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Sept. 16, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
01:13:48
20240916_under-siege-second-assassination-attempt-made-on-d
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Security Failures and Political Responsibility 00:15:27
There is no law that could have been passed here that would have apparently stopped this guy because he broke a crap ton of gun laws as a felon.
You're not able to buy any gun.
Four minutes away from killing him.
How has this happened?
If this was a Muslim terrorist or an Arab, people would be asking, where did he get radicalized?
Well, former President Donald Trump has now survived two assassination attempts in just seven weeks.
Shockingly, local law enforcement say the reason the latest shooter got within a few hundred yards of Trump is he's not the sitting president.
At this level that he is at right now, he's not the sitting president.
If he was, we would have had this entire golf course around him.
But because he's not, the security is limited to the areas that the Secret Service deems possible.
This is as unacceptable as it's inexplicable.
As president, Trump killed the founder of ISIS and Iran's foremost military commander.
He's one of the most famously divisive people on the planet.
He's also the Republican nominee for president in a febrile campaign that has just a few weeks left to run.
And above all, he came within a hair's breadth of dying in a round of bullets just 65 days ago.
What else does a former president, maybe the next president, possibly have to do to justify the highest possible level of security protection?
Any would-be assassin would have had no problem working out when and where Trump plays golf, simply by monitoring the movements of his enormous motorcade from Mur-a-Lago to his own golf club where he plays most weekends.
It's also the most obvious place for an attack, with Trump exposed in the open air for up to four hours at a location surrounded by endless places to hide and many access points from public roads.
That's why I would have assumed that after the catastrophic security failure in July, the Secret Service would have made damn sure that nobody could ever get that close to Trump again.
But I was wrong.
Palm Beach County Sheriff Rick Bradshaw says Americans should be proud.
Our agency with this real-time crime center was fabulous.
That's how we got the guy.
We started out with, we don't know anything, to where we had a tag, we had a vehicle description, and we got an area where we saw the person.
So be proud of your law enforcement.
Spare me the plaudits.
The gunman was able to hide behind a chain link fence 300 yards from Trump, armed with an assault rifle and a scope.
Fortunately, a sharp-eyed agent walking one hole ahead of Trump spotted the rifle sticking out of the bushes and opened fire on him, causing him to flee the scene.
That agent deserves great credit for potentially saving Trump's life.
But the fact the shooter got so close is another abject security failure by the Secret Service and frankly a disgrace.
The suspect has been identified as Ryan Wesley Ruth.
We know he took an intense interest in the war in Ukraine, attempting to recruit foreign fighters to support Zelensky's forces.
We need thousands and thousands and thousands of people here fighting with the Ukrainians.
We need, you know, we've got 190 countries around the world and we need thousands from all of them.
If the governments will not send their official military, then we civilians have to pick up the torch and make this thing happen.
Well, there's now a fatuous tug of war to establish his ideology in the court of public opinion.
He reportedly voted Trump in 2016, but later backed Nikki Haley, donated to two Democrat campaigns, and parroted the view that this election is an existential threat to democracy.
None of that matters though.
Ruth travels to Trump's golf course with an AK-47 and a GoPro camera to film an attempt on the former president's life.
He should never have got anywhere near him.
The last director of the Secret Service was forced to resign after the rally assassination attempt fiasco.
I believe the new director, Ronald Rowe, should also now be forced to resign.
There's too much at stake here.
There's been so much talk in this election about democracy, but there's no democracy if the candidates don't survive to face the judgment of voters at the ballot box in November.
In a moment, I'll be joined by my first panel, U.S. Air Force veteran and pro-Ukraine YouTuber Jake Brow, the former Navy SEAL, former FBI special agent, and host of the expert show, Jonathan T. Gilliam, the podcast and radio host, Ben Ferguson.
But first, I'm joined by former U.S. Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Leon Panetta.
Mr. Panetta, thank you so much for joining me.
It's hard to imagine anything more serious in terms of security around current or former presidents of the United States than the fact that Donald Trump has now had two attempts on his life in the space of seven weeks.
What is going on here?
Well, there's no question it raises tremendous concern about security.
Look, Pierce, this is a country that has an awful lot of guns in the hands of a lot of people, some of whom are mentally unstable.
And that's a formula for real trouble.
And we've already seen that happen, obviously, with former President Trump.
And for that reason, having been a chief of staff to the president of the United States, one of the greatest concerns I always had was whether or not we had sufficient protection with Secret Service wherever the president went.
It's pretty clear right now that Trump's life is in danger.
And the result of that is that we have to increase the security that's being provided when he does any kind of event or goes anywhere.
He's going to need additional security, period.
What is extraordinary to me and to many people, I think, is if you look at the two assassination attempts, they both seem to have been in places which would appear to be bleeding the obvious places for potential assassins to be lurking.
One on a flat roof 150 yards in front of a stage where Trump's appearing at a rally, which was unprotected.
And now we find that he was lurking the second shooter in the bushes at this golf course, the Trump International course in Palm Beach.
He was literally where the media go for the best vantage point to take pictures of Trump, but he's playing golf.
So this is somewhere which, you know, a rudimentary thought process about how to protect Trump, but he plays golf.
You would think that they would, at the very least, be patrolling the area where the media know they get their best pictures.
And yet that's where this guy was hiding.
And if it hadn't been for the sharp eyes of a particular agent, then you could well imagine that five minutes later, Donald Trump would have walked straight up to that green on the next hole and he could potentially have been shot dead.
No, there's no question.
And the Secret Service agent deserves a tremendous amount of credit for having spotted that individual and actually fired at that person and saving Trump's life without question.
But look, we've got to stand back and look at what has been happening in terms of security.
These are high-profile people.
Their lives are in danger because they are high-profile.
It is very important for the Secret Service to be able to provide additional protection, not just for President Trump, but also for Kamala-Harris, because this is a dangerous period.
And so you cannot allow somebody with a rifle to get on a roof and take a shot at the president.
That was a terrible mistake.
It was something that was inexcusable.
And with regards to the golf course, obviously, if you've got an area that has trees and bushes around it, that area has to be looked at.
That area has to be able to be monitored on a constant basis to make sure that there are no threats.
So, look, there are a lot of mistakes here.
There are a lot of lessons to be learned.
But we don't have much time here.
We only have a few more months to the election.
This is a very dangerous period, and it's going to require that both the Secret Service and law enforcement take much better steps to be able to secure those that are running for office.
I mean, in a way, I think what happened yesterday was even more egregious than the first one, because you say lessons need to be learned, but they've had seven weeks to learn the lessons of that first fiasco.
And I would say that what happened here was even more predictable in the sense that everybody knows where Trump plays golf at the weekend when he's in Palm Beach.
He plays at his own club.
Everybody knows that you can get pictures of him from a certain vantage point.
None of this is hard to predict.
We've already had one attempt in his life where he was literally hit by a bullet in his ear, saved by half an inch by turning his neck.
You know, as I said in my opening statement there, the director of Secret Service resigned after the first fiasco.
Am I missing something, or should this new director also be resigning?
Well, there's no question that questions need to be asked.
There has to be an immediate investigation as to what took place, what kind of precautions were taken.
And if they failed to take the kind of precautions that are necessary in this situation, then obviously we've got another head of the Secret Service who failed in his duties to try to provide necessary protection.
But look, there's a tremendous responsibility on the Secret Service.
Having been there, I've seen the huge responsibility they have.
And the result is going to be that we have to provide additional resources, particularly in light of the fact that we've had not one, but two assassination attempts on a candidate for president of the United States.
That tells me that Congress and the administration have got to step up and immediately provide additional resources to both Secret Service and immediately get local law enforcement to also play a bigger role in terms of providing the necessary protection.
These candidates are now under siege.
We have got to make damn sure that their lives are fully protected because they represent candidates for president of the United States.
But the really concerning part of this, Leon Panette, is we could have had this exact same conversation the day after the rally shooting.
I mean, literally word for word.
And what really concerns me is that this is the same candidate, Donald Trump, clearly a massive target because he'd already been shot once.
And this has happened seven weeks later.
I mean, you know, you didn't quite want to say the Secret Service director should go, but if you were running the show at the moment in the way that you used to, surely you would think it may be time for new leadership.
Well, you know, the problem right now is that we need the best leadership possible to be able to not only look at what happened, but also determine what steps are going to need to be taken in order to make sure that it doesn't happen again.
And before we start moving people around, before we start making massive changes here, I think it is necessary for the responsible people to sit down and look at what happened and determine what kind of additional resources are going to be needed as these candidates make their way across the country.
Look, this is not easy.
Let's not kid anybody.
This is not easy.
You've got candidates running for office.
They're going to be at rallies.
There are going to be a lot of people attending.
It is not an easy job to provide the kind of security we're talking about and put them in a bubble so that they can't even speak to people that they hope will vote for them.
So it's a challenge, but the key to that challenge is resources and making damn sure that when they go to an event, steps are taken to look at that area, to make sure that it's fully under surveillance and to make sure that key people are in their places so that these candidates are protected.
There is a way to do this, but it's going to take time and it's going to take resources and it's going to take tremendous planning.
The problem is we don't really have any of that time because there's only 50 days to the election.
Finally, Mr. Paneda, on a separate note, both sides have been accusing the other of inflaming rhetoric to such a degree that it is encouraging crazy people who have easy access to guns, as you noted earlier, to do this kind of thing.
What's your message to everyone, perhaps, in the American political sphere right now?
Well, you know, having been a part of presidential campaigns, having been a part of my own campaign, you know that particularly as you get into the last few weeks of an election, you know, everybody's juices are running.
This is high stakes.
And it's not going to be easy for people to suddenly be a little more restrained in the way they speak.
But you would hope that as a result of this, not only is there an effort to look at how we can provide better security for these candidates,
but I also think it's not a bad idea to talk with the candidates to try to at least make them understand that they have to be very careful about using the kind of language that can engender the kind of mentally unstable people to do what we've seen happen in these last few weeks.
So they're going to have to exercise some responsibility as well.
But I think it's also true that the American people are going to have to recognize that rather than encouraging the kind of rhetoric that we often see in these campaigns, I think it's not a bad idea for the candidates to spend a little more time instead of calling people names to basically talk about the issues that are involved in this race.
Yeah, I completely agree.
Neil Panetta, thank you very much indeed for joining me.
Good to be with you.
Okay, we're joined by the panel now.
I mean, look, this is not easy, Ben Ferguson, this situation for anybody.
Rhetoric Fueling Violence Against Leaders 00:09:28
But I was staggered in the aftermath of this news breaking yesterday to see people queuing up to salute the Secret Service for a brilliant job because one agent happened to spot the barrel of this rifle sticking out of a bush.
When the truth is, if he hadn't spotted that barrel sticking out of the bush, President Trump would most likely now be dead.
This was a spectacular failure, wasn't it, by the Secret Service?
Yeah, I mean, the Secret Service on the ground, they're incredible people.
The Secret Service leadership, they're pretty much worthless at this point, and they should be fired.
The second part here that I think needs to be looked at is Richard Blumenthal last week said that the American people are going to be shocked when the report comes out about the first assassination attempt and just the total failure of the Department of Homeland Security and Majorcas, for example.
So he was saying that about the first one.
Then he also said in the same interview, he said, I do think things have gotten better since then.
In other words, he'd been given assurances from the Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security, that they had made adequate changes.
They clearly haven't.
What does it take for someone to get fired?
And the Biden administration is the question that we need to be asking.
Is it literally a former dead president?
Is the only thing that gets you fired?
There should be lots of people fired today.
And the men and women on the ground in the Secret Service that are given a small group of people to protect Donald Trump, it's not their fault this is happening.
They did do an amazing job on the ground.
The problem is with the leadership, Piers, that is sitting there and they're basically saying we refuse to give adequate protection to Donald Trump.
So you have to ask the question then, why?
Why is it that you didn't learn from the first assassination attempt?
Why is it that there's the ability to have another one?
You listen to the sheriff, and I'll say this quickly.
The sheriff said, and I'm glad that he was honest.
He said, look, once you get to a tree line, the bush is there, like we can't see you.
He was being honest.
We don't have the adequate resources given to a sitting president for Donald Trump.
So therefore, this is Russian roulette.
If you want to kill the president, there's a very good chance you're going to have a chance to do it.
And so they could fix this.
And I disagree with Panetta.
He said, you know, it takes a lot of time and effort to do this.
No, it doesn't, Piers.
I worked with Bush in the Bush campaign, and I saw the Secret Service end up close and personal during the campaign and campaign events and also at the White House afterwards.
It is not hard for them today to spin up a full protection detail for Donald Trump.
You want to know how easy it is?
Because if he wins the election and when anybody wins the election, they immediately get that protection immediately on the night of the election.
So the idea that they can't do this quickly is a lie to the American people.
And I go back to Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat who's not being political on this when he said it.
This is egregious.
We spent $7.5 billion to put in seven electric chargers in this country with the Build Back Better plan of this administration.
If we can afford that, you're telling me we can't afford to protect every candidate adequately?
This is a question that Congress needs to ask, but they're the ones that are slow here.
And this administration needs to fire people.
Let me bring in Jake Bro.
I mean, Jake Bro, whatever side of the political divide you're on with this, for Donald Trump to have had two assassination attempts in seven weeks is an absolute disgrace, isn't it?
Yeah, I absolutely agree.
Whatever is not being done by the leaders of the Secret Service, they should be held accountable.
I want to make sure that Donald Trump makes it to Election Day and loses on Election Day at the ballot box.
If we had a political assassination of one of the major candidates, this would be a disaster for our nation.
This would be harmful to our democracy.
So, yeah, I would like to see shake-ups at the Secret Service.
I would like to see President Trump getting whatever protection he needs to enjoy an outing on the weekend going golfing.
This is not, I don't think this is an issue that anyone's really debating.
The shooter here, Ryan Ruth, was originally a Trump supporter in 2016.
He then became increasingly disillusioned with Trump and then became a full-on anti-Trumper.
And a lot of that was driven by his views about Ukraine.
And we can come to that a little later.
But in terms of what happened here, a lot of people are saying that the rhetoric he was using towards the end on his social media posts and so on was almost directly replicating rhetoric used by Democrat leadership, including that Trump represents a clear and present threat to democracy and has to be stopped and so on.
Do you recognize that that is a big problem?
That in disturbed minds, if they genuinely believe someone is a clear and present threat to democracy and has to be stopped, that their minds may tell them this is the way to do it.
There are a lot of mentally ill people here in the United States, and they form opinions based on whatever they see and hear on the internet.
This is a problem that both political parties have.
There are people in this country who want to kill Kamala Harris.
There are people in this country who want to kill Joe Biden.
There are people in this country who want to kill Donald Trump.
It's the job of law enforcement and the FBI to monitor these people and prevent these assassinations.
Ryan Ruth, you can just see videos of the guy.
He was a Trump supporter in 2016.
In 2020, he claimed he was a Bernie Sanders supporter for some reason, but he used the language of Trump.
He said he could never support sleepy Joe Biden.
And then in 2020, he became a never, 2024, he became a never-Trumper.
And he was a Nikki Haley supporter and a Vivek Ramaswamy supporter.
I don't know anyone more anti-Ukraine than Vivek Ramaswamy.
So I don't think his opinions on Ukraine, which were more passionate two years ago in 2022, had anything to do.
The FBI has not revealed the motivation.
This guy was also an anti-vaxxer.
This guy was also strongly pro-Second Amendment.
He had lots of opinions on lots of stuff, as many crazy people do.
So the fact that he's being exclusively linked to just his pro-Ukraine opinions, 60% of Americans support military aid to Ukraine.
This is a majority popular opinion to have here in the United States.
Now, he's a crazy person and there's a war going on in Europe.
So he tried going over there.
He was spamming on social media in 2022 for people to give him money, $2,500 so he could join the Foreign Legion.
He might have just been scamming people, but there's nobody in the pro-Ukraine community that has any association with this guy.
He was faking being a recruiter for the International Legion.
And there's posts going back to June of this year of actual recruiters with the Foreign Legion saying, this guy's insane.
He has nothing to do with us.
We're sharing screenshots of our crazy conversations with him.
He doesn't represent us.
This man is just mentally ill.
And Ukraine kicked him out of the country.
Okay, Jonathan T. Guillim, who's to blame here?
That's an interesting question, Pierce, because you can look at this from many different aspects.
Of course, the individual himself is to blame.
He took it upon himself to do this horrific act and attempt to actually take out Donald Trump.
You have the rhetoric that you all have been talking about that is, I believe, has gotten so visceral on both sides.
But the difference is on the left is that the grooming of young children, the grooming of this hate goes to a much deeper level, I believe, than on the right.
Typically, the people on the right, they're focused on patriotism, they're focused on the Constitution, typically their rights.
And when they feel those things being assaulted, they will say they're going to stand up, particularly they just go to social media and make that known.
On the left, what you actually have are people that step out and cause violence.
And I believe that's because of the years of rhetoric that has been shown and the lack of authorities stepping out and arresting some of these people on a large scale.
When they destroy a city, there's nothing that really particularly happens to them.
The politicians get involved in this stuff as well.
And as your second guest was saying, you know, there are a lot of liberals that would love to see this election just happen and let it play out the way it should.
But there's a tremendous amount of people that I think have been groomed and programmed on the left that have a hatred that is so deep that they don't even know where it comes from.
So we have that issue as well.
But then this Secret Service issue is really where I'm actually appalled.
And I loved your opening as you talked about this because I do not understand how a fatal funnel can be allowed to occur numerous times.
Secret Service Perimeter Breaches Explained 00:04:15
We don't actually know how many times it's occurred, probably every time Trump has gone out, but where shooters actually go and find that exact location that the Secret Service failed to protect and fully vet the perimeter.
And so what you had in Pennsylvania was an individual that got within 130 yards, which anybody can take an AR-15 and shoot something from 130 yards pretty easily.
In this case, an individual took the same type of gun that the shooter used at the congressional baseball game years ago to shoot Congressman Scalise.
It's an SKS Russian AK-47, the same type of gun.
I find that strange.
And he sets up a complete hide with ballistic panels with a GoPro to record it 20 feet from the road.
And there was no perimeter check.
There was no, we don't know if he set it up before that or if he actually had the time to go up there and set it up that morning.
But local law enforcement as well is to blame because as happened in Pennsylvania, where you had officers saying that, you know, we told the Secret Service they should have somebody on the roof.
At what point does local law enforcement say, hey, we own this property.
We're responsible for the perimeter.
And so we're going to take it upon ourselves to police this perimeter.
Here again, you have a Democrat elected sheriff in Palm Beach who makes this ridiculous statement about how Donald Trump is not the elected president.
So he's not going to get this type of security.
What type of security is he talking about?
All they have to do is walk around the perimeter and keep eyes on the area that's the same.
Well, that's the point.
That's the point, Jonathan, I find completely baffling is that people have been asking, well, how did he know Donald Trump was playing golf?
Because when Trump's in Florida, almost every weekend, that's where he plays golf.
That's where he is for four hours in the open air.
It's not a secret.
Most people who follow any kind of politics at all know that Donald Trump loves golf.
And when he's back in Florida, that's where he plays.
So this idea, this was some great sort of who done it.
How did he know?
You know, well, because that's where he is most of the time.
This is a problem.
Pierce, this is the job of the Secret Service.
Your job is to come on and make sure that not only is good content, but that you're informing people.
That's your job where you won't have a job anymore.
This is the Secret Service's job.
This is local law enforcement's job.
And it's a simple job.
You look at the area where the president's going to visit and you say, if I was an attacker, where, when, how, and why would I attack?
Yeah.
And then you formulate your defenses based on that.
And the biggest one, the first one, is the perimeter.
How far out should we have it and how do we secure it?
And that continues to fail.
And so, Pierce, I have, this is a very important thing.
I have to ask, is this on purpose or is it incompetence?
Here's what I think.
I would find it, listen, I've learned over the years to be careful when you completely rule out any theories because some of them come back to haunt you as being true.
I find it completely impossible to believe that the Secret Service would actively want this to happen.
But let's see where this all goes.
What I would say is that if I, a television presenter, if I could work out in five seconds where you should go at that golf course, if you want to have a clean shot at Trump, it would be where there are three holes altogether and where the media specifically go to get a clean shot with a camera of him.
And that's exactly where this guy went.
So, I mean, Ben Ferguson, we kind of all have an agreement here about the Secret Service failings here, which I think are very concerning.
I mean, I didn't realize when Trump played golf, they didn't patrol the perimeter until yesterday afternoon.
I just assumed, of course, they would, especially since he got shot.
Victim Shaming vs. Existential Threats 00:14:51
But on this separate issue, Ben, on this separate issue of the rhetoric, you know, yesterday morning, I mean, I've had a problem with the liberal side for years calling Trump Hitler.
I think if you constantly tell people that he's the new Hitler, who was the most appalling genocidal monster of the last century, killing 12 million people, perpetrated the Holocaust against the Jews, and so on.
If you keep calling someone the new Hitler, then it is going to permeate into unhinged minds.
I think it's been ridiculous.
However, I think.
However, before I come, just to put it in context, there's no comparison here.
But when Donald Trump yesterday morning, before he went to the golf course, just literally posted to his truth social media platform, I hate Taylor Swift.
You know, where you've got a presidential candidate just saying, I hate the biggest pop star in the world, who herself has millions of followers, some of whom may be mentally unstable.
How does that help anything either?
How does that not potentially, to an influential, to an easily influenced, deranged mind, not lead a Swifty to go and want to take action against him?
In other words, rhetoric is important.
And obviously there's a sliding scale from Hitler to Taylor Swift.
I get that.
But the principle, the principle of inflaming people in a deliberately provocative manner, I think is a really important one for us to right now calmly digest and debate.
Yeah, look, I think two things here.
One, when you talk about rhetoric, it's like victim shaming when people are like, well, and I saw this on TV even yesterday on MSNBC, they're like, well, maybe Donald Trump shouldn't go out and play golf.
Like maybe this is his fault that he did this.
Two days before that on MSNBC, they're referring to him yet again as Hitler.
And so this victim shaming idea, it's like saying, well, she shouldn't have dressed so attractive and then maybe she wouldn't have been raped.
It is insane.
It is insane that we're even having the conversation because law enforcement should not choose who they're going to protect based off there's an RD by their name.
And so that's all I care about right now.
Look, if you don't like what he tweeted about or said on True Social about Terror Swift, we can talk about that another day.
What I do care about is this.
If there have been two assassination attempts on Barack Obama's life, and thank the Lord there has not been, but in a 60-day period, are you telling me that Joe Biden and the Democratic Party and Congress wouldn't be firing people left and right?
And they're not firing people.
They're not doing it because of politics.
And so that is what I care about right now: the fact that they are deliberately allowing Donald Trump to be out in the open without adequate protection because of politics, peers.
And this is when I go back to what I said earlier.
What does it take for Joe Biden to wake up and for Kamala Harris to wake up and say this is wrong and we're going to fire people and we're going to give you full presidential protection between now and election day because it's the right thing to do.
What does it take to get fired in this administration?
Because apparently two failures on your political enemy or your political adversary is not enough to get fired.
That is insane in America in 2024.
If you would take the word ideology and input it where Ben is saying politics, you have your answer why they're not changing it.
It's not because of their politics.
It's because of their ideology.
And that ideology is dangerous.
Well, you know, I want to bring Jake in because Elon Musk tweeted something to the effect of, you know, I've note that neither there have been no threats against the life of Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.
He then deleted that tweet because many people leapt on it as what the hell are you doing suggesting that in the first place?
Why would you give crazies with your kind of following?
I think 20 million people had viewed it before he deleted it.
People have to be very careful here.
But in relation to Ben's point, it does seem to be a mark of this administration.
They don't hold people accountable and they don't act fast enough.
I mean, I'm amazed that we are having the same conversation about another assassination attempt seven weeks after the last one about the same candidate.
Why didn't Joe Biden or Kamala Harris do something more substantive to ensure that Trump was protected?
Because it's not in their interests that Trump is shot or killed.
I think it would backfire horribly on the Democrats.
Nobody wins.
I think you make a good point.
I have no loyalty to any of these people.
If you have a failure of leadership, you should be held accountable.
I had squadron commanders, group commanders while I was serving in the Air Force who were fired from their positions.
Once you fail to lead, people aren't going to follow you.
So yeah, I agree.
I am confident that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden want Donald Trump to stay alive until the election, and they want to defeat him at the ballot box.
So these attempts on Trump's life are unacceptable as Americans, as Americans, we should be condemning this, condemning any form of political violence.
So it's extremely inappropriate for Elon Musk, the owner of the Twitter platform, to, in response, say, why is nobody trying to assassinate Kamala Harris?
There's several prominent accounts who immediately jump to that conclusion.
Why is nobody trying to assassinate Kamala Harris?
And my answer is there are.
There definitely are crazy people in this country that want to do harm to Kamala Harris.
And thankfully, they're incompetent.
But yeah, it's the job of our law enforcement to make sure that this never happens in this country.
Yeah.
Stay with me, panel.
I'm joined now by the former Trump advisor and former United States Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton.
Ambassador Bolton, thank you very much indeed for joining me.
First of all, your reaction to the fact that Donald Trump has now had a second assassination attempt just seven weeks after he was hit by a bullet at the first one.
Well, look, it's a terrible thing to have happen in the country.
We're in very divided circumstances now, and there's no legitimate excuse for anybody to resort to violence to resolve political disputes, if that's what it is.
I have to say, again, we don't really know that much about the first attempt in Pennsylvania, but both of these individuals who have no apparent connection with one another both appear to be mental cases.
And I think that goes a long way to raising issues about how we treat people with those kinds of problems, leaving them alone, letting them get in the possession of guns, not having any way to back this kind of business up before they get weapons that they can fire.
People don't want to talk about mental illness.
They shy away from it.
But that appears to be what's at work here.
And we should be worried about more copycats, not just against Trump, but against other political leaders, because people who can be set off that way aren't necessarily doing this for political purposes.
It's because they've got mental problems.
Do you think this was another big failure by the Secret Service to allow this guy to get as close as he did?
Well, look, I speak as somebody who's under Secret Service protection now because the Iranians are trying to kill me.
Fortunately, they haven't succeeded so far.
And I was under Secret Service protection when I served as National Security Advisor.
With all due respect, the Secret Service succeeded here.
According to the reports in the press, which is all I know, they saw this rifle barrel sticking through a chain-linked fence and opened fire.
Can you imagine what would happen if it had been a 10-year-old girl with that rifle sticking through the fence, a pretend toy gun?
But this time, they didn't wait for permission.
They didn't go through bureaucratic steps.
They saw a threat and they acted on it.
And I think that was exactly the right thing to do.
The guy was 500 yards away from Trump when they spotted him.
So unless you want to put 500 yards of bubble wrap around Trump everywhere he goes, if he wants to go out in open spaces like golf courses, there are risks.
Could there be more protection?
Yes, there could be.
Should there be?
Yes, there should.
We've now had two attempts at Trump, and I think that alone justifies more extensive protection.
I would have thought one attempt at a former President of the United States who's running again and is the Republican nominee would be enough for a wholesale reevaluation of how people in his position are protected.
I mean, I'm surprised that you're so supportive of the Secret Service, because not because that agent didn't do a brilliant job, because clearly that agent did, and was very sharp-eyed and very quick-thinking.
But the truth is that guy should never have been lurking where he was, which is not just a random vantage point.
It is where the media go when they want to take photographs of Trump playing golf.
It is the best vantage point that you can access at the corner of the course where you have three consecutive holes which run into each other.
So this was not something that was hard to predict.
And coming seven weeks after somebody else tried to shoot him, I would have thought if Trump's out there playing golf, the one thing that you do, given that he normally plays at the exact same course and walks around in his buggy, goes around in exactly the same way each time over four hours, surely the very least you do is monitor the perimeter, don't you?
Well, I'm not an expert on providing security.
I don't think you have to be an expert, though.
That's my point.
Maybe you know.
I don't think you have to be an expert to think that that would be the first thing you do, do you?
You're telling me facts I don't know are facts.
I've been to the Trump golf course once about 30 years ago, and I don't have the slightest recollection of it.
Right, but we do know that the perimeter was not protected.
Otherwise, this guy wouldn't have got where he is.
I don't know anything at this point.
As a good lawyer, I don't assume anything.
If I could see the facts, then I could respond to you.
I certainly believe there should be an extensive investigation to see if there were breakdowns in the protection they should have provided.
What about this issue of the rhetoric on both sides, which has got increasingly toxic and abusive and personal, whether Trump's being called Hitler or whether he's saying, I hate Taylor Swift, whatever it may be, there's just a general level of abusive, toxic language being tossed around from both sides here, which many believe is contributing to an atmosphere that is almost inevitably going to lead to people doing stuff like this.
Sure.
I mean, I think the rhetoric is overheated.
We've had overheated rhetoric before in this country, a lot of it.
And that hasn't necessarily resulted in an increase in attempted assassinations.
Is it a good idea to cool the rhetoric down?
Of course.
Will that change the mindset of people who are temperamentally susceptible to engaging in this kind of activity?
I don't know the answer to that.
But I think in and of itself, it'd be nice, for example, to stop talking about Trump as an existential threat for democracy.
Existential implies threat to the life of democracy itself.
And maybe some guy who worries about democracy thinks he ought to take existential steps to prevent it.
I don't know that there's causation there at all.
I wish people would talk about issues instead of personalities, but who knows.
Last time, Trump got a pretty big bounce out of the attempted assassination.
This time, he's had a pretty rough week by most people's assessment.
He lost the debate to Kamala Harris.
A lot of stuff happened in the next few days, which is very negative for him.
Do you think this is actually, ironically, out of an attempt on his life, going to provide a valuable lifeline to him in terms of his election-winning chances?
Well, I think it could.
Look, I'm not voting for Trump or Harris, but I think it's pretty clear that Trump's adversaries who have tried to indict him for everything they could think of have actually boosted his presidential campaign.
You know, I don't think courts ought to decide who president should be.
I don't think assassins ought to decide.
Just think the voters ought to decide.
Why don't we talk about what Trump represents as a potential president, which is not much in my view, or what Harris represents, which isn't very much either.
John Bolton, thank you very much indeed for joining me.
Glad to be with you.
Go back to our panel.
Ben Ferguson, I saw you raging there in the background.
Why?
I think it's pretty rich for a guy that's got Secret Service protection to act like he doesn't know how important it is for people to be protected, and clearly he needs full protection.
And the second thing for Bolton, and look, I knew Bolton back in the Bush administration.
I had a lot of respect for him.
He just said, I think we should be talking about issues instead of like the name-calling.
Let me give you an exact quote from him.
Quote, President Trump hasn't got the brains for dictatorship.
He wrote an entire book name-calling and trashing Donald Trump and talking about him being a dictator wannabe and that he wanted to be close to all these dictators and tyrants around the world.
And that's what he is.
And now he's going to sit there on national TV and say, well, we need to really button things up here and be responsible.
No one would have paid you for the damn book if you weren't anti-Trump and trashing Trump.
By the way, not on the issues, but name-calling him in the book.
And then he sits there.
He's like, oh, I'm a lawyer.
Let me button that up again and I'm not going to assume things.
You have Secret Service protection.
You know that what he has right now is not adequate.
You should be calling right now for a full presidential detail for Donald Trump for the next 58 days, but you don't have the guts to say it because you hate Donald Trump so damn much.
It's disgusting that these guys that lead our country and have this, you know, oh, let me just tell you how it works.
I'm smarter than all you when the reality is he can't stand Trump and he won't do the right thing even on your show right now.
Jonathan, what does all this say about the current state of America?
Because to have two attempts on a former president's life, one is running again for office, it's pretty extraordinary, but to have it happen in seven weeks is unprecedented.
Gun Laws Broken by the Shooter 00:05:08
These are completely uncharted waters.
What do you think it says about the current state of America?
Well, first of all, I would like to add to what Ben was just saying there.
If I was Bolton, I'd be sweating bullets.
I mean, just think, Pierce, if your life depended on Secret Service right now, would you feel secure?
I know I wouldn't.
I mean, especially with a threat like he has against them.
So, you know, John Bolton is a politician.
Same thing with Leon Panetta.
So they'll tiptoe around different things.
But I'm not a politician.
So I'll tell you exactly the reality of what's going on.
I think what we see in the United States with these assassination attempts reflects what we've seen in the rest of the world.
We've seen in Mexico numerous assassinations and assassination attempts.
We've seen, I forget the other place where we've seen multiple in other locations throughout the world this year alone.
So I think the world in and of itself, and as I've traveled around with many clients and got to see over the past two years, a lot of the world, I'm very appalled at what I see, the divisiveness, the way that media can just catch on to these things that people have been groomed to believe, and then they just go with those things.
So whether it's social media or the news or just their talk on the street, I think we have people now who do not think past their own opinion and they will do things like run somebody off the road or shoot at a presidential candidate.
They do things like this that wouldn't have been the case before when people actually thought about what is realistic and looked at the totality of the circumstances, which nobody seems to look at.
They look at, okay, this group that I believe in says this, so I'm going to believe that.
And they don't look at the totality of which I know you've heard before in all these murder mysteries and things that you've done, is you have to look at the totality of everything that's occurring and then say, why is that occurring?
And since social media has come along, politics has gone towards the left so far that they're comfortable being called a Marxist.
Now what we see is dangerous vitriol and action, mostly from the left.
But I think in the United States, we see a reflection of what's happening around the world.
Jake, the one thing that we haven't talked about is something that the rest of the world looks at America and always thinks in these situations, and that is guns.
And I'll know the argument from Ben.
If I asked him, he'd say, well, look, a good guy with a gun, stop this happening.
I accept that.
But there's also no doubt with both shooters here, they appear to have had very easy access to getting their hands on high-powered semi-automatic rifles.
And there are now 400 million guns apparently in circulation in America.
A million new guns are sold every month in the United States.
You know, at what point does the argument, which at the moment focuses on things like mental health and all these other things, which every other country has, but the difference in a country, for example, like mine here, is that the ability to get your hands on these killing machines is virtually non-existent.
You're a military guy.
What do you think of the guns part of this?
Well, I think we're usually...
Well, let Jake just answer first.
I'll come to you guys.
I'm pro-Second Amendment.
I think private amendments, I think private citizens should be allowed to own guns, but there should be common sense restrictions.
I don't think weapons of war, semi-automatic weapons, should be allowed to be purchased by people with criminal backgrounds.
Ryan Ruth had an extensive criminal background.
So there should be an investigation.
How did he get this AK-47?
And why wasn't he being monitored?
If probably, you know, crazy people do this, they make inflammatory posts on social media.
I'm sure once the investigation is done, we will have the evidence that he's been threatening public officials.
It's staggering to me.
It's another failure.
What purpose does someone need an AK-47 or an AR-15?
And I just want to say, as far as the rhetoric, when we have a school shooting here in the United States, Republican members of Congress will then wear their AR-15 pins on the floor of the Congress.
So what if in the opposite scenario in which there was an assassination attempt on Trump, Democrats started wearing AR-15 or AK-47 pins on their lapels?
I just think it's tone deaf whenever we have one of these tragedies.
Nothing is being done by the right to solve the gun issue.
More guns are not going to solve the problem.
If more guns made America safer, then America would be the safest country in the world.
Media Soundbites Over Safety Protocols 00:15:33
Okay.
Well, it is pretty cool.
Let me say this real quick.
Yeah, very quickly, but I don't want to get into the whole gun thing as an extended debate, but very quickly.
Let me just say this.
We have laws, and I'm in favor of good laws.
There were multiple laws broken by this guy.
He was a convicted felon.
He had made multiple threats, from what we understand, multiple interactions with law enforcement.
And clearly he was able to get this gun, I'm assuming, illegally.
So the idea that we could have passed another, like, you know, magic wand gun bill that would have fixed what happened here is, I also think, taking away from the reality of accountability for those that are in charge of our government to protect and defend the president and the former president and anybody under Secret Service protection.
I don't want to give them an out because there is no law that could have been passed here that would have apparently stopped this guy because he broke a crap ton of gun laws as a felon.
You're not able to buy any gun.
Okay.
Period.
Full stop.
Okay.
Thank you to my panel.
I appreciate it very much.
The letters attempt on former President Trump's life is another cataclysmic event in which he's surely becoming one of the craziest election campaigns in history.
Before last night's news broke, Trump arguably had the most torrid week of his campaign.
But could this turn out to be a fortuitous turning point?
I'm joined by Harris Supporter and former conservative MP, Louise Mensch, the former lawyer for Donald Trump, Jenna Ellis, the commentator and comedian Jimmy Dore, and the former Republican presidential candidate, Joe Walsh.
Well, welcome to all of you.
Louise Mensch, there's no doubt, if you look at last week, you would say that Trump had his worst week of his race.
He lost the debate to Kamala Harris.
There was a real momentum shift after that.
Some of the stuff that came out of that debate, notably his claim that Haitian migrants are eating everyone's cats and dogs, became a sort of laughing stock of memes around the world.
His friendship with Laura Loomer, the far-right loom ball, became a stick to beat him with.
No one quite understands what she's doing anywhere near him, given the views that she has, and so on.
And yet, right now, all anyone's talking about is another attempt on his life.
And the way he responded again was extraordinary.
You know, from all accounts that have come out, he was bundled down by the Secret Service.
But his first thought when he was taken to safety was, what happened to the people I was with?
And his second thought, apparently, according to Sean Hannity at Fox News, was that he was frustrated because he had a birdie putt and never got to take it, which is very Trump.
But it also shows again that mentality that he showed after the first shooting, which is, you know, when he's literally under fire, he's got balls of steel.
Americans like that.
So last time we saw a bounce in the polls for Trump post-assassination attempt, thank God he survived this one.
But are you concerned as a Harris supporter that this will significantly change the momentum and narrative, right?
When you had him, perhaps where you wanted him?
I don't think so, but I also think that we've got to be really careful what we do as supporters of the other side, that we make absolutely no political capital out of this at all.
In fact, both sides should be careful about that.
Obviously, it is a disgrace that people are trying to silence the voice of the former president.
And as somebody that wants Carmela Harris to win, I'll be the first person to say that.
We want to beat him at the ballot box.
We do not want to beat him via a bullet.
And the only thing that I can say that's good about it, first of all, his response was commendable.
I don't have a problem with saying that.
Second of all, it looks like the Secret Service got it together in ways that they very profoundly did not do the first time.
I don't agree with that.
I think one agent got it together.
One agent had the sharp eyes and the quick wit to deal with what was going on.
But the truth is, if you hadn't spotted the barrel of that rifle peering out of the bush, Trump would now almost certainly be dead because the Secret Service, once again, had failed to properly protect the perimeter, which is the problem, which was the same problem with the rally when that kid got onto the roof.
Well, I would call this actual protection of the perimeter.
That Secret Service agent did see it.
It was in a suite before the president came out.
But Louise, the guy had been there, it turns out, for 12 hours.
They found from his cell phone, he'd literally been waiting at the number one vantage point where the media go at that golf course to photograph Trump when he plays golf because it gives them, ironically, the cleanest shot.
In fact, the only clean shot you can get at that course, apparently.
That's where this guy waited for 12 hours without anyone from Secret Service doing anything to find him, notwithstanding the fact that every week he's in Florida, Trump plays on that golf course.
And notwithstanding the fact that seven weeks ago, he got shot in the head.
It is playing so much golf during the middle of a presidential campaign.
But wherever you set up a perimeter, Piers, it doesn't matter where it is, wherever you set up the perimeter, it doesn't matter where it is.
People are going to go beyond that perimeter of safety and they're going to try and take a shot at the president.
Now, Joe Biden did increase Secret Service budget.
Agents on Trump, everything else.
They didn't set up a perimeter, Louise.
They didn't set up.
It's behind the perimeter.
It is behind the perimeter of where a former president gets safety.
There was no perimeter.
That's the point.
Be happy about the fact that they got him.
They caught him.
There was no loss of life, thank God.
And for all it turns out, this guy is a complete and utter lunatic.
He doesn't know where he is politically.
He's just demented.
He's got main character syndrome.
Yeah, there he was.
There he was.
Let me bring in.
I want to bring in Jimmy.
Jimmy Door, I want to play some footage.
This has just come in.
This is footage of the suspect being apprehended by the police, the county police, who were acting on very good, quick-witted information from a member of the public who managed to photograph the car as it sped away from the golf club and got the number plate, the license plate.
And they were able to then track the car very quickly and arrest this guy.
But Jimmy, the truth is, Trump was shot seven weeks ago.
Everyone knows where he plays golf.
And here's a guy waiting in a bush for 12 hours with an AK-47, a GoPro to film himself.
And he came within four minutes, which is how far Trump was away from where he was situated and would have been going towards to play his shots on that hole, four minutes away from killing him.
How has this happened?
Well, if you look at, if this was a Muslim terrorist or an Arab, people would be asking, where did he get radicalized?
So this guy's obviously been radicalized.
I saw an interview he did two years ago.
Newsweek interviewed him in Ukraine because he went from Hawaii.
He's an American citizen, went from Hawaii to Ukraine to help recruit people to fight in the Ukraine war.
And the way he describes the Ukraine war is like a child.
He says it's good versus evil.
He has no idea how the war started.
He has no idea what the motivations are.
He has no idea how it was provoked, but he sees it as a fight between an existential fight between good and evil.
And where did he get that idea?
From the corporate media in the United States, which has lied us into every war in my lifetime.
He also, if you look at his Twitter feed, he repeats the exact same talking points that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy.
So if you think someone's a threat to democracy, it almost makes it like the moral thing to do what he did.
And where does he get those ideas?
It gets him from the corporate media.
It gets him from the establishment.
Let me play chicken and the egg, Jimmy, because you're jumping ahead here.
You're presenting the egg argument, not the chicken.
Because clearly this guy's unhinged.
He used to vote Trump.
Then he turned on Trump.
He's been all over the place politically.
He's mentally unwell because he wants to kill somebody.
But the chicken part of this debate is knowing all this, why on earth wasn't more done to stop a lunatic like him with an AK-47 getting so close to Trump?
Here's why.
My answer is they don't care if Donald Trump gets it.
They, meaning the establishment.
I mean, they said that they're not going to give him the secret service protection that he deserves because he's not a sitting president.
If he was a sitting president, they would give him more secret service protection, but they're not doing that.
Even though he's already getting shot in the head on this one, you think they would have doubled it up, but it's because the establishment doesn't care.
They want to get rid of Donald Trump, which is why they're doing 91 cases of law affair, which is why they impeached him twice.
They did January 6th.
They did Russia Gate.
All that stuff is to try to get rid of Donald Trump, who's a thorn in the side of the establishment.
Okay, Joe Wolzid, you don't agree with that.
So respond.
No, Pierce, I'll give you a real simple answer to your question.
That perimeter would have been locked down if Donald Trump was given the same level of security that a sitting president is given.
But why wasn't he?
So I think exactly.
We are at a point, Pierce, in this country, damn it, where the nominee for both major political parties should get the same level of security that a sitting president gets.
And then all the streets around the golf course would have been blocked off.
That never would have happened to Trump on that golf course when he was president.
They should get the same amount of security.
Okay.
Now, what about Jimmy's second point, the egg part of the argument, which is that actually what happened is this guy got radicalized.
There's no doubt if you look at some of the language he used in his more recent social media posts, he was replicating language directly coming from Kamala Harris about Trump being this existential threat to democracy and so on.
Do you see a problem there with the language that both sides have been using?
I mean, yesterday morning before Trump went to the golf course, he tweeted completely out of nowhere, I hate Taylor Swift.
I don't know how that helps.
I mean, we can all laugh, but Taylor Swift has millions of impressionable young fans.
What if one of them's a bit of a lunatic?
What if one of them goes, really?
Well, I'm going to shoot you.
In other words, shouldn't it be incumbent on all candidates and everyone in the political world now, given two attempts on Trump's life, to dial everything down, to go back to debating issues, not saying things like, I hate the biggest pop star in the world, or on the left, Trump's the new Hitler.
Yes, Pierce, everything should be dialed down.
I would argue that, you know, these days, there's no greater purveyor of hate and a bigger inciter of violence than Donald Trump.
Let's be clear about that.
And Jimmy says they wanted him dead.
The corporate, the corporate establishment wanted him dead.
Come on now, be better than that.
That's dangerous and reckless.
Look, I believe Donald Trump is an existential threat to our democracy.
I believe that.
And I say that.
And I'm not.
And again, I say that knowing there are nuts out there, you know, who could do anything.
But I believe that.
And a lot of Republicans who are voting for Harris believe that.
Pierce, Donald Trump said an hour ago that he blamed Harris and Biden for their rhetoric that led to this latest attempt.
And you know what Trump said?
Donald Trump said today that Democrats are trying to destroy our country and they are the enemy from within.
You talk about dangerous rhetoric?
Come on.
Let me bring in Jimmy.
Let me bring in Jenna.
He's been waiting patiently.
Jenna, this whole issue of rhetoric, I mean, I'm going to play a clip.
Well, actually, I'm going to play a meme.
This is what came out of the debate where Trump, in my opinion, lost to Carmela Harris because she took his bait.
But all this stuff about Haitian migrants eating people's pets and so on has led to this kind of thing spewing around the internet.
They're eating the dogs.
They're eating the cats.
They're eating the pets of the people that live there.
They're eating the dogs.
They're eating the cats.
Eat the cat.
They're eating the cats.
They're eating the dogs.
Eat the cat.
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.
My dog was taken and used for food.
So maybe he said that.
And maybe that's a good thing to say for a city manager.
I'm not taking this from television.
People on television say my dog was eaten by the people that went there.
Again, the Springfield City Manager says there's no evidence of that.
Vice President Harris.
I'll let you respond to the rest of it.
And there are thousands more like it.
And on one level, they're all very amusing, Jenna.
But on another level, is that really what Trump wanted to come out of that debate when he had in front of him on that stage a woman who, by most independent assessments, is the most left-wing, progressive Democratic nominee in the history of American politics?
Why on earth would you want what comes out of that debate to be that?
Well, Donald Trump has now been shot at as many times as Kamala Harris has sat for interviews.
So regardless of the debate, I think Americans need to ask ourselves why the 2024 election is now at this point.
And listen, there is plenty of rhetoric that I disagree with from Donald Trump.
There are plenty of ways that I think his campaign could do better.
The Taylor Swift remark was just pointless.
He should have gone after the Swifty saying, hey, I'm actually the one that is going to protect the borders.
And when Taylor Swift has concerts in America, you don't have to worry about terrorist attacks like Hamas in Vienna and actually canceling her concerts.
But he isn't doing that.
He is going for the media soundbite.
And this goes to your overall question, Piers, about rhetoric.
We are too focused in this country now on just media soundbites instead of actually talking about the worldview differences between the two candidates.
And if the polls are accurate and this is actually such a neck and neck election, you have to ask why 50% of Americans actually want to see a Marxist communist in the White House that is Kamala Harris's policy.
I mean, she's being vague on purpose versus someone who actually wants to give more freedom and liberty to Americans.
Now, I don't agree with all of Donald Trump's policies, but he is very clearly more to the right than Kamala Harris.
But no one is talking about that because our rhetoric is so entertainment driven and it's so media soundbite driven.
What Donald Trump needs to do in the next 50 days before the election, if he really wants to make a difference, is stop with all of these bombastic comments and actually talk about common sense policies that Americans know him for.
Because Kamala Harris is getting away with all of the vagaries.
She's getting away with not being tied to the Biden administration.
I'm here in Denver, Colorado, that is very close to Aurora.
A friend of mine's husband is actually on the police force in Aurora, was telling me just this morning that there are Venezuelans who have literally taken over apartment complexes there.
They go to Target and have parties where there are shootings.
People get trapped in the targets and are literally in the crossfire.
I mean, this is coming directly from the source.
These aren't just the bombastic comments that people can make fun of Donald Trump for.
He has to focus on actual American policies.
Election Speeches vs. Actual Policies 00:07:49
Well, I can tell you what he's saying.
Let me tell you what he's focused on.
He's just posted on X.
The rhetoric lies as exemplified by the false statements made by comrade Kamala Harris during the rigged and highly partisan ABC debate and all the ridiculous lawsuits specifically designed to inflict damage on Joe's and Kamala's political opponent, me, have taken politics in our country to a whole new level of hatred, abuse, and distrust.
Because of his communist left rhetoric, the bullets are flying and it will only get worse.
And then he goes on ranting about other stuff.
I mean, Louise Mensch, when Trump does this kind of thing.
But I think he's right, Piers, but I, but hold on.
I think he's right in that because when people are suggesting on the left that he's a literal threat to democracy, then it's consistent with their worldview that they want to take him out.
I mean, they have had the rhetoric of get Trump literally since 2015.
They haven't done it out.
They've only amplified it.
Jenna, I can't.
No, stop, stop for one second.
I believe Donald Trump is.
Jenna, let me finish and then fire away.
I believe Trump is a threat to democracy.
I don't want to see Donald Trump taken out.
I condemned what happened yesterday.
I can condemn what happened yesterday and still believe Donald Trump is a threat to our democracy.
Don't say that those of us who do believe he is a threat want to take him out.
Come on.
Well, so the difference is, though, saying that he's a threat to democracy like Kamala Harris did on the debate stage, what she was saying, being vague, was not specifying that she wanted to take him out at the ballot box.
And so when you get these linets that are taking bullet shots at him, you're just incentivizing them.
Let me bring in Louise.
Yeah, you want to say something?
Yeah, I do.
Honestly, calling Kamala Harris a communist is just as bad as calling Donald Trump a threat to democracy.
And I actually, I've been persuaded for once by policies are communists.
What do you think?
Redistribution of debt and mortgage.
That's communist.
She's in a valid process.
He can call Karmala Harris a communist.
He can say that she's whatever.
She's like comrade Kamala.
He's literally calling her a Russian Stalinist, whatever.
Jimmy Dore retweeted a conspiracy theory that the intelligence services were behind this assassination.
Just this morning, Jimmy Dore retweeted that.
People have got to be able to say what they want to say during an election.
And Joe is right.
If we had enough security, this wouldn't be a problem.
And you can make your points against Kamala.
Trump can make his points against Kamala.
Kamala can make them against Trump.
We shouldn't have to quiet down all voices because of physical threats to the candidates.
Joe's right.
Both cans are going to be able to do that.
I do agree that there needs to be more superiority.
But what I don't agree with is that moderators should not be getting involved.
You shouldn't be fact-checking Donald Trump's sarcasm when you're not fact-checking.
Well, they should actually, you know what?
On the moderators, they should be fact-checking both sides equally.
And that wasn't happening.
Carmela Harris was saying loads of stuff that she knew was utterly disingenuous and she never got corrected on it.
So I watched it with an open, you know, no horse in the race view.
And I saw them fact-checking one side and not the other.
I don't think that was very good of them.
Let me ask Jimmy this.
Carmela Harris, I mean, we alluded to earlier, the fact she doesn't give interviews.
She gave a second one at the weekend to Action News's Brian Knath, and it was just a load of incomprehensible word selling.
Let's take a look at some of it.
I wonder if there are one or two spots, policy areas or approaches where you would say, I'm a different person.
Well, I'm obviously not Joe Biden.
And, you know, I offer a new generation of leadership.
And so, for example, thinking about developing and creating an opportunity economy where it's about investing in areas that really need a lot of work.
And maybe focusing on, again, the aspirations and the dreams, but also just recognizing that at this moment in time, some of the stuff we could take for granted years ago, we can't take for granted anymore.
And she then goes on to talk about she grew up with people who were proud of their lawns and so on.
I mean, Jimmy, if Trump can't beat Carmela Harris when she's this in interviews, there's something wrong with it.
There's a reason she was so unsuccessful when she ran before to be the nominee.
She's got this by default.
And every time she actually has to answer questions about anything to do with policy, I would argue she's a complete disaster to the point where I have to question Louise Mensch's sanity in being so keen to support her, given Ms. Mensch's former life as a Conservative member of parliament in this country.
But we can come to that another time.
But Jimmy, my point is, Trump couldn't really wish for a better opponent, could he, than a progressive left-wing word salad spewer.
And yet all we're talking about all the time with Trump is stuff that she's goaded him into saying, which has been very smart, by the way.
Yes, Donald Trump seems like he's doing his best to try to lose this election.
You know, when that question was given to him where he answered about dogs and cats, it was a question about immigration.
And that's a winner for him.
All he had to do was say, yes, Kamala Harris was such a bad border czar and opened our border to millions and millions of illegal immigrants that now she wants to pretend she wasn't the border czar.
He could have just ended it there.
He would win.
But of course, Donald Trump being who he is, he had to take it a little further.
And he said the thing about cats and dogs.
And as soon as he said it, I said on my show, this is all anybody's going to be talking about now.
They're not going to be talking about the actual issue.
But I just think it's ironic that they say that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy when Kamala Harris was installed by the elite without any votes from the voting public.
In fact, they threw out 14 million votes and the primary as they forced him out in a coup, in a soft coup for Joe Biden.
So that's the irony here.
We have someone running for president that the first time she ran, nobody voted for, and absolutely nobody voted for this time.
So there's the irony.
If you want to talk about it's the most undemocratic thing that's ever happened in this country and everybody's cheering it on like it's fantastic.
You know what, Louise.
Well, Louise, what's interesting is there's been no appreciable bump for Kamala Harris since the debate.
There wasn't really one since the convention, not in the swing states where it really matters.
And I can see the Democrats falling into the same trap they did with Hillary, where the national polling seems to show this, you know, growing sort of movement to Kamala Harris, but the swing states don't.
And ultimately, we know it's going to come down to those.
If I was a Democrat, I'd be pretty worried that you've had your best stuff and it hasn't really moved the needle.
No, there was a big bounce for her after the convention, but there was a bigger bounce after the debate.
We're talking about plus five, plus six, plus four.
Some of those are outside the margin of error.
Anybody that knows anything about polls knows that likely voters matter a lot than registered voters.
And also, the swing state polling has been very, very good.
I mean, there was an Iowa poll that showed Donald Trump up four points.
The previous poll showed him up 18 points on Joe Biden.
Now, he's not going to take Iowa, but that's a big swing he should be worried about.
If he's polling that way in that state, then he's got to worry about Pennsylvania, about Michigan, about those working-class states, the Russ Belt that is the absolute key to victory.
And I would much, much rather be Kamala Harris than I would be Donald Trump electorally right now.
There is a reason that he said I hate Taylor Swift, and it's that somebody showed him internals and showed him new registrations, new voters coming in through that link that she put out to vote.com.
Taylor Swift Votes and JD Vance Lies 00:01:13
Some say 300,000.
The last two close elections were decided on 50,000 votes each over a small amount of swings.
That's just a very small margin.
If Taylor Swift can bring that amount of voters, she might clinch the victory.
Okay, final words of Joe.
Pierce, final word.
The other big story of the weekend was JD Vance admitted over the weekend that he was lying about the Haitians are eating cats and dogs.
JD Vance admitted that.
Donald Trump lied about it.
And to your point, Pierce, there have been bomb threats.
Schools have been shut down.
Haitians are fearing for their life right now because of a lie spread by Trump and JD Vance.
He, to be fair to Jodie Vance, says he didn't say, he didn't claim he made up stories.
He was creating a story which he knew would be of interest.
That's an ambiguous phrase, creating, right?
It may be creating something for us to talk about.
May not be the same as inventing it.
But either way, there is no evidence that Haitian migrants eat their neighbors, cats, and dogs.
So it was a dumb argument to be having when there are much better arguments to be had about the state of the southern border.
I've got to leave it there.
Great panel.
Thank you all very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
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