Springfield.
A lot of towns don't want to talk about it because they're so embarrassed by it.
In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in.
They're eating the cats.
They're eating the pets of the people that live there.
And this is what's happening in our country.
The thing is, Tommy, that should have been a home run for Trump, right?
This is absolutely his wheelhouse.
She was the border czar.
She's dropped the ball massively.
That's all he had to say.
But going down this ridiculous conspiracy rabbit hole of migrants eating everyone's pets, which had already been discredited, certainly there's no actual evidence to prove it at the moment.
It just seemed, you know, as Chenk says, he sounded a bit nuts.
And he lost the momentum of what should have been a home run.
I don't disagree that he missed a huge opportunity to hold her to account on the border invasion that happened on her watch.
She didn't answer why she let 10 million plus in.
That was a question she was asked that she dodged because the low-hanging fruit is to talk about the bipartisan border bill.
But I don't disagree with you.
Trump had an opportunity to hold her feet to the fire and he didn't do it.
Now, I will also say this.
If Donald Trump wanted to talk about Springfield, Ohio, or Aurora, Colorado, other communities that are being devastated by mass immigration of foreign nationals, he could have taken that opportunity because it's a very real thing that's happening.
Sanctuary cities are going broke and bankrupt, taking care of millions of people that have been thrown into their communities that refused to assimilate.
He could have discussed it in that way because these communities are being devastated and you have people at city council meetings that are quite frankly talking about it.
But he chose to go a different route.
I wish he had not done that.
I wish he would have taken the bait.
There's no doubt he took the bait.
He took the hook.
He took the line.
He took the singer.
He took the entire freaking boat.
And I am frustrated by that.
And I am intellectually honest enough to say it.
I wish he had not done that.
He missed several opportunities last night.
But that does not change the fact that Kamala Harris's record, both in 2020 and three and a half years in office, is abysmal.
I wish he would have focused on that.
Yeah, I agree.
Let me bring in Michael actually on this as another conservative here.
Were you disappointed when that debate finished, that Trump played it the way he did?
I thought it finished strong.
I felt that Trump's closing statement was excellent.
I agree with you, Piers.
He should have given the closing statement probably as the introductory statement.
I thought Trump did very well for the first 20 or 25 minutes.
I thought that was a pretty clear victory.
And then when Kamala, quite good at manipulating people, was able to get him to fall for the trap on the crowd sizes, that did throw things.
However, that was also when the moderators stepped in, the so-called moderators.
And so you really did have a three-on-one debate at that point.
There were missed opportunities, but Chenk earlier mentioned that President Trump said all sorts of things that aren't true.
And the example he used was the notion of post-birth abortion, the notion that babies are killed through abortion after birth.
And Lindsay Davis, who was one of the so-called moderators, made this point when she fact-checked Trump.
But she was wrong, and Chenk is wrong.
And this is really happening.
And the irony of it is that one of the chief proponents of killing babies who survive abortion after birth is Kamala Harris' own running mate, Tim Walz.
This is not difficult to look up.
Within the past couple of years, Governor Walls in Minnesota repealed legal requirements that would force doctors who have babies who have survived abortions to provide medical care for them as they would to any other patient.
So that is happening.
When President Trump quoted the Democrat governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, who said that after a baby is born, if the mother doesn't want it, they'll have a conversation with the doctor, see what they're going to do.
That's on tape.
You don't need to take my word for it.
You can go watch it on tape.
So there were multiple instances of the moderators intervening and lying on Kamala's behalf.
And then they never at any point fact-checked Kamala's lies.
So I agree.
I'm not saying it was the greatest performance ever.
I think there were a number of missed opportunities from President Trump.
I suspect his campaign advisors told him not to get aggressive.
I thought it was crazy that he never called out the moderators.
People always ought to attack the media in politics.
You know what I thought, Michael?
I just thought at the end that he was a bit boring, Trump.
And the one thing he cannot be is boring because the point of Trump is he's so different to every other politician.
He either makes you laugh or he shocks you or he's combative or there's stuff always going on, which is compelling.
I just didn't find Trump very compelling last night.
I just felt that he was very repetitive and he got caught in various traps that were laid for him way too easily.
But ultimately, I just thought he wasn't very entertaining either.
So on every level, he wasn't Trump-like.
I agree.
There were a few moments where there should have been more pizzazz.
But then don't forget when he was talking about the cats and the dogs and the Haitian migrants, which we're all calling it a discredited story.
But of course, there are Springfield residents talking about this.
And really, all of the kind of evocative graphic details are really just there to call people's attention to the fact that Kamala Harris brought 300,000 people from a failed state with rampant cannibalism into the middle of America.
That's something that most Americans don't like.
When he did get a little spicier, he had some good lines about sending Kamala Harris a MAGA hat and how her economic policy that she stole from Biden and from him amounted to a run spot run.
There were some decent lines.
I just felt he had to get aggressive in a different way.
And he especially has to get aggressive on the moderators if they're going to intervene.
Yeah, because I don't think he's worked out quite how to do that with Kamala Harris.
I mean, bring in Brian.
I mean, Brian, look, I think it was a clear win for her.
I think also the fact that Taylor Swift, the biggest pop star on the planet, arguably ever, has come out with such a ringing, emphatic endorsement when many people thought she may just avoid doing that altogether.
Everyone kind of knew her leanings, but they thought maybe, you know, she's with this big burly NFL guy, very popular in middle America.
You know, would she actually show her colors in such an emphatic way?
Well, she did, and she chose Kamala's big win night to do it.
So a double win, I think, for Kamala Harris, especially with young women who would have been watching that debate, heard all the abortion stuff, saw Taylor Swift's comments and so on.
Attacking The Moderators 00:10:51
But, and it's an important but really, this race is absolutely wafer thing.
I had Nate Silver from 5038 on last week saying it literally is as close as it could possibly be.
Do you really think that this will move the needle in the race?
Or has it, what it's really done, has it given the Democrats more impetus, particularly after the debate debacle with Joe Biden?
Do I really think that Taylor Swift's endorsement where her biggest audience is Gen Z, which is the smallest vote, which is the biggest voting block, but the voting block in which the fewest people vote?
And she just posted to millions of people a voter registration link in her Instagram.
Do I think that that will have an impact in this election where the margins are probably going to be decided by tens of thousands or just thousands of votes?
Absolutely.
And I think that we should take advantage of every opportunity that we get.
It's important to note, too, that Donald Trump forced her hand.
This was an unforced error because he was so desperate to lie about accepting her endorsement by posting some AI Swifties for Trump photo.
He couldn't help himself but lie.
And so that forced her hand in terms of then going out there and saying, look, I don't know if I would have said anything, but because there was manipulated video, manipulated photos out there, I thought the right course of action was to correct the record and let my actual position be known.
And so because this guy is incapable of telling the truth, because he has to wield lies on a daily basis, because every time he opens his mouth, he has to spew disinformation and misinformation, he screwed himself here.
And so he's the one that's going to be hurt from all of this.
But moving back to just something that I think Michael said, and Cheng said, Cheng started off very rightly talking about how Republicans and Donald Trump seem unhinged by perpetuating these ideas that dogs and cats are being eaten and that women are having post-birth abortions.
And the first thing that Michael does when he comes on here is perpetuate these exact claims.
Look, you guys can do this until you're blue in the face.
With evidence.
I don't know how to convey the extent to which when Republicans say this kind of stuff, it does not resonate with normal people.
And you seem crazy.
And Donald Trump went out there on stage, got laughed at by the entire nation.
And then Michael, you come on here and you do the exact same thing.
So please triple down on this.
Quadruple down on this.
Make this election a referendum on this bogus notion that women are executing their babies after they're born.
I beg of you, we'll see how that works out.
Okay.
Brian, just to respond briefly, Ryan, all I did was refer to the law that Kamala Harris's running mate passed as the governor of Minnesota, the position that he currently holds.
So, you know, if you think that sounds crazy or wild or I don't know what to tell you because I suppose we're living in different countries.
I think Cheng made a much better point than Ryan just made.
And Chenk's point was that Americans want change.
They don't like the status quo.
And I think that's absolutely true.
And I do think this was the missed opportunity of the debate.
The status quo is Kamala Harris.
She's the vice president.
She's been imbued with presidential authority on immigration and other issues.
So the change agent is Donald Trump here.
That's what the debate's got to be about.
That's what the election focus has to be about.
But actually, most viewers would have had the complete opposite impression.
I mean, somehow, miraculously, Cheng, I thought Kamala Harris managed to present herself as the change option here, which given the fact she's been VP for nearly four years is extraordinary.
Ben Shapiro, your great friend, tweeted this.
This debate won't matter.
The American people still know nothing about Kamala Harris's positions.
Donald Trump is still Donald Trump, and the legacy media are still a giant flaming dog turd.
Okay.
So first of all, I'm enjoying everybody saying that I'm right.
Thank you, guys.
So in this debate, Kamala Harris, you know, the right-wing is saying, manipulated Donald Trump into being dumb and saying dumb things.
Well, what does that tell you about Donald Trump?
I mean, really, guys, you know it too if you're a right-winger.
He got manipulated that easily.
He's such a spoiled little child.
The minute you mention his toy, which is the rallies, he's like, no, no, my rallies are bigger than your rallies.
Come on, you're running for president, brother.
Be a little bit bigger than that.
But he can't help himself.
He's a tiny, weak, weak man.
That's why he was baited so easily.
His mind is weak.
So look, as the conservatives here talking about post-birth abortion, really name one case in the entire country where a woman had a baby and then executed it.
And the state said, oh, that's totally okay.
We allow post-birth abortion.
You can't name one case because this never happened.
And you guys sound absolutely nuts when you say it.
So I agree with Brian.
He's saying nuts so fair.
In fact, hold on.
I'm not done yet.
Hold on.
And then now attacking the moderators.
Attacking the moderators is so weak.
First of all, there's no crying in politics.
So when you cry about the moderators, you're just telling everybody we lost the debate.
Thank you for admitting it.
Second of all, now some right-wing media loons are talking about arresting the ABC moderators and shutting down ABC.
Okay, do you know how pathetic and unhinged you sound when you make statements like that?
First of all, what happened to free press?
I thought you guys were in favor of free speech.
All of a sudden, when your feelings get hurt, shut it down, shut down, the whole time.
Arrest them.
What happened to castle culture?
Okay, so look, guys, if you don't want people to think you're going to be nuts and dictatorial, don't say things like, we're going to arrest debate moderators for doing fact checks.
And don't say that people are eating cats and dogs and then they're cannibals, as Michael said.
What are you talking about?
Look, anyway, Brian's right.
Katie has a rant.
Let me bring Tommy.
Let me hold it.
Let me bring Tommy to us.
I thought this was an important part as well.
This is when Kamala Harris talked about Vladimir Putin and said that Putin would eat Trump for lunch.
Let's take a look at this.
What you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator who would eat you for lunch?
Now, Tommy, it's interesting because Trump has always presented himself as the strong man on the world stage.
And you're looking at these two candidates last night and thinking, which one would be a more effective, powerful commander-in-chief?
What did you think of that exchange?
Was Trump robust enough in going back at Kamala Harris?
It seemed to me like she kept jabbing him with stuff like that, and he wasn't really coming back hard.
Well, there's no doubt that this was very choreographed by the Kamala Harris team, and she did an excellent job executing that performance.
It was an act, and she did a great job.
I'm not going to sit here and pretend that she didn't.
She knew exactly what to say, and she knew exactly how to say it to get Donald Trump to say the lines that the American people are sick of hearing.
The American people didn't want to hear him say anything nice about Putin because the Russia, Russia, Russia, we've been through this before.
I don't know why he took that bait.
All he would have had to say is, listen, in my administration, I defeated ISIS in the Caliphate.
There were no new wars.
There was no incursion by Russia into Ukraine, as there were during the Obama administration and certainly during the Biden administration.
He could have doubled down on his discussion of China and how he really put China on its heels.
He could have said all of those things, how he bankrupted Iran, which he did to an extent, but he could have hammered down on those more.
Unfortunately, he took the bait.
What I'm most disappointed in is the ABC moderators' failure to hold Kamala to account on her flip-flops.
They didn't hold her to that.
I think they asked exactly one question on the economy.
It was the first one, and she didn't answer it.
I think if we're talking about the poor performance by the ABC moderators, not only do I think it was a three-on-one, I think they could have asked more questions that the American people actually cared about.
Talking about moving forward, they spent so much time talking about 2020, about the election, about January 6th.
They could have talked about the future.
I wish they would have done that.
I wanted to hear more about the plans and the policy positions of Kamala Harris and why she's not the same as she was in 2019 and 2020.
That's what I wanted to hear.
That's not what we were given.
I think it was a failure on Donald Trump's part to redirect, but I also think it was a failure on ABC's behalf to talk about the things the American people actually care about.
Yeah, I mean, Michael, I'm going to play a mashup of all Kamala's facial expressions because she kept turning and looking directly at Trump, and it was quite effective.
Let's take a look.
In fact, I was going to send her a MAGA hat.
She's gone to my philosophy, but if she ever got elected, she'd change it.
Her father's a Marxist professor in economics, and he taught her well.
But when you look at what she's done to our country, like they have, and policies like they have, I don't say her because she has no policy.
Now, Michael, it was a very deliberate, aesthetic thing that she was doing, which was to keep turning to Trump and kind of laugh at him, mock him, look aghast at him, and so on.
And, you know, you can look at it two ways.
You could say she overhanded, but I did think it was quite effective to viewers watching her own.
I found it war a little bit thin, but de gustebus no despotant de mest, so, you know, people's mileage may vary with that.
There was a real irony with the rules around this debate and Kamala's facial and even vocal interjections, which is during that first debate back in June, Joe Biden wanted the mics to be cut when the opponent wasn't speaking.
And Trump agreed to that eventually, and that rule ended up really helping Trump.
Then in this debate, Kamala wanted the mics to be on so she could have her I'm speaking moment, and Trump insisted that the mics remain off.
And ironically, it seems to have helped Kamala here, because I think had her mic been on and she had interjected with all of these rude remarks and her over-the-top facial expressions, I think it would have made Trump look even calmer and more presidential by comparison.
So she did relatively well.
And the other really impressive thing that she did in debate prep is she got rid of that crazy cackle.
That crazy cackle she's had on the campaign trail for decades at this point.
That disappeared overnight.
And whoever prepped her on that deserves a prize in political science.
Well, she also, Brian, she also, she didn't do too much of the word salad stuff.
I mean, she did right off the top when she clearly looked nervous.
But once she settled in, we didn't get the normal stream of word salad stuff, which I thought, again, was a plus for her.
But the big question for Kamala Harris now is, you know, she's ended up winning the debate.
Fantastic night for her.
Good for the Democrats.
Stolen Debate Moments 00:14:49
What does she do now to try and win the election?
50 odd days to go.
I think she continues doing what she did on that debate stage.
That debate stage was a microcosm of this actual debate, which was to draw the contrast between somebody who beats his chest about law and order while simultaneously presenting himself as a 34-time convicted felon, continuing to hammer away at the fact that Donald Trump is responsible for overturning Roe in this country, which is an issue that has killed Republicans, that has cost Republicans elections in Virginia and Ohio and Kansas and Kentucky and Alabama,
while Kamala Harris has presented herself as a champion of abortion rights.
And really, to put on full display her vision for the future, I think what's so interesting is that Tommy brought up this idea that the onus was on Kamala Harris to present some vision for the future.
And if we think about this election, this election, as far as Trump is concerned, is entirely predicated on seeking vengeance for what happened on January 6th.
He wants to release the January 6th insurrectionists who've been prosecuted, who've been indicted and charged.
He is solely focused on getting retribution for those people for what happened on January 6th.
He was asked in this debate whether he would sign a nationwide abortion ban multiple times, refused to answer it.
You want to talk about a vision for the future?
He won't talk about what he's offering for the future.
He's solely focused on relitigating events of the past.
Brian, Donald Trump on his campaign website, the first link is the platform page.
It's a 20-point, fairly specific plan on what he will do on inflation, on immigration, on he's said repeatedly he doesn't want a national abortion ban on foreign affairs.
Kamala Harris, until two days ago, did not have a policy page on her website.
It was only when some of us in the conservative media pointed out that she was lacking in this vision that they threw one up and it was shown by the source code that much of it was stolen from Biden.
The rest of it was stolen from Trump.
So I agree she had a rather good night, obviously with a lot of help from the ABC moderators, but I think it is preposterous to say that she presented a vision for the future.
There was very little policy substance discussed at all.
And if there is going to be a second debate, this I think would be the silver lining in the stormcloud for Republicans.
Is President Trump needs to make sure that the focus is entirely on policy?
They open up asking Kamala about the economy.
She starts talking about when she was a little girl in the middle class or whatever.
They bring up immigration.
She starts talking about crowd sizes.
She has got nothing on policy because the Kamala Harris Joe Biden record on policy has been three and a half years of unmitigated failure.
If Trump can focus on that in the next debate, he wins.
Okay, Tommy, you've got a legal point.
Hang on a second, because Tommy has to go.
Just quickly, Tommy, before you go, what advice would you give Trump?
You've always been, I think, very, you know, friendly critical towards him, I think, in an admirable way, when many just blindly go in the tank for him or blindly the other way.
What advice do you give him to try and now retrieve what I think has been quite a damaging 24 hours for him?
Right.
Well, I think that he needs to act very presidential, especially in these next couple of weeks.
He needs to show the American people that he can, in fact, restrain himself.
And sometimes that's not easy for him to do.
I think we all know that.
It can be his biggest attribute, but it also can make him his own worst enemy.
I'm not going to make any bones about that.
But I would also say my advice to Donald Trump would be this: no more rallies.
You don't need to do rallies.
Do smaller events, do town halls, do more interviews, do more podcasts.
And Kamala Harris made one point last night that unfortunately I have to agree with.
When he does these rallies, he goes off on tangents.
He rambles.
It's not helpful to him.
He needs to be very concise.
He needs to learn how to be brief and not ramble and hit the issues square on because he wins on the issues.
So I hope that he does that.
He needs to take a page out of Ronald Reagan's book.
He can still be charismatic.
He can still be a performer, but he really has to buckle down and get back to business.
I'd also like to see him bring Elian Conway back on the team because I think that he needs better advisors.
I think his advisors are doing him a disservice by just telling him to do whatever the hell he wants.
It's not working.
Or he's not listening to his advisors, which could also be true.
Tommy, great to have you back in Uncensored.
I know you're going to leave us.
Thank you very much indeed.
Cheng, question for you.
Did you share Kamala Harris's pride that Dick Cheney has given her his endorsement, given that in 2008, the president of the United States, Joe Biden, described Dick Cheney as the most dangerous vice president in American history?
Yeah, no, I did not.
That was one of the low moments for Kamala Harris.
The Democrats have to stop bragging about the Cheneys.
I don't know if they know this.
Dick Cheney left office with an approval rating of about 9%.
So look, she did wonderful jiu-jitsu on immigration.
Got him talking about eating cats and dogs when it should have been a strength.
It was a massive weakness for him.
But on this issue, the Republican Party is the one that gave us Dick Cheney.
And they gave us the Iraq war and the endless wars and the corruption and all of that.
Stick them with it.
Instead, embracing it is not the right way to go.
But it goes to my point that I've been saying all along, Piers, which is that people can't think outside their own bubble.
The establishment thinks, oh, doesn't everybody love Dick Cheney?
We all love Dick Cheney.
of everyone who was in power and we kiss up to them.
No, the country hates Dick Cheney.
And MAGA thinks, oh yeah, babies are being executed all over the country because of Tim Woz.
Yeah, A, it's not true.
And B, no one else believes that.
So if you keep saying it, it's not going to help your cause.
And Piers, you know what I've been saying for about a year now.
Biden was too old and Trump was too crazy.
And the first debate showed that Biden was too old and the second debate showed that Trump was too crazy.
Yeah, I mean, Brian, I know you wanted to come back to what something Michael said earlier, by all means do that.
But I think what's happened here is that any preconception Republicans may have had that Kamala Harris would be a walkover and that there was no real difference between her or Biden in terms of impact on the race itself.
I think that has now gone up in smoke.
She is definitely a better candidate than Biden would have ever been, given his current cognitive state.
And the momentum she will get from last night should not be underestimated.
But nor should Trump's ability to bounce back.
In a way, he's at his most dangerous as a politician, I would argue, when his feet are being torched.
I mean, I'll show you the cover of Time magazine, which is quite clever.
And it has an image of Trump in a golf cart, trapped in a bunker.
We call them bunkers here, a trap to American golfers.
And there he is in his cart, in the trap.
And the headline is in trouble.
But the thing about Trump is he's a much better golfer than people think he is.
He can get out of bunkers, traps, in golf very well.
And he's also proved himself to be very good at getting out of political traps, even though he fell into a few last night.
Are you concerned that the bear's been poked and may come back hard?
And maybe Kamala Harris won't be able to handle that?
I completely disagree.
I think that when Donald Trump is backed into a corner, he only hurts himself.
I mean, look at what he said when he wasn't getting any attention because Kamala surged onto the screen.
Her rallies were explosive.
She was drawing in more people than he was.
And so what did he do?
He went on national TV and said that she wasn't black.
And then he had a press conference the next day at Mar-a-Lago where he said that his rallies drew more people than Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech.
Every time he's backed into a corner, he tries to kind of grab back the attention with some insane thing that might be fun for his base, but it's not going to help him.
People watching Donald Trump say insane things is only going to help him with the people who are already supporting him.
But for that sliver of people in the middle, the sliver of people who are going to decide this race, these conservative Democrats, these independents, these pro-democracy Republicans, these low propensity voters, young people, people of color, they're not going to watch Donald Trump brag that his crowd size was bigger than Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech and think that's my guy.
I've been waffling all this time, but now I know that that's my guy.
I also want to harken back to something that Michael said before, which is that this idea that Kamala Harris, when she's running right now, she's running on all this baggage of the Biden-Harris administration.
We have more than 16 million jobs added.
We have a record high stock market.
We have the lowest unemployment in 50 years.
We have the strongest economy in the entire world.
We've had more legislation passed under Joe Biden in the first two years of his administration than we've had in any administration in modern American history.
This idea that this administration hasn't done a good job, that our economy is strong, that the United States is performing well, not only relative to the rest of the world, but relative to where we've stood in the past, is a complete denial of reality.
I get that.
I think what I'm trying to wish cast are trying to reality.
I'll sort of hold the panel for a moment.
Michael, you can respond in a moment.
Well, we're being joined now by the former Navy SEAL and Texas Congressman Representative Dan Crenshaw.
Dan, thank you so much for joining Uncensored.
A lot of reaction, obviously, to last night's debate.
My honest opinion is that Trump lost it because the expectation was that he would rough Kamala Harris up a bit and she would be exposed on the national stage and that would be it.
That didn't happen in boxing parlance.
I'd say she won on points.
What was your view?
It's about right, and it's frustrating because it's such an easy debate to win.
I just heard the talking point by one of your guests that somehow Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are responsible for this great economy.
I've never heard so much nonsense in my life.
I can show you all the numbers that discredit that idea.
The American Rescue Plan and their policies immediately resulted in record numbers of illegal immigrants crossing our border.
They resulted in record inflation right away.
Gas prices are 50% higher.
Electricity prices are 30% higher.
They claim they inherited a bad economy from Trump.
That's also nonsense.
By the time they took office, real GDP was back to pre-pandemic levels.
Under Trump, it had undergone its massive recovery.
Everything they say is a lie.
Now, the problem is that Trump didn't say what I just said.
That's the problem.
This is a very easy debate to win against Kamala Harris.
Now she's feeling good.
She's feeling confident.
I think Trump should take her up on that second debate.
If she's offering that, I think he should take her up on that.
But he needs to remain disciplined this time.
He needs to get new people around him who understand, who have maybe bothered once in their life to actually try to persuade an independent.
I do agree with some of what was said, is that there's too much pandering to the base.
And that's not necessary right now.
What's necessary is to actually convince independents.
And it's very easy to do because you got four years on one side, you got four years on the other.
You've got policies that took place and you've got the outcomes associated with those policies.
And it's a very, very clear distinction.
And on those distinctions, Trump wins running away.
All he has to do is talk about it.
Now, it should also be said, I've noticed a couple of things in that debate.
Well, he did take the bait too often and didn't nail her when it was, there were so many openings to nail her on policy.
I did notice that he was also very disciplined, at least in his physical appearance, right?
He didn't take the bait while she was sneering and jeering at him, condescendingly looking over, trying to get his attention the entire time.
She appeared very childish doing that.
He remained stoic.
He remained disciplined in that regard.
But again, missed a lot of opportunities because they were easy, easy to swap back at her.
Do you know what?
I just felt he wasn't entertaining in a way he normally is.
He just seemed a little bit dull.
He was repeating himself a lot.
He didn't laugh really at all.
He didn't really crack many good jokes.
This wasn't the normal rock star debater we're used to with Trump.
And as a result, it played into her hands, as did so many of the things that he did last night.
He is at the moment hesitant about a second debate.
Do you think it's imperative he does one and that this debate is not the only one that the American public sees?
I would absolutely suggest that he does another debate, but make sure that none of the people who prepared him for this debate are around because they didn't do a good job.
You need people who have actually bothered to try to persuade independent voters.
Again, very easy debate to win.
Very easy debate to win.
If you go in there knowing the facts, knowing your points that you want to make, then you can relax and be yourself.
As you noted, maybe he didn't feel like himself.
You can relax a lot more when you're confident in what you're saying.
When you've got those, I just stated those numbers.
You can memorize those numbers.
You can memorize those facts that actually matter when you're trying to make the comparison between a Kamala presidency and a Trump presidency.
It's very easy to win this debate.
And so my message to independent voters is, like, yeah, granted, she's a lawyer, right?
She's a prosecutor.
She knows how to push people's buttons.
That doesn't make her a good leader, and it doesn't make her policies any better for the American people.
There's still really, really bad policies.
Just because she's jeering over at him and trying to poke him doesn't make her a good potential president.
No, it made her quite a skillful debater on the night, actually.
I mean, you're a Navy SEAL, obviously.
From a commander-in-chief point of view, do you think that she came out of this debate with those credentials slightly better than she went in as a potential commander-in-chief?
I mean, not from my point of view, but look, I'm a Republican that thinks everything she stands for is wrong for her country.
So, you know, granted, I have some bias, but even on her personality, I've been observing Kamala Harris for quite some time now.
I've never thought at all that she is somebody that I would ever want in a commander-in-chief position.
She's defended the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
She's defended every policy Biden has put in place, to include basically letting the Russians continue to win in Ukraine.
Battling Undecided Voters 00:12:42
It took them multiple years for them to finally agree to better weapon systems to Ukraine to defend against the Russians.
That war could have been in a much different place right now if it weren't for their feckless leadership.
October 7th happened under her watch because they kept appeasing Iran.
All of this is on her.
She would make an absolutely terrible commander-in-chief.
And I'll tell you what, I mean, I know the troops do not want to be led by someone like her.
That I can say for sure.
Dan Credul, thank you very much indeed for joining me.
I appreciate it.
Appreciate it.
Let's go back to the panel.
Strong words there, Michael, from Dan.
I mean, I hope Trump listens to some of this stuff because he can get very pig-headed when he's got his back to the wall a bit.
He doesn't like being criticized.
He gets very defensive.
But that's probably not the response that he needs right now.
He needs to listen to critical friends, doesn't he?
Of course.
And I think what Dan said is basically exactly right there.
There was one good point that Trump landed in the debate on Ukraine when he said after Kamala boasted that she went over to negotiate with Zelensky and try to resolve this conflict that had been brewing between Russia and Ukraine.
And Trump pointed out, he said, yeah, you went over, you tried to solve it.
And then three days later, the Russians invade.
So clearly it didn't work out very well.
And to Dan's point, you don't just need to take a Republican congressman or a Republican author's words for it.
You can take Vladimir Zelensky's words for it.
He says that the Russians invaded basically because of Biden.
And Biden, in fact, in his own words, invited Putin to invade and said there wouldn't be much pushback if there were a minor incursion.
So you see that on foreign policy.
You see this issue on immigration and all of the numbers Dan cited on the economy, I think, are quite apt.
So then it puts Kamala in this very difficult position.
She's now describing her platform as a new path forward.
But of course, she's the sitting vice president.
The current vice president's a vegetable.
So she's probably effectively the president.
How is this a new path forward?
Well, if she's going to reject the policies of her own administration, what's she going to revert to?
All of her previously stated policies when she did run for president in 2020, though she had to get out before the first votes were cast, were to the left of Bernie Sanders, and they were deeply unpopular.
Medicare for all, including Medicare for All for illegal aliens, defund the police, bail rioters and criminals out of jail, which she did herself when she was raising money for them on Twitter, so on and so forth.
This puts her in a really difficult position because either she's got to defend the unpopular status and failed status quo or the even more unpopular policies she ran on the first time.
That's where Trump's got to pin her.
He's got to put her in this place where either way she moves, she harms herself with the voters.
And whoever prepares him for that next debate needs to make sure that that is where the focus is.
And he's always looking out to avoid the landmines that she can sometimes successfully lay for him.
Okay, we're running out of time a bit.
Cheng, final words from you about this.
How significant do you think this debate will end up being in this race?
Yeah, I think these two debates are potentially two of the most significant debates that have ever happened in a presidential election.
So they're a little bit of a microcosm of how they would do in office.
And Biden's brain melted in the first debate and he showed you he can't make it another four years and force him out of the race.
In this debate, Kamala Harris looked strong and in charge.
And she, as almost everyone here has acknowledged, easily manipulated Donald Trump into traps that he fell into.
But think about what that means.
So when she's talking to Putin or other foreign leaders, she's going to be prepared and strong and be able to manipulate them to our advantage.
Trump, on the other hand, was a fool.
He was easily manipulated, fell into every trap.
I mean, think about how unprepared he was.
And that's exactly how he was as president.
He never bothered to learn anything.
After the 2020 election, he thought that we could terminate the Constitution because he didn't like the result of the election.
That's not a thing.
There is no process for terminating the Constitution.
He kept saying clownish things throughout his time in office and in this debate because he never does his homework.
And that's how he is as president.
He's weak.
And the minute Kim Jong-un says, oh, I like you, he's like, okay, build all the nukes you want.
And so you saw there, that's exactly how every foreign leader manipulates Trump into their advantage and our disadvantage.
I don't want that stench of weakness in the Oval Office again.
Okay.
And Brian, your final thoughts.
My final thought is, you know, I've sat here listening to Dan, to Michael.
I believe Tommy made the same point about how Donald Trump has to fire his advisors.
When he comes back for the second debate, he can't listen to these people who've steered him wrong.
Does anybody actually think that Donald Trump took the advice of any of his advisors?
Does he think that he's disciplined enough to take any advice and not just revert back to exactly who he is, exactly the guy that we've seen for the past nearly a decade?
The second he's poked, he is so easy to bait that you could dangle a cookie in front of a four-year-old and they would have more discipline than Donald Trump.
This notion that his advisors are responsible for what happened on that debate stage is a joke.
It's also, you know, you look at someone like Ronna McDaniel, for example.
She was fired as RNC chair because Donald Trump always needs to blame somebody for his own shortcomings.
The reason that Republicans lost was not because of Ronna McDaniel or the RNC.
It's because people aligned with Donald Trump, aligned with the America First agenda, didn't present themselves well to the American people because they're lunatics and they lost.
But Donald Trump can't take responsibility for anything.
And so somebody else had to get thrown under the bus as a result of that.
What we saw on that debate stage was not the fault of his advisors.
It was not the fault of anybody on his team.
It was not the fault of anybody but Donald Trump.
He cannot take responsibility, which makes it especially ironic that he's running to represent the party of personal responsibility.
Okay.
And Michael, your final thought.
Well, I think Brian's point is demonstrably silly because Trump debated in a different way last night than he usually does.
And so I suppose what I'm calling for, Piers, I think what you had suggested too is that we get a little bit of that old Donald Trump back, that go after the media, that he focus a little bit more on the issues, bring a little bit more pizzazz into it.
Absolutely.
He has to do that sort of thing.
To your point, Ryan, you know, you say that Donald Trump does not appeal to the American people.
He doesn't repeal even to the Republican base.
That's why he's got to throw Ronnie McDaniel out.
Ronald McDaniel just left her position.
And guess what?
Donald Trump did something Kamala Harris was not able to do.
Donald Trump was able to win the Republican primary for president.
He was able to win his party's nomination fair and square through a process.
Kamala Harris tried to win her party's nomination one time.
She got thrown out of the race before the first vote was cast.
And so she was able to finagle her way behind the scenes through a palace coup to get rid of the current president and take the nomination.
Good for her.
That's all very impressive.
But I think this is why Kamala Harris made a big mistake by challenging Trump to another debate.
Because next time they might not be on the most liberal network news station.
Next time, they might not have a three-on-one debate.
Next time, Donald Trump might have better preparation going in.
And if that's the case, look, there is a reason that parties have primaries.
It's to battle test their candidates.
Kamala Harris remains completely untested.
The debate was supposed to test her, but she didn't get any difficult questions whatsoever.
And she had two people helping her out to beat Donald Trump.
If we want to go for a round two, I say, as a staunch Trump supporter, bring it on.
Panel, thank you very much indeed.
It was certainly a fascinating night in what has become one of the most unpredictable and gripping presidential races ever.
And long may it continue because it gives us plenty to talk about.
Thank you all very much.
Well, RFK Jr. will be joining me very shortly, but joining me right now is Polster and Pillars strategist Frank Luntz, who said a few days ago that the winner of the debate will win the election.
Well, Frank, do you think that's the case?
Do you think Kamala won?
And does that mean she may now win the election?
I think more accurately is that Donald Trump lost.
And this is not the worst debate performance I've seen in my career, but it's very close to it.
The conversations about people eating dogs and cats, calling the leader of Hungary one of the greatest world leaders, repeatedly missing the opportunity to focus on inflation and affordability, and the complete inability to present his point of view without completely tearing into her, into Joe Biden, into whomever was in his sights.
It was a pretty negative performance, pretty pessimistic, cynical, contemptuous.
And I think that this will cost him, yes.
I'm trying to decide if I want to go on record, and the answer is yes.
I think that he loses because of this debate performance.
Wow, really?
There are very few undecided voters left.
It's about 5% of the vote.
And they only matter in seven states.
And those states are too close to call.
So essentially, we're looking at less than 1% of America.
And they're going to spend $2 billion.
The whole race is going to focus on these tiny, this tiny sliver of the country.
But they heard nothing from Trump to give them a sense of anything that would be different going forward.
Harris did not talk about details.
She did not give her plans, no policies, no specifics.
We do know what she cares about, and we know what soundbites she uses.
And she was, other than her facial expressions, which were clearly demeaning and hurt her own messaging, she didn't make up any real slips.
She didn't, but she didn't tell us who she is.
She didn't prioritize.
And I actually think that this is pretty bad for the entire country.
That if these are the best that the Democrats and Republicans can do, it's pretty sad state for American democracy.
What I felt watching her was that she had determined clearly in advance that she was going to be prosecutorial, which obviously plays to her prosecutor's strengths.
That she was going to look at him directly repeatedly, mock him, scorn him when she believed he was saying ridiculous things for the optics that that would create.
But that she would also go after him quite hard in the way that she did, as if she was in a courtroom.
And Trump just seemed like he wasn't ready for that, which I find baffling because that was always going to be her best chance of taking on Trump, given her background.
He just did not seem ready.
And unlike with Hillary Clinton, he didn't know how to deal with it.
He didn't know how to handle her.
I agree with that.
In fact, maybe you should have been his debate prep person because he clearly didn't listen to the people in his ear.
The issue with Trump is that his campaign in the campaign in 2024 is better.
It is more tuned to what these undecided voters think.
It is more effective at drawing a distinction between his record and the Biden-Harris record.
And it delivers its negative message in an efficient way.
The only thing that's not working about the campaign is the candidate himself.
You're correct.
Now let's take it a step further.
Not only was he ill-prepared, but he could not stay on message.
He could not stay focused specifically on inflation, affordability, food, fuel, housing, health care, none of that.
And when given the chance to do it, he diverted onto some other issue that was simply ineffective.
And when he talked about immigration, which is his other strong point, he did so out of anger, out of bitterness, out of vitriol and revenge.
And that's not how people feel.
They want to be safe.
They want to be secure.
They want a strong border.
They agree with Trump.
But the way that he articulated it, this resentment and this ugliness, it's too much for undecided voters and it's going to hurt him come November.
I remember you saying in a Times interview, I think it was just before Biden pulled out of the race, but you said that in the end, it's Biden's inability to galvanize people to come out and vote for him, which may be the tipping point for him.
Swift Endorsement Shifts 00:02:38
Conversely, could it be that her performance last night by Kamala Harris, that that might galvanize just a few more people to feel like, yes, I'm going to come out, particularly given that Taylor Swift, the biggest pop star in the world, has come out with a really ringing endorsement.
And we know she has millions of Gen Z girls, young women, who abide by her every word.
Could that move the needle in terms of the polling and ultimately the votes?
Yes, it could.
And this is why I was so eager to do this one-on-one with you.
You understand it.
You were here for long enough that it made a difference.
You're one of the few people who knows British politics and American politics.
And in this case, pop culture.
She is an icon for younger women who were completely disengaged and uninvolved when it was Trump versus Biden.
Now that Harris is the opponent, they can't wait to vote.
And that changes the entire electoral makeup with younger women taking a bigger percentage of the actual voting public, which I believe that they will.
That means that Democrats benefit for the Senate.
They benefit for the House.
And all the races down ticket.
So not only are you seeing this continuing surge for the Harris candidacy, but the Republicans have been stopped in their pursuit of gaining the Senate and blocked in their pursuit of maintaining control of the House.
I think that what happened last night, combined with the Taylor Swift endorsement, gives Democrats at least a 50-50 shot of taking all three positions.
And if they do, gone will be the filibuster.
D.C. will become a state.
There'll be campaign changes in campaign laws and election laws.
I'm told that they're going to go after the Supreme Court to add four more seats.
And when you start to make these fundamental changes, it's hard to see how American, how conservatives will come back into power.
And frankly, the public is so divided and so angry right now that they may just sit back and say, go ahead, it's your turn.
In her endorsement, Taylor Swift said, I'll be casting my vote for Carmela Harris and Tim Waltz because she fights for the rights and causes.
I believe I need a warrior to champion them.
She's a steady-handed, gifted leader.
I believe we can accomplish so much more in the country if we're led by calm and not chaos.
Particularly, she referenced LGBTQ plus rights, IVF, a woman's right to her own body, and so on.
Winning Female Votes 00:09:14
That was a big part of last night, the big exchange about abortion.
I thought that was where Carmela Harris was at her most powerful, perhaps on policy.
And if you're a young woman watching that, they're really, well, let's watch a clip actually, because I've got a clip of this.
Let's watch a clip.
The plan is, as you know, the vote is, they have abortion in the ninth month.
They even have, and you can look at the governor of West Virginia, the previous governor of West Virginia, not the current governor who's doing an excellent job, but the governor before, he said, the baby will be born and we will decide what to do with the baby.
In other words, we'll execute the baby.
Trump abortion bans that make no exception even for rape and incest, which understand what that means.
A survivor of a crime of violation to their body does not have the right to make a decision about what happens to their body next.
That is immoral.
And one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree.
The government and Donald Trump certainly should not be telling a woman what to do with her body.
I thought that was very powerful for Harris.
It was.
And the fact is he won't look at her.
I'm watching this again, and I'm thinking as a debate coach, turn your face, pay attention.
He's looking either at the camera or the moderators and showing no acceptance that she's right there.
And by the way, you know what that looks like?
For every woman that reminds them of their husband or their boyfriend simply ignoring what they have to say, having disrespect and contempt.
And it's agitating to women watching.
Trump can't just win with men.
He's got to get women.
I don't know if you heard me say this, but the issue, Donald Trump reminds women of their first husband's divorce lawyer.
That is just absolutely disastrous.
Can he win in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, the three crucial swing states, just with men?
No, but you can't win the country.
Right now, the gender gap is roughly even.
She's up 15, 17 points among women.
He's up 13, 14 points among men.
And that's who you get the gap, that they're more female voters.
But it is this mirror image of each other.
And it goes back to a point that I make on your show that I make every time I speak out.
These divisions are getting worse and worse.
And it's going to become, at some point, you break.
At some point, you can't talk to each other.
Playing identity politics or woke politics is dividing the country and it's getting horrific.
And just, I'm so glad you showed that clip because the contempt that he shows her, she's pissed at him.
I assume you can use that word.
But the contempt that he shows her is going to hurt him with female voters, particularly older female voters who otherwise might have voted for him.
And you're going to see this in the polls.
It'll take about four or five days to show up.
But I do think that this has the potential to be a fatal mistake on Trump's part.
Ronald Reagan famously had a terrible first debate before he became president and turned things around with a brilliant second debate.
If there was another debate, do you think Trump has it in him to recognize what went wrong last night and to be a different character in a second debate?
He has the capability to turn this around, absolutely, because the public thinks he was a better president.
The public thinks that the administration was more successful.
The public is actually on his side on the two issues that matter most.
But they've come to really dislike him.
And I think I'm as explicit as I am because I don't believe that he understands just how angry people are with him, just how frustrated they are with him, and how they want him to simply be quiet.
And he's incapable of doing it.
He wants all the cameras.
I'm thinking, what analogy can I do with the stuff that's sitting in front of me right now?
He believes that if he's speaking, he's winning.
That if the cameras lights are on, that he's successful.
And someone has never gone into his head and said, you know what?
For you, sir, just for a moment, a little silence would go a long way.
You know, he had six minutes more airtime than Carmela Harris last night.
If he'd had six minutes less airtime, he might have won the debate.
Exactly.
You got it.
Frank Luntz, brilliant to talk to you, as always.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
It's my pleasure.
Well, join me now is the former independent presidential candidate, now part of Trump's transition team, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Brilliant to have you back, Robert.
How are you?
Piers, thank you for having me.
What did you honestly think about last night's debate?
I'll tell you what I honestly thought.
I thought Trump lost and Carmela Harris won.
Yeah, I think that Vice President Harris was better prepared and that she was much more polished.
I think that she also had the hosts on her side, which I think allowed her to get away with some of the statements on the substantive issues.
I mean, for me, Piers, on the substantive issues, I think Trump does better.
His delivery is bad.
And I think a lot of the things that Frank Lunt just said are accurate.
But, you know, the first question, I'll give you an example.
The first question, which I think was the most important question of the night, was, are you better off today than you were four years ago?
She didn't answer.
She never answered that.
She never answered it.
And the hosts were calling Trump on, you know, and debunking and fact-checking him on all of his questions, but they did not.
They did not discipline her on that.
Let me ask you that.
Let me ask you that, Robert.
So why didn't Trump then jump in and say, you haven't answered the question, Carmela?
Are we better off now than we were before I left office?
And it was his failure to jump in and get the answers he wanted or the questions he wanted.
I just felt that was weird.
He just didn't seem to want to do that.
And I'm not quite sure whether he was told not to or was told to behave himself, whatever it may be.
He was very untrump-like last night.
Yeah, you know, he actually, historically, he's been one of the greatest debaters in American history.
I mean, he dispatched 16 opponents in a row in 2016.
But last night, he was not showing that side.
And I think he lost a huge opportunity to really showcase his policies.
Like Frank said, he was the better president.
I mean, where, you know, we have it.
We have doubled the inflation.
The housing prices have doubled.
There's 15 million more Americans in poverty.
Suicide rates have gone through the roof.
The drug overdoses, all the indices of social deterioration have increased dramatically after.
And then the immigrant problem, which I think he talked about constantly.
But I think one well-articulated response on that would have been much more effective than the way that it was done.
And then on the issues of war, I think, you know, Vice President Harris was bragging about her endorsements by people like Dick Cheney and John Bolton.
These are the neocons.
There's 225 neocons who endorsed her in the last week.
These are people who are pro-war, pro-censorship, pro-surveillance.
These are the people who gave us the Patriot Act that gave us the Iraq war.
They're not endorsing her because they've changed their mind about anything.
They were exiled from both the Republican and Democratic Party.
Now they're all back.
And that's what I worry most about Vice President Harris as a president, that we're closer now to nuclear conflict than we've been at any time since 1948.
And we're in these wars and the Iraq war, which we should have never gotten into.
And she doesn't seem to understand at all.
She has an inch of knowledge about it.
And unfortunately, he did not take the opportunity to force her to drill down on that and explain exactly what we're doing there and why we walked away from two peace treaties with Putin.
Let's ask that question.
Ukraine Peace Dilemma 00:05:15
But he also, Robert, I want to play the clip about Ukraine and then ask you a follow-up on this.
Let's take a listen.
I want to ask you a very simple question tonight.
Do you want Ukraine to win this war?
I want the war to stop.
I want to save lives that are being uselessly people being killed by the millions.
It's the millions.
It's so much worse than the numbers that you're getting, which are fake numbers.
Now, we all want the war to end, but he dodged that question.
And he was also asked, you said, you know, as he repeatedly says, I can solve this in 24 hours.
He said last night, I'll get it done in between winning the election and inauguration.
I'll get this sorted.
But I still remain completely mystified how Donald Trump will get this sorted without handing Putin a win in terms of allowing him to keep some or all of the territory that he's taken.
Is there something I'm missing here?
Because I don't see any other way this gets ended quickly.
Yeah, I mean, right now, I think it's more difficult than ever.
I think it would have been very easy.
You know, in April of 2022, Putin signed a peace agreement and began withdrawing his troops.
And he left Lukas as part of Ukraine.
And President Biden forced Boris Johnson to go over there and make Zelensky tear up that agreement.
And then since then, there's been 600,000 Ukrainian kids who have died and 300,000 Russians.
Back then, it would have been very easy.
The more the Russians commit to this, the more difficult it becomes.
And right now, the Russians are devastating the Ukrainians.
The Ukrainians have lost the war.
The Russians are routing them on every front.
And it becomes much more difficult to end the war in a way that's satisfactory, that leaves Ukraine as a functioning nation the farther we go into it.
So I think it's more difficult now than ever, but Putin has, until very recently, he has persistently asked for negotiations persistently.
And in fact, Ukraine passed a law making it illegal to negotiate with them.
What kind of, you know, what are we into here?
That you can't negotiate with your opponent.
This is, it's a, it's really, it's inexplicable.
But I think the war can be ended.
It has to be ended.
It's either going to end with the total defeat of Ukraine, or we can save some part of Ukraine at this point.
But the Russians are not going to lose this war.
From the beginning, it was obvious that the Russians would not lose this war.
It was a foolhardy errand by Anthony Blinken and the people who are making these very, very bad decisions.
The neocons in the White House were making these decisions.
It was a horrendous decision.
But let me ask you that.
You and I have debated Ukraine quite a lot, and I don't really agree with your take on this.
But let me ask you the same question Trump dodged.
Would you like Ukraine to win, just in principle?
What I want is peace in the region.
Everybody wants victory means right now.
The question is, really.
I don't know what victory means.
Yeah, I mean, by winning, what do you mean by that?
Do you mean beating Russia, going into Kirks, which they're now in Russia?
Do I think that that's a good idea?
Do I think that that was a good strategy?
Well, I would think President Zelensky would catch.
Well, I would say winning would mean that the Russian forces withdraw from the Ukrainian territory that they've invaded.
That's what winning would look like.
Do you mean including Crimea?
I don't think that's ever going to happen.
Well, I doubt it would include Crimea.
That's part Crimea to one side.
But in terms of the invasion in 2022, the land that Putin has taken, that if that, I would say that Ukraine and Zelensky would see victory as the Russians having to pull out of that.
Well, you know, they had that deal in April of 2022.
That was the deal.
Donbas and Lukans would remain part of Ukraine.
And the only thing the Russians wanted was, number one, keep NATO out of Ukraine, which is a valid security demand by the Russians.
We would not allow Russian coalitions into Mexico or Cuba.
We've already shown that.
The other thing they wanted is to make sure that Ukraine ended the civil war against the Russian-speaking and ethnic Russians and Donbas and Lukans, that they could speak their own language.
They would be autonomous region within Ukraine the same way that Mancha, that Quebec is in Canada.
Those were reasonable demands, and I think that was a victory for everybody.
And unfortunately, we walked with the Biden administration, including Kamala Harris, who said she met five times with President Zelensky, walked away from that deal.
Reversing Bad Decisions 00:02:18
You know, it's left everybody in a much worse position today than they were.
Okay.
This was an avoidable war.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think all wars should be avoided.
Let me talk about animals with you.
You've established your credentials and the animal world in your own campaign.
Let me play a clip from last night involving Donald Trump and pets.
What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country and look at what's happening to the towns all over the United States.
And a lot of towns don't want to talk.
It's not going to be Aurora or Springfield.
A lot of towns don't want to talk about it because they're so embarrassed by it.
In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in.
They're eating the cats.
They're eating the pets of the people that live there.
And this is what's happening in our country.
Did you think that was a big mistake of Trump to go down that line?
Yeah, I do.
You know, I think he had a winning argument there that the administration, the Biden administration, did not need legislation to end the invasion at the border.
It looks like the Boston Marathon on the border.
I've been down there.
And you go, Piers, there are 27 holes in the wall in the Trump wall.
And each one of those holes has a giant pile of construction material next to them for finishing the wall.
The day the Biden administration came in, they ordered that construction suspended and they left that stuff to rust right next to the wall.
Anybody can, any American can go down and see that.
They tore up the fences.
They tore up the sensor equipment, the long-range cameras, the night lights, and all of the material and let people in.
And then they changed two policies, the catch and release policy and the Migrant Protection Act, to make it so the Border Patrol couldn't do their job.
All they need to do is reverse those decisions.
That's all they had to do.
They didn't need legislation.
So why didn't Trump accusing all the migrants of easing everyone's case?
I wish he had.
I wish he had.
Blown Election Prediction 00:02:56
And I think, again, that he lost a lot of opportunities to, you know, to talk to Vice President Harris about the failed record of this administration.
And she was able to, you know, as I said, if you look at his record, and Frank Lunt said this as well, the previous person you interviewed, if you look at his record, people want that record.
People want to go back to no inflation.
They want to go back to 15 million Americans not being below the poverty line, which has happened during the Biden administration.
They want to go back to where the suicide rate and the drug overdoses were low and all of these other issues where life was affordable, where we weren't at war.
But President Trump was not adept at defending his record.
And I think he lost an opportunity and I think it's sad.
Has it cost him the election?
Frank Luntz said after some thought, I think he's blown the election with that debate.
Well, I would say this, Piers, that if you look at the topsy-turvy history of this election, where, you know, when the night that President Trump got shot, and for the week after that, he was unbeatable.
There was no way that anybody could ever challenge him.
Two weeks later, you know, you had President Biden drop out.
You had Harris take over, you had the convention, and the Democrats were up on top again.
Then by the fifth day of the convention, when everybody thought Vice President Harris was unbeatable, suddenly you had another 40% or 30% shift in Nate Silver's rating, where he rated prior to the convention that Trump had a 40% chance of winning.
And two days ago, it was now a 70% chance.
So I would not make any predictions about what will happen in this election because so many crazy things have happened this term.
And I just don't know where it's going to go from there.
I think Frank Luntz is really very smart, and he's a friend of mine.
I've known him for 30 years.
I very much enjoyed seeing him on it.
Your show.
I think that was a rash prediction because I don't think anybody in the world can predict what's going to happen in this election.
What's going to happen next?
It's the craziest election that I've ever seen in my lifetime.
And it must be one of the craziest in American history.
Have you spoken to Donald Trump since the debate last night?
No, I haven't spoken to him.
I've spoken to people on his team and members of his family.
Unpredictable Election Future 00:00:18
And what have you said?
I think they feel like the same way that I do.
I think that there were some lost opportunities.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., brilliant to have you back in on Sensor.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Pierce.
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