Debate week is here, and Donald Trump is refusing to take part in the first Republican debate because he doesn t want to debate the front-runner. Joe Biden will make an excuse for why he won t debate Donald Trump, and the rest of the Republican field, but it's a perfectly logical reason why Trump should be on stage with the other Republican candidates. And if Trump is the nominee, Joe Biden should debate him, because if he s not the nominee then he's not going to debate anyone else, and if he is, it's going to be Joe Biden who will do it, because he's the only one who can stop Donald Trump from being the next president of the United States, and that's not even close to close to being close enough to be a good enough candidate to beat him in 2020. And Joe Biden has a shot at becoming president if he becomes the nominee of the Democratic Party in 2020, which is not a bad bet, because Donald Trump isn't even a good shot at being the nominee at all, let alone a good chance at becoming the president at all. And that's a bet Joe Biden is making on Donald Trump's chances of becoming the next President of the U.S., and it's not a good one. And it may not be so bad, because Joe Biden may well be the nominee after all anyway, and there's no question that he's got a shot of being the 2016 candidate of the country's most electable presidential candidate in 2020 and a chance of becoming president in the next election, no matter who it s going to become the nominee in 2020 or not even a close shot at all that he s running for re-election in 2020 at all of the votes he s getting. But it won't be much different than it was in 2016, and it could be even better than 2016, because it's Joe Biden's shot at winning the election in 2016. And that s a bet that Joe Biden could be the next time, and he's running for president, and maybe even a much better shot than Donald Trump s chances of being re-elected in 2020 than Trump s. . That's a good bet, right there, right? and Joe Biden might not even be the 2016 nominee. I mean, who's better than that? in 2020? I guess we'll find out soon, but we'll have to wait and see. - Tom? - Tom and I will talk about that soon.
00:00:22.000He was like, I'm not going to be part of this.
00:00:24.000It didn't hurt him in any way, shape, or form.
00:00:26.000On a logical level, it makes perfect sense for him not to take part in the Republican debate.
00:00:30.000On a sort of principled level, he certainly should because there are serious questions to be asked about whether he should be the nominee or not.
00:00:35.000This is true for anybody who's running for the nomination.
00:00:37.000Joe Biden should be debating Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for sure.
00:00:40.000And people who are voting for Trump in the primaries should remember this tactic because I promise you, promise you, promise you, one year from now, When Joe Biden is the nominee, if Donald Trump is the nominee, Joe Biden will not debate Donald Trump.
00:00:54.000He's not gonna get on a stage with him.
00:00:55.000And Donald Trump's people will say, well, he's afraid.
00:00:57.000And at that point, every Democrat and every member of the media will come back and say, well, Donald Trump didn't debate any of the Republicans.
00:01:02.000Why exactly should Joe Biden debate Donald Trump?
00:01:05.000Biden's excuse will be something about Trump being an insurrectionary, or Trump being a criminal indictee, or whatever it is.
00:01:11.000And the media will side with Joe Biden, and there will be no debate.
00:01:14.000So if you are nominating Donald Trump because you think he's going to debate Joe Biden, just get ready, Joe Biden is not going to debate Donald Trump.
00:01:18.000But, put that aside, there's a perfectly logical reason for Donald Trump not to debate the rest of the Republican field.
00:01:23.000Namely, he is leading them by leaps and bounds.
00:01:26.000There's a brand new CBS poll, and what it shows is Trump way out in front, at 62% of the vote.
00:02:25.000I mean, if Donald Trump is the nominee, you're running directly against four separate indictments that are coming down in the first half of next year.
00:02:32.000You're running directly against the generalized American perception that Donald Trump was not a good actor between November 4th of 2020 and January 6th of 2021.
00:02:44.000Okay, if you look at the polling on the general election data right now, general election data says that Donald Trump is competitive with Joe Biden, but Donald Trump is not breaking 45, 46% in any poll.
00:02:53.000Those are the upper end polls for him in the general election cycle.
00:02:55.000Now, you may think that's going to change because the economy is going to collapse.
00:02:58.000You may think that's going to change because Joe Biden has health problems.
00:03:01.000You may think that's going to change because of all of the Hunter Biden of it.
00:03:05.000Whoever is the nominee of a major American party has a shot at becoming president of the United States, as we learned in 2016, when the New York Times had Donald Trump as a 1% possibility of becoming president.
00:03:14.000And then, by the end of the night, on election night, he was the president of the United States.
00:03:18.000So, if he is the nominee, sure, there's a good shot he could become president.
00:03:21.000By good, I mean like, if you're trying to ballpark this thing out, a 1 in 3 shot of him being president of the United States because he lost all the states he would need to win next time.
00:03:32.000He would then have to win one of the following three.
00:03:34.000Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania, right?
00:03:37.000And right now, in the state polling, he is losing in all of those places, right?
00:03:41.000The only place where he may be competitive among those states right now is Georgia.
00:03:46.000That is largely because of the presence of Brian Kemp in the state of Georgia, who remains a popular figure.
00:03:51.000But there are going to be a lot of states that are up for play in 2024 if Donald Trump is the nominee.
00:03:56.000And it's not just the ones I mentioned.
00:03:57.000North Carolina is going to be up for play.
00:03:59.000I know a lot of people are sleeping on Texas.
00:04:00.000I don't want to be alarmist here, but Ted Cruz is going to run a rough race in the Senate in Texas, especially because Greg Abbott, who is a popular governor of Texas, is not going to be top of the ballot.
00:04:10.000Last time Cruz ran, you have to remember that Greg Abbott was also running.
00:04:14.000Greg Abbott was a popular governor, this is in 2018, and Ted Cruz ended up winning over Beto O'Rourke by a couple hundred thousand votes out of about eight million votes cast.
00:04:23.000Well, that race could be really, really tight this time because Greg Abbott is not at the top of the ticket, and that could be a real problem for Donald Trump, yes, believe it or not, in Texas.
00:04:30.000That's not necessarily going to happen, but do Democrats see that as a state that is in play if Donald Trump is on the ballot?
00:04:36.000So, again, Donald Trump, right now, leading in the Republican field by leaps and bounds.
00:04:42.000Also, in terms of a general election, If you are, that is at best a 50-50 bet.
00:04:48.000Now, is it possible that that's better than any of the other Republicans?
00:04:52.000I tend to doubt it, but certainly it's possible.
00:04:55.000Anything is possible at this point, but do I think, in my heart of hearts, that Donald Trump is as likely to win the presidency if he is the nominee as pretty much any of the other Republican candidates who don't have the same baked-in negatives as Donald Trump?
00:05:07.000I think that Trump has some very, very big problems that face him.
00:05:11.000So you can hope that Joe Biden is just really, really bad and that anyone can sneak in, but that's not really an argument for Trump.
00:05:16.000That's an argument that pretty much anybody can sneak in if Joe Biden is the candidate, which requires you to ask the question as to whether then Trump should be the nominee.
00:05:24.000Anyway, none of this matters in terms of the actual data today.
00:05:27.000The actual data today, whatever I say, Donald Trump is winning the nomination by leaps and bounds.
00:05:32.000Again, the CBS poll has him up over the nearest competitor.
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00:07:02.000Voters who were likely GOP primary voters were asked, which concerns you more about the latest Trump indictments?
00:07:08.000Whether it's politically motivated, whether Trump tried to overturn the presidential election, or both.
00:07:13.00077% say the indictment is politically motivated, which of course is true.
00:07:17.000As far as top reasons for considering Trump, 99% Among those who are or might be considering voting for Trump, 99% say things were better under Trump, which is true.
00:07:28.00095% fights for people like me, 76% know him better than other candidates, and 74% always been a supporter.
00:08:25.000Like supporting him in the trials by giving him the nomination?
00:08:27.000Or winning the election if those two things are in opposition?
00:08:30.000And virtually everybody said that they were very much interested in winning the election.
00:08:34.000But what's gonna have to happen for people to actually realize that is for people to actually start thinking of those two things in opposition.
00:08:40.000It may be too early for that because again, the polling numbers for Joe Biden are so low at this point that Trump looks competitive even with the indictments.
00:08:49.000Among those who say that honesty is very important in the GOP nomination, 61% say That the most honest candidate, the candidate who they choose, if honesty is a top priority for them, 61% say Trump, 17% say DeSantis.
00:09:06.000Now, I understand that when people answer this question, they're not using truth to mean truth.
00:09:11.000They're using truth as a proxy for says the things he feels like saying at any given moment.
00:09:15.000They're using truth as a proxy for authenticity, which again, I have an intellectual problem with.
00:09:20.000I know an awful lot of authentic people who lie on the regular.
00:09:24.000I know an awful lot of authentic people who are really quite terrible.
00:09:26.000Because authenticity is not a moral quality.
00:09:29.000Authenticity is you having no actual brain-to-mouth filter.
00:09:32.000It turns out that many of the most considerate, best people you know are inauthentic in the sense that if you consider authenticity to be whatever your instinct is that day, then you actually have to sit there and be like, okay, I'm not going to be authentic when I tell my wife she looks fat in that dress.
00:10:09.000My seven-year-old son, constantly, when he gets in trouble, he, very authentically, will tell me that it is not his fault, and it is 100% his fault.
00:10:16.000This sort of stuff happens all the time with kids.
00:10:18.000However, Again, my opinion on this doesn't matter, the GOP voters' opinion matters.
00:10:23.00061% of all GOP voters in the primary say that Donald Trump is their candidate if honesty is very important to them.
00:10:32.000Not only that, among Trump voters, 71% of Trump voters say, they were given options as to what they feel, they were given a bunch of sources, and they were asked, okay, of these sources, who do you trust most to tell you what is true?
00:11:11.000Which means that of Trump voters, they actually trust Donald Trump to say true things to them.
00:11:17.000More than they trust their friends and family, conservative media figures, or their own religious leaders.
00:11:22.000Well, I mean, bottom line is that on a utilitarian level, you can't break that stranglehold.
00:11:29.000How exactly do you break that stranglehold?
00:11:30.000How do you say that Donald Trump is not telling you the truth when he is not telling you the truth when you trust Trump more than you trust the person who's saying that Trump is not telling you the truth?
00:11:36.000There's no way to break that stranglehold, per se.
00:11:40.000Which is why, really, the only attack line that ever was going to get any traction with regard to a huge percentage of primary voters was the Donald Trump is not the most likely candidate to win this election.
00:11:52.000Which, again, I think that's true, but Donald Trump is saying the opposite, and a lot of these people trust Donald Trump to say the true thing.
00:11:59.000So when Donald Trump says, I'm going to win, and I'm winning big in all the polls, and there are no polls showing him winning big against Joe Biden, doesn't matter.
00:12:05.000They trust him more than they trust the polls.
00:12:06.000They trust him more than they trust friends and family.
00:12:09.000Donald Trump has forged a connection with the people who support him stronger than any political figure of my lifetime.
00:13:43.00047% say that he might, and 18% say that he'd be a long shot.
00:13:48.000So one of the things that is happening here is also that Again, that generalized perception that the best candidate to beat Biden would be Trump is being bolstered by two separate perceptions.
00:14:01.000One is in DeSantis' control and one is not.
00:14:03.000One is that Joe Biden is so weak in the polling that there's a perception that anyone, including Trump, can beat him.
00:14:08.000And the other is that DeSantis himself has not run any good campaigns at this point.
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00:15:18.000All of this brings this to the debate itself.
00:15:21.000As you say, Donald Trump, right now, he's got a lock on two-thirds of the Republican base, or at least half of the Republican base.
00:15:26.000And, you know, again, any consolidation of the field right now does not look sufficient to overcome it.
00:15:32.000This is why he's not going to participate in the debate and is going to undermine the debate itself, right?
00:15:36.000He's doing a pre-taped interview with Tucker Carlson, which makes perfect sense.
00:15:40.000It allows him to slap directly against Fox News the way that going on Tucker does, since Fox News fired Tucker.
00:15:46.000And meanwhile, he'll get big numbers on Twitter now.
00:15:49.000Those numbers are not comparable to actual cable news numbers.
00:15:52.000Numbers on Twitter, if you hover over a tweet for more than a second or two, it counts as a view.
00:15:56.000But those will be people who engage at a very high level with that.
00:16:00.000And it doesn't matter, he doesn't have to out-compete it.
00:16:02.000He just has to degrade the debate itself.
00:16:04.000And by the way, he'll be the subject of the debate anyway.
00:16:07.000No matter what happens, the guy who's leading by 40 points not being on the stage, A lot of questions are going to be about Trump in that debate.
00:16:13.000And Ronna Romney McDaniel, understanding that very likely Trump is the nominee, she's basically acquiescing to all of his requests about the debate, even while he's undercutting the debate.
00:16:22.000So she's kind of begging him to be part of the debate.
00:16:25.000Of course, he's not going to do that, but she's then allowing all of his surrogates into the spin room to spin for him.
00:16:29.000She's allowing Kerry Lake and Matt Gaetz and and Byron Donald and all these people who are like Trump's surrogates in the room.
00:16:36.000Their man is ditching the debate and she Who has been, I gotta say, the most incompetent RNC director of my lifetime.
00:16:42.000The only one who's a challenger is Michael Steele.
00:16:44.000She's the... I mean, it's insane that this lady's retained her job.
00:16:47.000I said this when she was up for the re-elect for RNC.
00:16:52.000Full disclosure, I'm friendly with Harmeet Dhillon.
00:16:53.000She represented us with regard to our case against the federal government to stop the OSHA VAX mandate under Joe Biden.
00:17:00.000I said at the time, I don't understand how you get your ass kicked in 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2022 and you keep your job.
00:17:07.000Which speaks to, in general, the state of the Republican Party, which has basically become a non-profit for losers.
00:17:13.000It's a bunch of people who can't win an election, and then they're like, we couldn't win the election because of this extraneous factor, give us more money.
00:17:20.000How this lady has retained her job is beyond me.
00:17:22.000She's running a party That has lost several elections running has underperformed in all the elections where it should be overperforming is running up into a 2024 election cycle where Republicans should retake the Senate and now are very easily on the verge of continuing to lose the Senate and maybe the presidency again.
00:17:40.000And she's holding a debate among Republican candidates sponsored by the Republican Party and basically declaring her own party irrelevant.
00:17:48.000Well, what exactly does the RNC stand for if the guy says, screw you and your debate, I'm going on Tucker.
00:17:53.000And she's like, well, why don't you bring all your surrogates in here, in the spin room, so they can rip all the candidates on stage that your candidate didn't have the balls to come and actually speak to.
00:18:52.000I mean, I don't even know what to say about Romney McDaniel, who, by the way, remember, the reason she originally ended up in this position is because she was related to Mitt Romney.
00:19:00.000Donald Trump didn't like Mitt Romney, so she literally dropped Romney from her name.
00:19:09.000OK, meanwhile, the DeSantis campaign obviously has been running really rough in the launch with Elon Musk.
00:19:17.000I think that DeSantis thought when he jumped into the race, he was going to be seen as Trump without all of the baggage.
00:19:26.000And instead, he is sort of seen as Trump without the charm because the baggage on Trump doesn't wear.
00:19:32.000I mean, the reality is the Republican base, the more baggage you pile on Trump, the more the Republican base sees Trump as some heroic ox who can actually hold all the baggage, right?
00:19:41.000The more stuff you pile on him, the more like, man, that guy's got broad shoulders.
00:20:18.000Like, my kids keep me up all the time.
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00:21:30.000Not in the Republican primaries it don't.
00:21:32.000And a simple fact of the matter is that Ron DeSantis passing a bill to stop critical race theory in the state of Florida has been treated by Republican primary voters the same as Vivek Ramaswamy saying things about critical race theory.
00:21:44.000Saying things and doing things in a Republican primary, there is no actual distinction.
00:21:49.000And it's hard for a lot of people who are in politics to understand, but it is the reality.
00:21:53.000Because politicians make, I get it, politicians make promises all the time.
00:21:56.000And so, you tend to believe those promises in a primary, if you have no reason not to believe the promises in a primary.
00:22:03.000Which is why Donald Trump could make promises in 2016 on all sides of a particular issue, and people are like, okay, well I either trust the guy or I don't trust the guy.
00:22:10.000DeSantis is like, you should trust me because I did these things in Florida.
00:22:13.000And the Republican voters are like, well, I mean, but I could trust Vivek.
00:22:17.000Maybe he'll do those things when he's... Sure, I mean, I have no reason to believe he won't do those things.
00:22:21.000So, doing things and saying things in a Republican primary turned out to be almost the exact same thing.
00:22:26.000So DeSantis has focused a lot on governance in Florida, but the governance that he's focused on in the campaign has been all the same stuff that Vivek just says.
00:22:34.000And so he hasn't actually won any advantage over somebody like Vivek by passing a law banning critical race theory in the classroom over Vivek saying he would do that if he were president of the United States.
00:22:43.000So that distinction, which I think DeSantis thought was going to be very telling for him, hasn't had any impact on the race.
00:22:49.000Second, as I mentioned, the electability argument for DeSantis was rooted in the idea that Trump would probably pull low and DeSantis would pull better against Biden, and that hasn't happened.
00:22:58.000Largely because everyone pulls well against Biden, or at least half-decently against Biden, because Biden's a really crappy president, as we'll get to in just a little while.
00:23:06.000And then on top of that, I think that DeSantis truly believed that because he had some capital in the bank, not just money, but like actual political capital in the bank, that he could then not go into unfriendly areas and reiterate to the American public why he was popular in the first place.
00:23:23.000So Ron DeSantis is not just popular because of his COVID policy.
00:23:26.000Ron DeSantis was popular in the state of Florida because the media made him enemy number one, and then he went into their spaces and he wrecked them.
00:23:33.000DeSantis, as I've said over and over, needs to be doing this.
00:23:35.000I don't understand for the life of me why he has not thus far.
00:23:38.000He's basically shielded himself from opposing media.
00:23:42.000I get it on a personal level, it's not fun to do that sort of stuff, but you know who does opposing media fairly frequently is Vivek.
00:23:49.000You know who does opposing media fairly frequently, or at least did during the 2016, he doesn't do it now, but during 2016, Donald Trump did opposing media fairly frequently.
00:23:57.000If you want to show the Republican base that you are a fighter, DeSantis thinks you do that by actually doing things as governor, as I mentioned.
00:24:05.000The only way people think that you're a fighter in the Republican base right now is you go on media and you go to a member of the media and you wreck them to their face.
00:24:11.000That is the way that you show them that you are a fighter.
00:24:13.000DeSantis has not done this in that campaign so far.
00:24:15.000So he's not really dropped in the polls.
00:24:16.000He's stuck still in that 15 to 18 percent range, but he's not bust out in any serious way.
00:24:23.000OK, so over the weekend, he He basically was lied about.
00:24:30.000He made a comment while he was being interviewed by Wilwitt that seems to me inarguable in context.
00:24:35.000In context, I do not think this statement is in any way arguable.
00:24:40.000It was then immediately taken out of context by pretty much all of his political opponents, which is the way that it works in a campaign, and used as a club to hit him.
00:24:46.000So here was DeSantis with Wilwitt over the weekend.
00:24:50.000These guys have records of principle fighting the swamp that are second to none and yet they will be attacked by some of these people and called rhinos.
00:25:00.000So it's just been totally detached from any type of substance and ultimately a movement can't be about the personality of one individual.
00:25:08.000The movement has got to be about what are you trying to achieve on behalf of the American people, and that's got to be based in principle.
00:25:16.000Because if you're not rooted in principle, if all we are is listless vessels that are just supposed to follow whatever happens to come down the pike on truth social every morning, that's not going to be a durable movement.
00:25:29.000Okay, so, the beginning of this statement, in which he literally calls out people like Elise Stefanik, right?
00:25:34.000He's talking about left-wing, or people who are left-leaning Republicans, who have allied with Trump and then suddenly become not-RINOs.
00:25:41.000And then Chip Roy of Texas, who's very, very conservative, and suddenly becomes a RINO when he supports DeSantis.
00:25:46.000What DeSantis is saying is that congressional supporters who suddenly become not-RINOs because they support Trump, even though they're left-wing on policy, Or people who simply will do whatever Trump wants on any given day as opposed to, I like Trump for principled reasons.
00:26:04.000He's talking about people who shift their position on any given day based on what Donald Trump's preferences are.
00:26:09.000He's saying that any movement that roots itself in follow the leader is not going to be a successful movement.
00:26:15.000That does not seem particularly arguable to me in that context.
00:26:18.000So immediately gets taken out of context.
00:26:20.000And now the idea is that it's a basket of deplorables moment, like when Hillary Clinton suggested that Trump supporters were a basket of all white supremacists, terrible people, etc.
00:26:29.000So the suggestion is that what DeSantis was saying there is that everyone who supports Trump is a listless vessel, which is clearly not what he is saying there, right?
00:26:40.000You've got the Trump campaign, which again, there's great irony to the fact that Donald Trump can attack anybody from any angle at any time using any tool at his disposal, and everybody just kind of shrugs.
00:26:49.000DeSantis says something that really is not an insult, and Trump's campaign immediately takes offense.
00:28:32.000Hey, well, again, we will see if anybody else, including DeSantis, is able to gain any points during the debate.
00:28:38.000It seems to me the dynamic of the debate with Trump absent is going to be all about Trump.
00:28:42.000It seems like everybody's going to train their incoming fire on DeSantis, particularly Chris Christie, who is just a suicide bomber in these debates.
00:28:48.000He was in 2016 when he committed one of the world's most obvious acts of murder-suicide against Marco Rubio, killed him in a New Hampshire debate, and then proceeded to implode himself.
00:29:25.000Everybody pulling each other down as they try to escape the pot.
00:29:28.000Meanwhile, Trump is sitting over there with Tucker Carlson enjoying himself.
00:29:32.000Now, the other candidates, for what it's worth, are having their own struggles.
00:29:37.000Everybody's focused on DeSantis' struggles, because he's widely assumed in my polling is the second most prominent candidate in the field, even if he's trailing by 40 points.
00:29:44.000But the other candidates are having their own troubles.
00:29:46.000So, Vivek Ramaswamy, for all the talk, is still six, seven percent.
00:30:03.000He's making a name for himself, which, you know, again, is part of what Republican politics has become for a while, is very often people running for office for ancillary reasons.
00:30:12.000Meanwhile, Nikki Haley is still running.
00:30:16.000She's earning three, four percent of the vote.
00:30:18.000She's, at least to her credit, trying to make a case as to why people should move beyond Trump, which I assume that somebody has to make if they don't want Trump to be the nominee.
00:30:26.000Here's Nikki Haley the other day trying to explain why Trump should not be the nominee.
00:30:30.000I think that President Trump was the right president at the right time.
00:30:48.000We have got to talk about how we are going to take America to a new future that is full of peace and law and order and opportunities for our children.
00:31:03.000Meanwhile, the person who actually has the strongest case to make against Trump on the merits is Mike Pence, who's vice president, who Donald Trump lied about for three months, suggesting that he had the unilateral power to overturn the 2020 election by denying state-certified results.
00:31:18.000Pence was asked specifically about whether Trump actually declassified materials that he then, you know, had on his property at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend, and Pence was like, well, I mean, I didn't see any evidence he declassified them.
00:31:30.000We are learning that Meadows has told investigators that he knew of no such broad declassification order from Donald Trump.
00:32:55.000Today, he almost had a fight with some raccoons, which would have been bad, but we need to keep him healthy so he can actually fight it out with the raccoons, and this is why we give him Rough Greens every morning.
00:33:03.000The dog food you've been giving your dog is dead food.
00:33:24.000Naturopathic doctor Dennis Black, the founder of Rough Greens, is so confident this product will improve your dog's health, he's offering my listeners a free Jumpstart Trial Bag.
00:35:14.000Tesla wrote, Hunter Biden reported nearly $2.4 million in income in 2017 and $2.2 million in income in 2018, most of which came from Chinese or Ukrainian interests.
00:35:26.000And this directly goes against what Joe Biden said in the debate in 2020 with Donald Trump.
00:36:22.000Well, now it seems that things may get ugly for Joe, not because of the stuff that he did for
00:36:26.000Hunter, but because of the one time he couldn't pull it off for Hunter.
00:36:29.000According to Politico, Hunter Biden's lawyer is now threatening to put Joe Biden on the stand.
00:36:35.000It was Halloween of 2022 and Hunter Biden's lawyer, Chris Clark, didn't sound happy.
00:36:40.000Just three weeks earlier, news had leaked that federal agents believed they had enough evidence to charge his client with illegally buying a gun as a drug user.
00:36:45.000The leak was illegal, the lawyer wrote to the U.S.
00:36:53.000If the Justice Department charged the president's son, his lawyers would put the president on the witness stand.
00:36:59.000President Biden now unquestionably would be a fact witness for the defense in any criminal trial, Clark wrote in a 32-page letter reviewed by Politico.
00:37:05.000That letter, along with more than 300 pages of previously unreported emails and documents exchanged between Hunter Biden's legal team and prosecutors, sheds new light on the fraught negotiations that nearly produced a broad plea deal.
00:37:15.000That deal would have resolved Biden's most pressing legal issues, the gun purchase and his failure to pay taxes for several years.
00:37:19.000And it also could have helped insulate Biden from future prosecution by a Republican-led DOJ.
00:37:25.000The documents show how the deal collapsed, a sudden turnabout that occurred after Republicans bashed it and a judge raised questions about it.
00:37:31.000The collapse renewed the prospect Biden will head to trial as his father ramps up his 2024 election bid.
00:37:38.000Well, apparently the documents provide a detailed behind-the-scenes look at how the two sides came to the brink of a plea deal.
00:37:43.000It was a sweetheart deal, no question.
00:37:45.000It blew up when the judge saw the sweetheart deal and said, I've never seen anything remotely like this.
00:37:48.000It was very obvious that David Weiss and the DOJ were cramming down a sweetheart deal.
00:37:54.000Hunter Biden was going to take that sweetheart deal, and they were doing all of this in order to protect Joe Biden from having to take the stand or be involved.
00:38:00.000But it was Joe Biden's DOJ who was overseeing all of this, obviously.
00:38:04.000According to the documents, By April 26, 2022.
00:38:09.000As Hunter Biden's lawyers convened with prosecutors, they had one big concern.
00:38:13.000Specifically, whether prosecutors were going to charge him with failing to lawfully pay those taxes from 2014 to 2019.
00:38:18.000Charges related to anything else didn't seem remotely imminent.
00:38:21.000Speaking to lawyers from the DOJ, Biden's attorneys opened their argument with Trump.
00:38:25.000In light of Trump's ceaseless demands for an investigation of Hunter, charging the younger Biden with tax crimes would be devastating to the reputation of the DOJ, according to Hunter's lawyers.
00:38:32.000It would look like the department had acquiesced to Trump's political pressure campaign.
00:38:36.000So, the argument that Hunter's lawyers made to the DOJ, which the DOJ then took up, remember, this is also under Donald Trump, was, if you intervene right now and you actually prosecute Hunter, it might hurt Joe, and that would look bad for Trump, which is an insane reason not to bring charges.
00:38:50.000Biden's lawyers argued the political pressure was itself a compelling reason not to bring any charges.
00:38:55.000Later in 2022, the DOJ confirmed to Biden's lawyers their client could also face federal charges for a gun crime.
00:39:02.000Clark argued the same political pressure meant bringing gun charges would be scandalous.
00:39:05.000On October 31, 2022, he wrote directly to David Weiss, the U.S.
00:39:09.000Attorney for Delaware, overseeing the probe.
00:39:12.000He'd been allowed to stay on during Biden's administration to continue the investigation.
00:39:15.000Merrick Garland, the AG, had pledged to give Weiss full independence.
00:39:19.000But he wasn't given full independence.
00:39:20.000He had to work with other DAs across the country to charge in various jurisdictions because he didn't have special counsel status.
00:39:26.000Clark argued in his letter to Weiss that charging Hunter Biden with a gun crime would torpedo public trust in the DOJ.
00:39:33.000The document included color photos of two former heads of Trump's DOJ, Matt Whitaker and Bill Barr, talking about Biden business deals on cable news.
00:39:41.000Then Clark invoked another controversial federal investigation, he said, was seen by the public as a political hatchet job, the failed prosecution of prominent Democratic lawyer Michael Sussman.
00:39:49.000Sussman, of course, was involved in the Steele dossier and all the rest of it.
00:39:54.000Clark laid out what could have been seen as a promise, a warning, or some very zealous lawyering, he said.
00:39:58.000Joe Biden would undoubtedly be a witness at trial because of leaks about the probe.
00:40:02.000He wrote that just a few weeks before sending the letter there had been two back-to-back leaks related to Hunter Biden and the gun issue.
00:40:07.000Clark said the leaks prompted the president to address his son's legal woes the next day on CNN.
00:40:11.000And he then described it in a nearly unthinkable scenario, actually calling Joe Biden as a witness.
00:40:17.000And at that point, the DOJ basically said, fine, let's do a sweetheart plea deal.
00:40:22.000So basically, Hunter Biden's lawyers pressured the Biden DOJ into giving him a sweetheart deal with the threat that Joe Biden might have to testify for the defense.
00:40:32.000Then the whistleblowers came forward, they said, oh yeah, by the way, this was a sweetheart deal.
00:40:35.000And they prevented us from investigating fully.
00:40:38.000And that is when, only then, after that, and after the collapse of the plea deal, that is when the DOJ decided to make David Weiss a special counsel to investigate presumably partially himself.
00:40:49.000By the way, worth noting here, who exactly is David Weiss?
00:40:53.000Well, it turns out that David Weiss worked for years with Beau Biden because he's from Delaware.
00:41:01.000Weiss worked with Beau to hash out prosecution strategies.
00:41:06.000Although Democrats point to Weiss's appointment by Donald Trump as evidence of his independence, the full story of his career is more nuanced.
00:41:12.000attorney under Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and then remained as top deputy for the remainder of their term.
00:41:18.000So the notion that it was like Trump's decision to appoint Weiss, and he could have fired him presumably, but very often what happens, you think the president knew who David Weiss was?
00:41:27.000He got a recommendation from people in Delaware, David Weiss is a good guy, so he just reappointed him.
00:41:31.000The White House declined to comment, noting that Weiss is conducting an independent investigation, presumably into himself, considering the fact that Weiss is the person who negotiated the sweetheart deal in the first place.
00:41:42.000This is going to get very, very ugly very quickly for Hunter, for Joe, for everybody else involved.
00:41:48.000Meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to be the world's most terrible president.
00:41:51.000Over a thousand people are still missing two weeks after the wildfires in Maui.
00:41:56.000That includes presumably hundreds of children.
00:41:59.000We have no idea exactly how many people have died.
00:42:03.000The good news is that Joe Biden went west for his second vacation of the month, which is really important.
00:42:10.000They arrived in Nevada late Friday for more rest and relaxation.
00:42:13.000They're renting a private home on Lake Tahoe.
00:42:15.000He flew there from Camp David, where he hosted a summit Friday with the leaders of South Korea and Japan.
00:42:19.000That home belongs to Tom Steyer and Kat Taylor.
00:42:22.000You remember Steyer as the very, very ultra-wealthy Democratic donor who ran for president in 2020 and got zero votes.
00:42:28.000The Bidens will then halt their vacation for one day on Monday to visit Maui.
00:42:31.000They'll meet with survivors, first responders, and local officials while surveying the damage.
00:42:35.000This is shortly after he said there was no comment on the number of dead in Maui.
00:42:40.000He vacationed earlier this month in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where he went on bike rides, visited beaches, and went for a date night with the First Lady to see Oppenheimer.
00:42:48.000So, the good news is the old man is having himself a really nice summer.
00:42:51.000The bad news is, of course, that if this were Donald Trump doing all of this in the middle of the Maui wildfire, then everybody would have lost their damn mind.
00:43:10.000Maybe you should just, instead of reporting it as like a third party, well, you know, it is being, maybe you should be doing the scrutiny.
00:43:17.000More than 120 hours passed between when Joe Biden first spoke publicly about the devastating Maui fires on August 10th and his next substantive remarks about the tragedy the following week.
00:43:26.000During that five-day stretch of presidential reticence, the full scope of the crisis in Hawaii came into clear view, says the Washington Post.
00:43:32.000Behind the scenes, aides say, Biden was leading a robust, by-the-book federal response.
00:43:45.000Meanwhile, FEMA, their spokesperson was out there saying, you know what, we're not in charge, the state is.
00:43:49.000Which, by the way, is true, but that didn't cut it when a Republican was president.
00:43:53.000Maui County has opened a distribution center at a shopping center just across the street.
00:43:59.000FEMA is working closely with state emergency management and Maui County emergency management to make sure that those locations and shelters Don't run out of supplies.
00:44:10.000So FEMA's not in charge, the state is in charge, Maui County is executing the emergency management response, and FEMA is coordinating across the entire federal government, bringing all federal resources to bear to help meet the needs that we hear about from the state.
00:45:13.000Well, according to the New York Post, access to water should be predicated on conversations about equity, according to the Hawaii official under fire for delaying access to water during the Maui wildfires.
00:45:22.000M. Kaleo Manuel, former deputy director of the Hawaii Commission on Water Resource Management, waited for more than five hours to release water during the wildfires that devastated Maui, according to the reports.
00:45:30.000Manuel, in a livestream debate hosted by the University of Hawaii last year, described water as a sacred god.
00:45:35.000He said, let water connect us and not divide us.
00:45:37.000We can share it, but it requires true conversations about equity.
00:45:39.000How do we coexist with the resources we have?
00:45:41.000He's a former Obama Foundation leader.
00:45:43.000So that's exciting stuff there from the equity crowd.
00:45:46.000Excellent job in handling the wildfires over there.
00:45:49.000Meanwhile, Gavin Newsom is declaring a state of emergency as Hurricane Hillary approaches California.
00:46:36.000Heavy rain in Southern California is a full-scale disaster area.
00:46:40.000So obviously we'll see how Gavin Newsom handles that on sort of the political level.
00:46:43.000Meanwhile, nationally, Joe Biden, we've been talking about doing a really crappy job.
00:46:48.000Well, the fact is that what we're about to watch is going to get a lot worse.
00:46:51.000So China, its economy, as I mentioned last week, is going to drag down the rest of the world economy.
00:46:57.000According to the Wall Street Journal, for decades, China powered its economy by investing in factories, skyscrapers, and roads.
00:47:01.000The model sparked an extraordinary period of growth that lifted China out of poverty and turned it into a global giant whose export prowess washed across the globe.
00:47:09.000What worked when China was playing catch-up makes less sense now that the country is drowning in debt and running out of things to build.
00:47:13.000Parts of China are saddled with underused bridges and airports.
00:47:16.000Millions of apartments are unoccupied.
00:47:17.000Returns on investment have sharply declined.
00:47:20.000With private investment weakened, exports flagging, officials say they have little choice but to keep borrowing and building to stimulate their economies.
00:47:25.000So Keynesianism working beautifully over in China.
00:47:28.000The reality is that China's subsidization of particular industries is not what made China a world economic power.
00:47:34.000What made China a world economic power was opening their population to capitalism to even the smallest extent.
00:47:39.000The sort of fascist economic model of China, which is that you basically subsidize particular industries and you make those the industries.
00:47:46.000You borrow money to make those the industries.
00:47:53.000It was called the 1960s and 70s in the United States.
00:47:57.000Economists now believe China is entering a year of much slower growth, made worse by unfavorable demographics and a widening divide with the United States and its allies that is jeopardizing foreign investment and trade as well it should.
00:48:07.000You should check out our episode 2 over at YouTube for more on this.
00:48:11.000I talk about the inevitable decline of China.
00:48:13.000They got a serious problem on their hands demographically, economically speaking.
00:48:17.000The IMF puts China's GDP growth below 4% in the coming years, less than half of its tally for most of the past four decades.
00:48:23.000Capital Economics, a London-based research firm, figures China's trend growth has slowed to 3% and will fall to around 2% in 2030.
00:48:30.000And so they're closing themselves off more from the world economy.
00:48:35.000It's going to have some real dramatic effect on the world economy as well.
00:48:39.000Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine has completely stalled out.
00:48:42.000Marcus Walker writing for the Wall Street Journal says Russia's war on Ukraine is in danger of becoming a perfracted struggle that lasts several more years.
00:48:48.000The reason isn't just that frontline combat is a slow-moving slog, but that none of the main actors have political goals that are both clear and attainable.
00:48:56.000Who said that after a couple months of war that either there needed to be a negotiation where everybody was looking for an off-ramp or all of the goals were misaligned?
00:49:03.000That Russia was not going to give up Crimea and the Donbass?
00:49:06.000That Ukraine had been told by the West that they could win back every inch of that and that Zelensky was going to lead the negotiations and these two goals were Incompatible in the extreme.
00:49:13.000And so this was likely to just continue forever.
00:49:16.000Like for a very, very, very, very, very long time.
00:49:18.000And the only way this is going to end is for the West to actually play the role of bad guy.
00:49:21.000Go to Putin and say, you're going to get part of the Donbass, you're going to retain Crimea.
00:49:24.000Go to Zelensky and say, listen, that's the deal.
00:49:33.000So he gets to retain his status with the Ukrainian people.
00:49:36.000The Russians get to save some face and the war ends.
00:49:39.000Otherwise, they're just going to continue.
00:49:41.000Ukraine's Central War aim, restoring its territorial integrity, is the clearest, but appears a distant prospect given the limits of Western support.
00:49:47.000Again, territorial integrity, like post-2022, is not territorial integrity post-2014.
00:49:53.000As under Barack Obama, the Crimea was seized by the Russians and nobody did a damn thing about it.
00:50:01.000Russian President Vladimir Putin's declared aims are the most elastic, ranging from ambitious imperial schemes to more limited land grabs and shifting with Russia's military fortunes.
00:50:09.000Well, that means that there's actual play in the joints there, but The fact that there has been no actual strategy here from the Biden administration is part of the problem.
00:52:22.000He also wrote a three-part series on American history that's really worth reading.
00:52:28.000So his stuff is, he's a terrific historian and his stuff is really worth the read.
00:52:33.000This book is called The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstein.
00:52:35.000Okay, time for some things that I hate.
00:52:40.000So naturally, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, she is going on the socialist sympathy tour,
00:52:45.000according to Mary Anastasia O'Grady, writing for the Wall Street Journal.
00:52:49.000Since transnational criminal organizations are ravaging Latin America, economic growth in much
00:52:53.000of the region is shaky. Corruption remains a perennial problem. Just when it looks as if
00:52:55.000things couldn't get any worse, AOC went on a South American socialist sympathy tour.
00:52:59.000For Americans, it's not what the congressman took to the, the congresswoman took to the region
00:53:04.000that's disturbing, it's what you might bring back.
00:53:06.000She said, we have a lot to learn from Brazil, Colombia, and Chile.
00:53:10.000She went with 10 other congressional Democrats and staffers, including Senator Bernie Sanders' chief of staff.
00:53:15.000So, Brazil is a disaster area right now, obviously.
00:53:19.000Everybody is ignoring Lula da Silva's crackdown on the opposition.
00:53:24.000The Supreme Court is going after free speech.
00:53:27.000Meanwhile, they met with leftist politicians to offer their support for collectivist causes in the name of non-intervention.
00:53:33.000In Chile, she's going after quote-unquote extractive U.S.
00:53:36.000policies, which means copper mining, which is the engine of all of Chileans' economic growth for decades.
00:53:43.000Meanwhile, they are going there and ripping on American Cold War policies, which, by the way, the most anti-capitalist countries in South America also happen to be the poorest countries in South America, like Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, where communism is actually taking hold.
00:53:57.000In Brazil, the entourage met with foreign policy advisor, Chulula, and they discussed the climate.
00:54:04.000The fact that, you know, Bernie Sanders is considered a wise old man of the Democratic Party after spending years standing for socialists, like actual socialists, is totally crazy.
00:54:11.000That's why whenever he says, oh yeah, all I want is the Nordic model, I'm like, okay, then why were you so warm to, you know, Nicolas Maduro and Hugo Chavez, I noticed.
00:54:24.000We'll be joined by Jerry Dunleavy and James Hassan, co-authors of the new book, Kabul, the untold story of Biden's fiasco and the American warriors who fought to the end.
00:54:31.000If you're not a member, become a member.
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