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Nov. 7, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
59:34
20241107_the-democrats-reaction-to-trumps-victory-feat-roge
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
Entering a Dark Time 00:05:13
I think we're about to enter a golden age in this country.
I'm happy to confess on your show.
I got it wrong.
I'd rather take WWE versus World War III.
There's got to be some unity.
I mean, both sides have been guilty of this rhetoric.
Democrats need a self-examination.
When you realized that Trump had won the White House, the Senate, did you cry?
It was supposed to be the closest election of all time, but in the cold light of day, it was a thumping landslide.
A massive popular mandate with control of the Senate and probably the House too, and of course, the White House.
If the Democrats are won by anything close to these margins and narrative, we're one of a jubilant nation embracing a glorious new era of hope and change.
Instead, the dial's already been set to finereal, led by a somber and belated eulogy from the outgoing vice president.
Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars?
I know many people feel like we are entering a dark time.
But for the benefit of us all, I hope that is not the case.
But here's the thing.
America, if it is, let us fill the sky with the light of a brilliant, brilliant billion of stars.
The light.
The light of optimism, of faith, of truth, and service.
Sorry, but what the hell is she talking about?
Honestly, there are five stages of grief.
It's not unreasonable to say that Donald Trump got stuck on denial in 2020, but Harris campaigners and the legacy media are moving quickly into anger and depression.
Hey there.
How you doing?
If you watch the show regularly, I'm guessing you're not doing great.
I don't think Donald Trump's a good person.
I'd even go so far as to say he's a bad person.
Now, in my defense, I'm only basing that on everything I've ever been taught about what makes someone good or bad.
Why are you leaving the country?
I can't stay for another four years of this.
Who knows what he's going to do?
This is not the end.
And we have to regroup and we have to continue to fight and continue to work day in and day out.
Honestly, have you ever seen anything more pathetic in your life?
It's honestly pathetic.
The reality is that a majority of Americans are feeling great because Trump won a massive win, a landslide.
More than 70 million people voted for him in the belief that he will put more money in their pockets and make the world and the American border a safer place.
Whether he can deliver on those promises or not remains to be seen.
And I will call it and him out as I see it throughout the presidency, as I always have done in the past.
But people voted for Trump for positive reasons.
They're not happy with the direction of the country.
They believe Trump will make it better.
These grieving late night hosts and shocked cable news commentators might as well start their broadcast with a disclaimer that says, if you're a Republican, turn off now.
They're also delaying the most important stage of grief, which is acceptance.
That's when you take stock of what's happened and work out what you're going to do about it.
The Democrats did a whole new strategy for winning back the disaffected working class voters they took for granted and lost.
And I've got news for our friends at the Bullwarp podcast.
That strategy will not include indulging this bizarre and frank fantasy.
And I agree with Bill.
I think this is a just a horrific event in American history.
And We've got a period of disillusionment that we're going to have to deal with before we mobilize the resistance.
And I think it will be with the resistance.
I'm prepared to put undocumented people in my attic.
I could also say with some certainty that liberal journalists and Democrat politicians will not end up behind bars over the next four years, at least not for their politics.
But unfortunately, that message hasn't reached the screeching AOC.
Donald Trump has talked about turning the military on U.S. citizens that he deems his domestic political enemies, authoritarians and people that he affiliates closely with and strongmen abroad in regimes like that.
It is not uncommon to jail political dissidents or legislative opponents.
The last time I checked, it was the Democrats who turned the legislative arsenal on to their political opponents and tried to in earnest to jail Donald Trump himself.
That was wrong then and it's wrong now.
So much so that in my view, as unpopular as it may be, Trump should make one of his first moves to pardon Hunter Biden.
America is deeply and bitterly divided.
Trump's opponents clearly are verging on the hysterical.
Trump's Extraordinary Opportunity 00:09:00
It's that kind of gesture that possibly, possibly, could bring the country a little bit closer together.
In a moment, I'm joined by an all-star cast to dissect the latest news on this bombshell victory for Trump.
But first, a longtime Republican strategist who's worked for Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Trump.
He's a man that many, including myself, including himself, I'm sorry, credit with first suggesting that Donald run for president.
It's the infamous, notorious, famous Roger Stone.
Roger, how are you?
Great, great.
Having a great day.
Well, I'm sure you are.
1998 was the first time that you suggested to Donald Trump that he run for president.
Did you actually ever imagine that not only would he win one term, but he would then lose and come back in the way that he's done with a massively bigger majority?
Yes, I actually did.
I met him, of course, in 1980 when I was working for Ronald Reagan.
But by 1988, I realized that he had the size, I don't mean the physical size, but the stature and the courage and the independence and the stamina to not be just a great candidate for president, but to actually be a great president.
And I think I have been validated yet again yesterday.
Yeah, I spoke to him yesterday morning.
I rang him and had a chat with him.
And even he seemed a bit shell-shocked by the size of the victory.
I mean, to win the White House, to win the Senate, probably the House, you know, to have potentially two more picks of the Supreme Court coming in the next four years.
Almost all the state stuff was a landslide two.
It's an extraordinary triumph for Trump, an amazing redemption for him personally, but also an extraordinary opportunity for him.
Well, I think you're exactly right.
I mean, first of all, it is a testimony to his resilience, his strength, his persistence.
But it's also a unique opportunity to return the country to unprecedented peace and prosperity, as well as opportunity for all Americans.
I really think not only does he understand that, but I think he demonstrated in his first term that he knows how to lead us in that direction, and he has a very specific plan to get us back there.
So I think we're about to enter a golden age in this country.
I was among many who thought after January the 6th, it was over for Donald Trump, that we'd never see him anywhere near the White House again.
It's been a remarkable comeback.
How do you think he's pulled this off?
In terms of him personally, what are the characteristics of Donald Trump that have enabled him to make one of the greatest comebacks anyone's ever seen?
Look, I worked for Richard Nixon.
I worked for Senator Bob Dole.
They were both very tough guys.
Donald Trump is the toughest human being I have ever met.
He is persistent when he has an idea.
It's unshakable.
He has a work ethic which was demonstrated once again, as it was at the end of the 2016 campaign, that leaves younger men like me behind.
In a very strange way, his enemies in their efforts to destroy him, to bankrupt him, to send him to jail, they turbocharged his campaign.
I felt at the time that he announced his candidacy for this election, a certain flatness among the electorate in terms of their response to it.
Yet when they tried to destroy him, they literally turbocharged his campaign.
It's hard to remember now, but many people said, oh, well, Ron DeSantis will easily become the Republican nominee.
Trump is yesterday's news.
He vanquished DeSantis and quite easily.
He stormed to the nomination in an unprecedented style.
He got three times the margin of the previous big winner of the Iowa caucuses.
That was my old boss, Senator Bob Dole.
It was a relatively easy nomination, and the party is now completely remade in his image as the party of working Americans, the party of the middle class.
They have underestimated his strength.
The man is a lion.
I thought there was some...
Listen, I totally agree with you about that.
And in fact, I wrote columns saying that I thought DeSantis was the future.
But then I think the way the left weaponized the justice system so transparently against Trump, you could see his own poll ratings from that moment, as you put it, start to turbocharge.
And they carried on.
In fact, the more times he appeared in court, the better his approval rating got to the extent that by the time we got to last week, his personal approval rating was the highest it had ever been as a politician, despite the fact that by then he was a convicted felon.
So it's been an extraordinary thing to watch.
And yet I felt the overreach by taking him through a criminal court over a ridiculous case involving Stormy Daniels from 20 years ago.
I thought that was such an obvious abuse of power by the Democrats that actually it backfired completely.
I agree with all of that.
The problem, of course, is that they are unhinged by their hatred for him.
And I think it has clouded their political judgment, which is why they overreached.
The American people were able to see that he was being unfairly persecuted in an effort to interfere in the election and destroy his campaign to return to the White House.
So yes, he was ultimately helped by his enemies because they tried so hard to destroy him.
What kind of president will he be second time around, Roger?
Because the first three years of his presidency were going pretty well.
People were offended by stuff that came out of his mouth, but in terms of what he did, he was a reasonably moderate, successful Republican president.
Then he got hit by the COVID pandemic, which, as it did to every country in the world, threw everything up on its head.
And then we had the fallout, obviously, him refusing to accept the election result, January 6th, and so on.
I don't want to go back over that.
But he's got a chance now to reset his legacy, and he knows he can't run again.
So I suspect knowing him, and you can tell me what you think, but I suspect knowing him, he's going to really go for it this time.
And he's going to try and really cement his legacy.
What I'm not sure about is exactly how he sees that legacy.
What do you think he'll be doing?
First of all, I do think he's going to be magnanimous in victory.
He was in 2016, but his enemies would never concede defeat.
I think he has a unique opportunity in a number of areas to be remembered as one of our greatest presidents.
He understands that low energy prices, drilling again for gas and oil, are the cornerstone to a vibrant economy.
He also understands that a vibrant economy, as JFK said, a rising tide lifts all boats.
He has a deep commitment to criminal justice reform.
We saw that in the first term, in the First Step Act, in the Second Chance Act.
I think he should do more in that area, and I think he will.
He's very focused now on the fact that there's a huge lack of affordable housing in America.
It doesn't matter whether you're a buyer or a renter.
It's impossible to buy, and it's too expensive to rent.
He's a builder.
He's going to fix that problem.
I think he understands that he has a unique opportunity to not only restore the country to its former greatness, but now to go down in the history books with FDR, with Theodore Roosevelt, with some of our Abraham Lincoln, some of our greatest presidents.
He is absolutely the right man at the right time for this job.
It is quite staggering that somebody who has been branded the most racist candidate in history, a neo-Nazi, a fascist, blah, ended up with this surging support from black voters and particularly from Latino voters when he was up against a female black candidate.
Unifying the Fractured Nation 00:07:03
What do you think that says about America?
Was it just that American voters saw through all the Nazi nonsense?
First of all, it was nonsense.
And our mistake, perhaps, as political analysts is to not realize that black people and Hispanics and really all people, they all want the same thing.
They want economic opportunity and security.
They want safe and secure neighborhoods.
They want low gas prices.
They want low food prices.
They realized based on his four years and the last four years that Donald Trump brought us those things before and that he could bring them again.
So I think this is why he made these historic gains.
Let's recognize that he won an absolute majority of Hispanic Americans.
I mean, George W. Bush, I think, had the highest previous high water market, about 38.5%.
So people voted for their future and they trust him with their future far more than they trusted Kamala Harris.
I posted on X this morning, and it got a lot of blowback from MAGA supporters, but I posted that it might be an interesting move by Donald Trump if he truly wants to send a signal early on that he wants to unify the country to consider pardoning Hunter Biden, Joe Biden's son.
Trump pardoned you after you were convicted of a crime.
Would it be a good move, do you think, for Trump to effectively reach across the pardon aisle and pardon the current president's son?
Well, of course, Pierce, as you know, once a federal judge ordered the Justice Department to release Robert Mueller's fully unredacted report, which the judge denied my defense attorneys at trial, even Mueller could not sugarcoat the fact that he found no evidence of Russian collusion, WikiLeaks collaboration, or for that matter, any other crime.
I was pleased when the president said that the pardon of Hunter Biden was not off the table.
We need to bring America together again.
We need to end this cycle of weaponization of our criminal justice system.
The fact that Kamala and her surrogates were saying, well, if Trump is elected, he will seek to prosecute and jail his political enemies.
Do they have no sense of self-awareness?
They were accusing him of planning to do that which he did not do in his first term and that which was being done to him at that very instant.
So I was pleased to see that he's considering it.
I don't speak for him.
I speak only for myself.
But it is time to end this cycle where Republicans and Democrats are trying to destroy each other, put each other in prison.
It was not like this when I entered politics.
I had friends who were in the business who were really smart people, Democrats, who you would eat with and drink with and hang out with and make jokes with.
That camaraderie just no longer exists.
We have to get back to a time where there is some civility in our politics.
And I actually think Donald Trump understands that.
Well, in the interests of moving forward and reaching across to historic foes and so on, I just wanted to end on a bit of personal business, Roger, because when I tweeted that Kamala Harris wasn't up to winning the presidency, you responded to me on X and you said, Piers now trying to suck Trump's dick after betraying him previously, a truly talentless dirtbag.
I just wondered whether, now the dust has settled, you wanted to maybe rethink your view there, Roger.
Look, I confess Piers to occasionally posting a Tumartini tweet, and I'm less than perfect.
But yes, let's have a reset.
I had seen an interview with Trump in which I didn't think you treated him fairly, and that was my motivation.
But it is a new day for all of us.
None of us is perfect, and let's move forward on a more positive basis.
So you don't think I'm quite such a truly talentless dirtbag?
No, actually, you're not a bad fellow at all.
You know, it's interesting with Donald Trump because I've known him a long time, not as long as you, but I've known him nearly 20 years.
And I've criticized him a lot, and I've praised him a lot when others haven't.
And we've occasionally had a little wobble in the relationship.
But the thing I've always liked about Donald Trump is that I always know when we've had a little spat or a falling out, and we did after that interview you talked about, he rang me a few months later like nothing had happened.
And I think he, you know, he is actually a very loyal person, as you know, to people he's known a long time, even if occasionally they say or do stuff he doesn't like.
He is actually a loyal guy.
Well, look, I think he falls in and out with people, but nobody is ever permanently banned.
And Piers, look, anybody who sports a boutonnier like that can't really be a bad chap.
Roger, it's great to have you on our sensor.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, and God bless you.
Well, joining me now to discuss the latest is the former White House Communications Director, now host of the Rest of Politics USA, Anthony Scaramucci, the co-host of Gutfeld and author of I Used to Like You Until, Kat Timf, also the former Communications Director and host of the Sean Spicer Show, Sean Spicer.
Well, what a remarkable trio to have to discuss this.
Let me start with you, Anthony, if I may.
I'm sure you won't be surprised I want to start with you, because I don't think I've ever seen anyone more certain on social media that they were going to be right about something who was then proven to be so spectacularly wrong.
Your thoughts?
Well, I actually think you are a dirtbag, Pierce.
So, I mean, I know Roger doesn't think you are one, but I do.
Look, I got it wrong.
I'm a big boy.
I got it wrong.
I congratulated the president.
I congratulated Elon Musk.
Democratic process.
They ran a brilliant campaign.
It was incredibly well executed.
And I got it wrong.
And so when you get something wrong, especially if you're an entrepreneur, if you get something wrong, you say, I got something wrong.
You own up to it and you make adaptation.
And so I'm happy to confess on your show or anywhere, I got it wrong.
You know, Barry Diller, when he lost the Paramount deal in 1993, I was a younger man then, and he said something that I think was brilliant about life.
They won, period.
The Core of Common Sense 00:15:12
We lost, period, next.
And I see it that way.
And by the way, I wish the president-elect well.
He's the president for everybody, and I want him to do a good job.
I would love to have him dial down some of the rhetoric against his fellow Americans.
I don't think that that's going to help him unify the country, and I hope he considers doing that.
On the rhetoric, though, you see, I think one of the biggest problems for the Democrats was that they kept talking about how offended they were by Trump's rhetoric, while simultaneously constantly calling him a Nazi, a fascist, and this and that, using the most extreme rhetoric imaginable, comparing him to a man who murdered 12 million people.
And I kept saying, why are you doing this to my liberal friends?
Do you not understand that most average Americans do not think Trump is Adolf Hitler and nowhere near Adolf Hitler?
And it's incredibly offensive, actually, to keep using that analogy.
So when it comes to the rhetoric, do you accept, Anthony, that on your side, the rhetoric was also pretty awful?
Well, no, I've said that on my podcast.
In fact, my co-host, Katty Kay, who's a fellow Brit, when someone's bringing up the word Hitler, she always says that that's just too glib, or to use an American expression, it's jumped over the shark.
I don't see the president as Adolf Hitler, but I do see the president as somebody that hits hard with the language.
You know, when you're, listen, we can debate it again if you want to, but when you're saying that non-white immigrants to the country and whether they're legal or illegal are eating dogs and cats, I think that's a rough thing to do.
That's dehumanizing.
And I don't want him to do that.
I don't want any leader, frankly, to do that.
We have to figure out a way to cohabitate in this country.
We have to figure out a way to respect each other's cultures and each other's ways of living.
But I do think there's a resonating message that the left needs to listen to.
If you don't mind, just to be one second, there was a great meme from the Harris team.
There was a man standing at the voting booth and there's a young little girl.
And the young little girl said, Daddy, who are you voting for?
And she said, he said, I'm voting for you.
But that's not actually what happened, Pierce.
What happened was there was a woman standing at that voting booth and there was a young son.
And the young son asked the mom, who are you voting for?
And she turned to him and said, I'm voting for you.
You see, and I think people on the left need to understand this, this woke culture, this demonizing every word that's spoken that they think is inappropriate, this cancel culture, if you will.
I think the American people are tired of.
And I think Donald Trump represents those people.
And I think that's one of the reasons why he got 46% of the vote.
So listen, the race is over.
He won.
Congratulations to him and his team.
But if the left wants to get competitive with people like Donald Trump, they better understand what they're doing from a cultural perspective.
Kat, it's interesting that Trump talked about having a core of common sense.
And that is why he believes there's been this realignment of the electorate where you've got so many black Americans, Latino Americans, and others gravitating to somebody, despite the fact he's been called racist and so on.
This common sense part has been very interesting to watch.
THE NEW YORK Times today had a fascinating report that one of the most effective ads that the Trump campaign did, and they were stunned apparently, by how effective it was, was the one that talked about Carmela Harris will be for they them, and Trump will be for you him, or you you me you, I think, whatever it was.
But whatever it was, it was making a point about this whole issue of the trans debate, which many Democrats have tried to downplay, and yet I've constantly said this is something most people really feel fired up about, which is this thing of trans athletes in women's sport and so on and getting into women's spaces and so on.
And the effectiveness of that ad seems to suggest that I was right and that the Democrats were very wrong to try and downplay it and say that people didn't care, and I saw Joe Scarborough on MSNBC saying the same thing.
I think that kind of issue played into that core of common sense that Trump was talking about.
What do you think?
Yeah, I wrote not one but two chapters about gender in my most recent book because of this, and I think it's one of these issues where a lot of people do agree, but there's the extremes on the two sides that are very loud, and another thing that's in my book is that Research shows over and over again that there's huge gaps between what people will say out loud and what people will actually believe, perhaps because of fear of this sort of cancel culture, right?
And I think with Joe Biden, it was one thing because I think a lot of people really believed that Joe Biden was a moderate.
And Joe Biden himself might honestly be a moderate.
I honestly think sometimes if you were to walk up to him and ask him to explain they, them and pronouns with no prompter and no notes, I don't know that he would be able to do that.
I think there was a team of people around him that was pushing some of this stuff.
But I think honestly that when you have Kamala, it's a different story.
She ran a very progressive campaign in 2020.
There are videos of her saying, you know, certain things.
She actually is on record saying that when Trump said, it sounds crazy.
It does sound crazy when Trump said that she wanted to have taxpayer-funded transgender operations on what, how did he put it, illegal aliens in prison.
And everybody laughed.
And it turns out she is actually on record supporting that.
So I think that was one of the things that made the huge difference.
I think also that it's something that a lot of people don't really understand.
Transgender people are a small percentage of the population.
And it did get to a point where even asking a question about something you don't understand in the incorrect way could be enough to see yourself canceled.
And I think that of a lot of the people who I know who I know a lot of people who voted for Trump for the first time in this past election, I still, I'm a third-party voter.
I still stuck with that.
But a lot of the people who voted for him this time were like, were men.
And they said, listen, I voted for Trump.
Please don't tell my wife.
And it was this idea of if you are constantly being told how bad you are and you are constantly being told that no solutions, if there's going to be, if you want to be progressive, there has to be some sort of path to progress.
There has to be some sort of redemption possible.
You have to be able to learn and grow and be a better person.
But that's not what people saw Democrats becoming.
It was, okay, you said this, did this, you're done.
And I think that that's one of the issues where we saw this, but that's not the only issue where we saw this.
And I think that overall, people kind of saw their vote as a way to kind of stick it to that because you reach a point where you're like, okay, if I'm just bad, well, what do you want me to do?
You want me to kill myself?
What do I do?
There was no path to redemption there.
There's no path to progress there.
And if you can't win, why try?
And I think that was what the vote was for a lot of people.
Yeah, you know, I always found it ironic that the left would constantly say Trump's a fascist, whilst themselves behaving very like fascists.
You know, the purest personification of fascism is where a group of people tell another group of people, if you don't dress how we tell you to, speak how we tell you to, laugh at things that we think are acceptable, you know, have heroes that we have approved, read books that we have approved, et cetera, et cetera.
That is actually what fascism is.
It's where you try through your own narrow prism of your worldview, try and dictate that to everybody else on pain of utter cancellation, shaming, vilification, ruination, getting them kicked out of their jobs, and so on.
You know, I kept saying to my liberal friends, this is fascism, actually.
This far-left progressive bullshit woke stuff is fascism.
Chaul Spicer, great to have you back on Uncensored.
You must be feeling, I guess, rather chipper today.
It's an extraordinary win, obviously, for the Republicans.
What do you put it down to?
How has Trump managed to pull off the greatest comeback in American political history?
Yeah, it's a, by the way, it's a combination of euphoria and exhaustion at once.
Had a few hours of sleep.
But I think that there's a lot of what you guys just talked about, the culture factor.
But more importantly, for the first time in over 100 years, America had a stark choice.
You could look at the four years of Donald Trump or the four years of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.
And so the rhetoric is usually propositional.
It's theoretical.
I will promise you this.
My opponent will do all these bad things, et cetera, et cetera, from both sides.
And what happened in this election is that the American people could say, I hear the stuff that they're saying about Trump, that this is how he's going to govern.
This is what he'll do.
But I remember the four years he was in.
Yeah, a little chaotic, but things got done.
We were more prosperous.
The border was secure.
The world was more stable.
I do a morning little conversation called the morning meeting at 9 a.m. Eastern.
And one of the guys in the chat put it this way.
He said, I'd rather take WWE, which is a wrestling federation in America, versus World War III.
And I think that there were a lot of people that were worried about how Kamala Harris would govern, whether it was economically, culturally, as you guys just mentioned, or just the threat that we face from abroad, from China, North Korea, Iran.
And she didn't instill a sense of stability, of understanding the issues.
People were willing to give her a chance when they pushed Joe Biden out.
But at the end of the day, the attacks didn't hold water when it came to Donald Trump because people had seen what he had done for four years.
And they knew the difference between the four years of Donald Trump on a range of issues versus what the world and the country have become under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
And voters don't get that choice very often.
And we could look at it in very, very stark, real terms in terms of the record of results for both sides.
Yeah, and there's no doubt that's what most Americans did and they voted accordingly, hence this landslide.
Period, one point off your fascism.
It was also the attacks on democracy, right?
That democracy was under attack didn't hold water.
We just conducted the fundamental principle of democracy, which is going out and voting.
But the other side was the side when it comes to democracy that tried to kick Donald Trump off the ballot, that tried to kick RSK off the ballot, that tried to kick Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, off the ballot.
So when it came to democracy being under attack, it was actually the other side that was actually doing things to undermine the democracy.
Yeah, I certainly think there was a double standard.
Yeah.
Let's bring in Larry Wilmore.
Can I say something real quickly, though?
Anthony, I'm going to come to you in a minute, Anthony.
I'm going to go to Larry Wilmore, who's not a chance to speak yet, the comedian and host of Black on the Air podcast.
Larry, I want to play you.
It's a mashup of the late night hosts crying and weeping over Trump's victory.
Let's take a look.
Hey there.
How are you doing?
If you watch the show regularly, I'm guessing you're not doing great.
I don't think Donald Trump's a good person.
I'd even go so far as to say he's a bad person.
Now, in my defense, I'm only basing that on everything I've ever been taught about what makes someone good or bad.
Why are you leaving the country?
I can't stay for another four years of this.
Who knows what he's going to do?
This is not the end.
And we have to regroup and we have to continue to fight and continue to work day in and day out.
Yeah, Jimmy Kimmel, Larry, went on to start crying on his show last night.
And all I can think was, I interviewed Jay Leno, Jay Leno, about a year ago, and he didn't understand why late night hosts have become so partisan because they never used to be.
You know, Jay Leno used to whack both sides and no one really knew who he voted for.
You know, Johnny Carson, perhaps the greatest of them all, no one ever knew his politics.
He just used to rip into all the politicians.
The most popular right now in late night is actually Cat Show, Gutfeld, with Greg Gutfeld leading it and Kat and Tyrus.
That's the most popular.
And they're not afraid to whack their own side if they want to.
Why has it become such a weirdly partisan thing at night and all skewed to the left?
Yeah.
Well, to answer that question, you know, Showbiz has a way of cannibalizing something that works, you know.
And the Daily Show was, it was kind of an answer to what was happening in the Bush administration and I think Fox News at that time.
And Jon Stewart kind of became a symbol for people who felt like they weren't getting their news in some kind of way.
And remember, Pierce, this was like before social media was a big thing and that type of thing.
And he kind of became the symbol of that.
The thing about Showbiz, it tends to want to repeat things that are successful.
And I think it just became kind of a movement, it seems like.
I don't disagree with Jay at all.
In fact, one of my favorite comedians of all time is Johnny Carson for that reason.
It really is funny when I look at the hosts and everything, because I have such a complete different reaction to this.
I'm actually optimistic, Piers, to be honest with you.
I think the Democrats need a self-examination.
Here's what I've been saying for a long time.
Joe Biden did not win because of his vision in 2020.
He was an anti-Trump candidate.
And I always said, this was my criticism of the Democratic Party.
I said, I feel like there's like we have a presidency without a president.
That's what it felt like when Bush was president.
You know, meaning there was no vision for this presidency.
It was anti, it's what I call a, it's a, it's kind of an election.
Well, I forget the words for it, but you can't, you can govern like that, but you can't really gain a coalition like that.
And so that's really what Kamala kind of inherited, Pierce, more than anything else, was a non-vision party, but a managerial party.
We're managing this government so this guy does it.
You cannot win with that kind of strategy.
So the Democrats have an opportunity now to figure out what their vision is, what they really stand for.
And I think it's something that ultimately hurt them because Trump has stood for the same things before he even ran for president, immigration and trade.
He's always stood for those things.
So he's always had a clear vision.
And I think it's for people that are looking for somebody to lead them, you know, people in the middle, because your sides are your sides, right?
I think it's easier to latch onto something like that.
So I think this is an opportunity.
Anthony, as we've been talking, Biden has actually come out and addressed the people.
Let's take a little listen to some of this.
Yesterday, I spoke with President-elect Trump to congratulate him on his victory.
And I assured him that I'd direct my entire administration to work with his team to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition.
Leading the Middle Ground 00:14:17
Yesterday, I also spoke with Vice President Harris.
She's been a partner and a public servant.
She has a backbone like a ramrod.
She has great character, true character.
She gave her whole heart and effort.
And she and her entire team should be proud of the campaign they ran.
My thoughts about Biden and Kamala Anthony are that Biden clearly in the last two years was on a pretty rapid descent in terms of senility or dementia, whatever it was.
I kept writing about it.
Other people did.
We would be mocked and ridiculed every time we said this.
But it was obvious to me, and doctors were telling me it's pretty obvious.
There's something that's going on here, which is taking him downhill quite quickly.
The Democrats knew that, but they didn't do anything about it until summer.
And then they stick the metaphorical knife in his back and get rid of him in a coup.
But rather than have what I think would have been a sensible move, which is to have an open convention where people all throw their hat in the ring and they all duke it out.
and the most effective operator goes forward to take on Trump, who's a very formidable opponent.
They just coronated Karmala Harris, who had been a pretty unpopular attempted nominee the first time, who'd been a pretty unpopular vice president, and who, when it came to it, wasn't able to differentiate herself from Biden at all.
In fact, she said, I wouldn't change anything that's happened.
And from that moment on, I thought she was kind of dead in the water.
I also thought she was sort of uniquely unsubstantial.
Whatever you think of Trump, everybody knows where he stands on all these big issues.
He ransoms home with a marketing hammer all the time.
I wouldn't know what Carmela Harris really thinks about almost anything.
And I felt that she was a very uninspiring candidate for that reason.
But also the combination of Biden going on too long when he was clearly unfit for office and then Carmela Harris being parachuted in.
Do you think he was just tactically a complete shambles by the Democrats?
Should they have just done something about this earlier?
Well, I'm going to try to tie the thread into what both Sean and Larry were saying.
You know, Joe Biden said he was running for four years.
He recognized his age back then, and he said he was going to rebuild the Democratic Party and then find somebody to replace him.
And then quite Shakespearean, he got the bug of power and didn't want to leave.
And as Sean can tell you, the president's very powerful.
And so he sort of flexed against the Democratic Party that wanted him out.
Nancy Pelosi needed to make that call in September of 2023, not in July of 2024.
And so you had that problem.
And I just want to bring up something that Sean said that you have to think about here.
In the exit polling, number two was the threat to the democracy.
But then when they asked the secondary question, the secondary question is the Democrats were the threat to democracy.
You know, they were saying that Trump was, but the Democrats were the threat to democracy.
And then when people were asked why, it was because of the coronation issue that you're talking about, Pierce.
And let me say this, okay?
And people should know this.
In 2016, they also had a coronation on the side of the Democrats.
Joe Biden wanted to run for president.
He got stuffed by Barack Obama.
You may remember that 40-plus-minute long Rose Garden speech.
But he probably could have primaried Hillary Clinton and beaten her.
And then it would have been a contest between Trump and Biden at much younger ages.
So I think Democrats have a real problem.
I think they've got to look in the mirror at the hypocrisy of what they're saying to people.
And frankly, the way it resonated in the exit polling.
Yeah, I completely agree.
Kat, Trump's got an amazing mandate, an opportunity now.
I mean, he's basically won everything in a massive clean sweep.
And that gives him awesome powers, but also awesome responsibility.
When he stands up at the inauguration, what do you want him to say?
Yeah, I'm someone who's continually cynical about politics.
And I am not someone who ever has really been excited about a candidate, I don't think, in my entire life.
But I think one of the biggest things that we, sorry, but one of the things we struggle with right now, I think, is there's got to be some unity.
I mean, both sides have been guilty of this rhetoric of if we don't win, the whole country is over forever.
And, you know, I don't believe that regardless, if Kamala would have won Trump winning, I don't think either one means that there's not going to be an election ever again.
We had people on both sides saying that.
And I know that one of the things that people like about Trump is that he is, to me, objectively funny.
And he's entertaining.
And he does like to get these zingers in and that kind of stuff.
But if he could strike the tone that he struck for the first part of the speech that he gave at the RNC, which was again very different from the second part of the speech that he gave at the RNC, I think that that would go a really long way.
Of course, there's people who are afraid right now.
There's people who are going to, there's people who are genuinely afraid, and then there's people who make money off of division who are kind of stoking the division.
But I really think that anything he could do in terms of that would be... would be really healing, I think, for at least some people in the country.
I think it's going to take time.
I'm really excited for Christmas to get here.
Maybe by then we'll be able to talk to each other.
But that would be what I would like.
That's a very good first step.
In terms of policy, I'm someone who sees, for example, I notice how tariffs are attacks on the consumer.
I'm not really super excited about that.
But there's plenty of things about Kamala I wasn't excited about.
At the very least, I'd like to take a step towards us being able to talk to each other as human beings and not just have politics be the main determining factor.
Would it be a good idea in that spirit for Trump to pardon Hunter Biden?
I suggested this on X this morning and all hell broke loose with Mago coming for me saying this was disgusting and outrageous.
But that's the whole point is that if Trump was able to find it in himself, notwithstanding the fury he must have felt all year at the attempt to incarcerate him, if he was able to find it in himself to pardon Hunter Biden, just by doing that, I think it would go a long way to making the left just calm down a bit.
Do you think that?
I wholeheartedly agree with that.
I wholeheartedly think that'd be a wonderful idea.
Yeah.
Sean Spicer, we thought it would be quite fun given we've got you and the mooch.
Well, Larry, I'll come to you in a second on that.
While we've got Sean and the Mooch, two former Trump directors of communications, of course, from the famous podium, we've done a little mashup of your first days in your jobs.
Let's take a look.
Some members of the media were engaged in deliberately false reporting.
The White House is on track and we're actually, I think, doing a really good job.
A reporter falsely tweeted out that the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office.
If the president says it, okay, let me do more research on him.
My guess is that there's probably some level of truth to that.
Photographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way in one particular tweet to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the national mall.
I don't think I'd be standing here if I didn't have a good relationship with the president.
I love the president.
And I think a lot of you guys know in the media I've been very, very loyal to him.
Now, Sean, other than the fact you've both weathered quite well, I think.
You both look arguably younger than you did then under the strain of the office.
It's not an easy gig standing at that podium in that press room trying to explain what Donald Trump says.
Because sometimes I get the feeling even Donald Trump doesn't know what he said or why he said it.
How hard is that job?
And who's the best type of person for it?
So one, thanks for the trip down memory lane.
I appreciate that.
Now I understand Anthony's comment at the beginning.
It makes a lot more sense in context now.
I'm just kidding, of course, but I get it a lot more why he started the interview and the comment he made.
Look, it is a tough job.
I came into it, I think, with a sense of a traditional nature of trying to, and what I think he needs to do is make sure, or frankly, the opposite, what the person who takes this job needs to do is understand that Donald Trump speaks for himself.
And that if you're going to go out there and make policy pronunciations or directives or personnel announcements, you better be darn sure that you have the best and latest information when you go make that comment.
It's one of my lessons learned from working with him.
I just assumed too much at times that where I thought he was on a position instead of continuing to confirm what he thought or because I relied on sometimes staff and others.
But anyway, I think the person that takes these high-profile jobs in this coming administration better be certain when they speak on his behalf that they know exactly what he thinks.
Just on that point, Anthony, I'm going to come to you, Larry, in one sec, but Anthony, just on that point.
Unlike Sean, who stayed loyal to Trump, you turned on him pretty savagely.
Why?
The guy, hold on a sec.
The guy went after my wife on Twitter.
Okay, I gave the guy a million dollars for his campaign.
I gave him hundreds of hours of media advocacy.
I said one thing he didn't like.
It's okay to go after me, but my wife never did anything to the guy.
He went after my wife.
So maybe if he goes after your wife, Pierce, you'll be cool with it.
And maybe Ted Cruz is cool with it.
I'm not cool with it.
Okay.
And period, the end.
So when you say why, you just, you don't do that to a guy like me.
I grew up in a blue-collar family in an Italian-American neighborhood.
You know, I got to go to Rayo's tonight.
Okay.
I could never look at my Italian friends the right way if I accepted that from Donald Trump.
These people still work for us.
We're still in a democracy.
Maybe you'll invite me back and I'll be in an undisclosed location if we're not in a democracy anymore.
Don't go after my wife on Twitter after I gave you a million dollars, two years of advocacy after you fired me.
You just don't do that to somebody like me, Pierce.
Now, I just want to point out to Sean, he's dressing a lot better, okay, than he was in that first press conference.
Because did you see the suit, Pierce?
It was up in here, okay?
And Sean has gone on to build a very successful career for himself, which we should be doing here in America.
So I wish Sean well, and I'm glad he's doing well.
But don't go after my wife.
If you want to come after me, I got no problem with it.
I'm a public figure.
I can take it.
And Pierce, let me tell you something.
You're a friend of mine.
If he went after your wife, I'd be standing in the bar with you ready to take him on.
Okay.
And that's just the way things are when you grow up in a neighborhood like mine.
No, well, I grew up in an East Sussex village on the south coast of England, and we have exactly the same mentality.
If you come for the wise, it's very simple.
That's why Roger Stone is texting me right now saying, hey, man, no hard feelings.
I always was very fond of you.
And I just texted him back in the middle of the show.
Don't go after my wife and we'll be just fine.
And again, I wish the president well, but that's a very personal thing for me.
You've actually, the one thing that's really stood out from what you just said is you're going to Rayos.
That's reminded me.
I haven't been there for years.
God, I love that place.
Larry, let me come to you just for the big picture here.
This has been an unbelievable week to be in the United States of America.
You know, I predicted Trump would win and I suggested a few days before I thought it could be quite big.
Even I, and I don't think Donald Trump either, when I spoke to him, ever thought in a million years it would be on this scale.
What does it say about America?
And how optimistic are you, despite what's happened and the way it's fractured America as always?
How optimistic are you that actually, given the scale of the mandate, second time around, Trump may not be what he was first time, and this may turn out to be quite a transformative presidency?
First of all, I never got a chance to thank you for having me on, Pierce.
I really appreciate being on.
Oh, well, thank you.
It's great.
Also, oh, yeah, here's the thing.
I actually predicted this in a number of ways.
A year ago, I predicted Trump was going to win.
And even before the debate with Biden, I predicted it.
And it was mainly because of how the American people were feeling about where they were.
You know, I come from working class people.
My niece is a nurse in an emergency room and she was always telling me stories how it's just hard for them, you know, paycheck to paycheck, that type of thing.
She and her family, they're struggling and that message wasn't, I don't think, was really being paid attention to enough by the Democratic Party.
And I really feel the wave of that was really what swept in here was that undercurrent.
And this is why I say I'm optimistic.
First of all, you always should listen to the American people.
And I think the Democrats, because they're so out of power, finally have a chance to listen and make some changes.
Piers, I grew up playing sports, right?
If we just lost a football game it on the refs, that is not a good examination of how we play the game.
So I'm very optimistic.
I always root for America first.
I'm never going to, I'm like, I agree with Kat completely.
I distrust most politicians and I'm never going to allow a politician to be in charge of my happiness.
That's not going to happen.
But I think we have an opportunity.
There's an opportunity to listen to the American people and there's an opportunity for the Democrats to kind of figure out what's going on.
Because Pierce, during election years, I don't mind all the hypocrisy and the fighting and all that because that's kind of what we do in campaigns, right?
You know, he said this, she said that.
Voting on Economic Vibes 00:06:23
Who cares, right?
But once we get past it, Piers, what are we going to do?
Are we going to govern properly?
Are we going to govern the American people from a place of unity?
To me, that's more important than anything else.
Yeah, and the one thing I do think we've learned from this election, and it was a lesson that should have been learned from the Hillary Clinton debacle, is that when the Democrats think they're being clever, rolling out all these pop stars and movie stars, from Taylor Swift to Oprah to George Clooney, Julia Roberts, they all queue up to pledge their allegiance to the Democrat candidate.
Actually, the American people don't give a stuff what these celebrities have to say.
They were far more interested, actually, it turned out, by what podcasters like Joe Rogan were saying with Trump, where Trump had three hours and you can't hide over three hours.
And actually, in that three hours, Trump revealed himself to be a much more complex, nuanced, charming parts character than perhaps his enemies ever give him credit for.
And then he got the power of someone like Elon Musk.
He's not a celebrity.
He's a kind of weird genius who is changing the world in so many radical ways and used to be a Democrat, but just got fed up with all the woke nonsense and gravitated to somebody he thought would end it.
And there again is a lesson for Democrats.
I think forget the celebrities and try and work out why people of the magnitude of Elon Musk have ditched you and try and bring your party back to a more electable place.
Got to leave it there.
Thank you to my brilliant panel.
Really appreciate it all.
Thank you very much indeed.
Since Trump's stunning victory, there's understandably been rivers of tears shed by some of our regular uncensored contributors.
And we feel it's important to check in on them just to check they're okay.
Here's how my final guest today reacted in real time as the results came in.
They're still outstanding.
Are they not counting him here?
What's going on, Vadim?
You should know this.
Why isn't Philadelphia counting votes?
I want to know what the f what is going on.
What the hell is going on right now?
Well, by popular demand, Destiny rejoins me now.
Destiny, I can't imagine this could have gone any worse for you, could it?
There are ways it could have gone worse.
I think the writing was probably on the wall.
Obviously, I have to do a stream for, well, I can think of a number of ways it could have gone worse.
I could have lost every single state.
It could have been the Reagan landslide that everybody wanted it to be.
But I think the writing was probably on the wall when the Florida votes started rolling in, and you saw that Miami had flipped red.
But listen, we've got to do a show.
You know as well as I do.
You've got to keep it entertaining for 12 hours.
So we were engaging in some high-level Bernie math into the deep hours of the night.
Try to see if there was a way for Harris to win.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was a fun time.
I mean, look, it's been an absolute debacle for the Democrats.
Why do you think it's been such a crushing defeat?
Honestly, I think that I understand that we have to keep our jobs and we have to make sure that our jobs are important by telling people how important they are.
But I think the real answer, because all the analysis was done earlier by all these panelists, especially Roger Stone, who's an American trader, was absolutely ludicrous.
I think the actual answer is Americans just kind of vote based on the economic vibes they feel.
I think that when Biden won in 2020, it was because COVID.
Everybody felt horrible.
The economy was like everything was crazy.
In our just economy, everything was crazy.
So people voted for Biden.
I think that when Biden came in, I think they had a lot of inflation early on.
People still feel the cumulative effects.
Suddenly they vote Trump.
I think it's probably as simple as that.
You can try to reach to all of these other things, but basically every other point brought up earlier, which is factually completely and totally ridiculous and incorrect.
The idea of weaponizing the DOJ and then bringing up New York State, the fact that Donald Trump has done every single thing that you guys earlier were accusing the Biden admin of doing, except like 20 times worse.
I don't think at the end of the day, Americans don't care about that.
If you talk to an average person, they're not going to tell you about the Department of Justice is weaponizing Bible.
They're just going to say like, man, you know, shit's expensive right now.
Fuck.
And that's about it, I think.
I mean, that is partly true, certainly on the economic part.
I agree with you.
And I think I would add immigration and the southern border crisis as being a major added component to that because people resented the fact that not only could they not afford to feed their kids, but there are all these people coming in illegally on the border and putting extra pressure on public services and taking jobs and so on.
I think you can't discount that.
Nah, nah, that's not.
Well, you would discount it, but I wouldn't.
No, no, I would discount it because the Republicans discounted it.
If the border was a huge issue, then the border bill wouldn't have been shut down.
They would have negotiated harder on it.
But they didn't.
They shut it down because they knew it wasn't a real issue.
People care about things like the border and immigration because Republicans told them to care about things like the border and immigration.
The reality is unemployment is incredibly low.
If you want a really big, like top-line takeaway from this whole thing that would be interesting that nobody will discuss because it's incredibly boring, perhaps the Federal Reserve targets politically should actually target things like inflation more than unemployment.
Maybe on a political level, maybe it was worth it to suffer 8% or 9% unemployment rather than so aggressively trying to target an inflation figure and keeping unemployment low.
Maybe, but that's a macro econ question.
When you get a result like this, Destiny, notwithstanding your chilling self-confidence, which I obviously admire as a trait, do you have a moment of self-awareness where you just go in the mirror, wow, I was so wrong?
Do you think that the Republicans had a moment of self-awareness in 2020?
Well, it wasn't the question.
I just wonder whether you had had a moment of self-awareness.
I look at the figures as they come in.
I try to analyze what the public is.
But this idea that the Democratic Party needs to do some huge soul-searching after the Republicans tried to coo their way back into office when they lost the last election.
Nah, I don't think.
I think that's ridiculous.
I think the double standard is ridiculous.
I think that the passes that you guys give Trava are absolutely insane.
I think at the end of the day, it's just voting on your general economic trends.
The only tragic thing is that because the economy has been righted in such a positive way, and nobody knows it because nobody talks about it, but the United States is outperforming basically every other country in the world on metrics like inflation, on metrics like unemployment, on metrics like real wages.
Now that the ship has been righted, we're in a situation, again, where thankfully a Republican can come in after a Democrat has, I complained about this before on your show, after a Democrat has righted the ship after an economic catastrophe.
Trump did it after Obama, and now Trump is going to do it again under Biden.
And now he can try to take credit for all the things that he wasn't able to do in his administration, right?
He couldn't pass infrastructure.
Biden did.
Now when stuff is getting built, he's going to take credit for it.
He couldn't bring manufacturing like chips back to the United States when he tried to tear up China.
Biden did with the Chips Act.
Now Trump could take credit for it as that stuff gets built.
Debating a Rigged Election 00:02:24
So, you know, the cycle of politics continues.
When you realize that Trump had won the White House, the Senate, probably the House, he's going to get another two on the Supreme Court, probably.
In other words, a complete quick clean sweep.
He won the popular vote as well as Electoral College.
Did you cry?
No.
No, I'm not.
But I'm not a crier.
If I was more emotional, maybe I would have.
Not a tear?
Nothing?
I mean, I was streaming all night.
If there were any tears there, you would have seen them.
I will say, though, I haven't seen any Democrats try to take over the Capitol building.
We'll see on January 6th.
Maybe I shouldn't hold my breath, but we'll see.
Well, actually, the odd thing, the odd thing, actually, has been the singular lack of protest.
I mean, I felt this at Madison Square Garden when I went to that rally, and the Secret Service told me they were expecting thousands of protesters, and 150 people turned up.
And I've been really struck being in New York.
There'd be no protests whatsoever at this thumping Trump win.
It's nothing like 2016, which makes me think the Democrats massively miscalculated in trying to continue to play the he's Hitler and blah, because that's not what people are clearly feeling, or they really would be out in mass protests.
Sure, but I think Democrats are also able to lose elections.
Conservatives can't, right?
Because we're a little bit more grounded in reality.
Like the election outcome is either we win or we lose.
On the conservative side, the only outcomes are we win or it was rigged.
You saw it, and no Republican that you ever bring on the show will ever admit it.
But Donald Trump said that the election was rigged this year, this like two days ago.
He was literally saying, we watched, we pulled up the tweet as the Philadelphia votes were starting to roll in.
He was saying voter fraud in Philadelphia.
I saw people tweeting out that in Detroit, they're bringing in the vote dumps or whatever.
So they were calling it rigged or they had any evidence, just like he called 2020 rigged with no evidence.
They still believe it was rigged, just like he called 2016 rigged because he didn't win the popular vote.
So, I mean, like, yeah, when the election can only be rigged or when the election, you know, is going to be won, of course, they're going to be more prone to throw a temper tantrum than the Democrats are.
Well, for the record, I did not think Trump had the last election stolen from him.
I said it to his face, which enraged him, but he didn't.
But this one, he's absolutely won fair and square, and it is good to see the Democrats accept that.
Destiny, good to talk to you.
I love having you uncensored.
So I really appreciate you coming back on today.
Thanks for having me.
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