Daily Wire Backstageļ¼ Jeremy Said This Debate Wouldnāt Happen Edition
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
232.1548
Summary
Join Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, and the God King, Jeremy Boring, as they discuss the latest news and cultural events, all while enjoying some fine whiskey and cigars. Today's episode features: The Democratic Debates President Trump vs. Hillary Clinton debate
Transcript
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Hey, Michael Knowles here, and do I have a treat for you.
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The latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage is available now, and you do not want to miss it.
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Join me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, and the God King, Jeremy Boring,
00:00:49.580
as we discuss the latest news and cultural events, all while enjoying some fine whiskey and cigars.
00:00:59.780
Jeremy said this debate wouldn't happen edition.
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I am the Jeremy in question, and we're just 15 minutes away from finding out if I owe every one of these schmucks $100 each,
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which is still less than Ben had to pay us for his 2016 election prediction, but who's counting?
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Joining me tonight to take my money are Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, and Michael Knowles.
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We're glad you're here with us. We're going to watch this thing so that you also can watch it.
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I mean, I was going to say it so that you don't have to, but everybody has to.
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Like 65 million people watched the debates in 2016.
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It's only going to be more people watching it this time to see the two oldest candidates in the history of the republic
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duke it out with or without breaks every 30 minutes, depending on who wins the coin toss.
00:01:56.180
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to share their ideas without limitation by their government.
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The second right they enumerated was the right of the population to protect that speech
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You know how strongly that I believe in these principles and everyone here, every one of us, a gun owner.
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In fact, two of the three of you, I took to purchase your first firearms.
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If you need more convincing than that, I don't know, after that sale from Jeremy, I don't know what more you need.
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Go check them out, youtube.com slash bravocompanyusa.
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Well, I mean, they don't have to watch the debates.
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I'm hoping that I'm hoping Trump eats Biden for lunch.
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I would like to point out that the first time in now six months that Drew has come to the backstage in person was to take $100 from Jeremy Ford.
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It is the first time we've all been together in like nine months.
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And the last one for a long time since we're all leaving.
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I'll be sitting here sweeping up the streets, you know?
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Well, good luck with that because have you seen what's going on in the streets over here?
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Some men see Sunset Boulevard and they ask why not.
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Well, because they already canceled Gone with the Wind, so they were going to cancel Sunset Boulevard, one of the other great films of the era.
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Will Joe Biden be able to do anything other than stand on his feet and not drool?
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But I actually think that Trump is the guy to watch today.
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And the reason I think this is because Trump, as we all know, is not exactly a scholar.
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He is a guy who actually now knows what he's talking about.
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If he can convey that, if he can be articulate enough to convey the fact that he actually now knows that there is a country called Korea, maybe a North, maybe a South, somewhere out there, that he knows how things work.
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He could actually make Biden look bad, even if Biden delivered.
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I just want to make sure that I'm following you.
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Your theory is that Donald Trump is going to drop knowledge on Joe Biden.
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Not that he's going to drop a kitchen sink on him.
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No, but I actually think he now has something he didn't have before, which is knowledge, because this is the way he learns.
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I don't know if you guys, did you watch the Trump town hall?
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So it was that he was sitting down, I forget, with some left-wing outlet.
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The only reason they let this question come into that town hall was because it seemed like it was pro-Trump, but it wasn't.
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It was this woman who talked about how sad it was that her parents had died from COVID, and they all really loved Trump.
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And so isn't he going to open up the borders and not build the wall and increase immigration?
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He talked all about her and what a wonderful daughter she is, and then moved on, and he pivoted, and he didn't take the bait.
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I think that is evidence of learning something.
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So I agree that if the Trump who showed up for that town hall shows up tonight, he stands to really gain a lot.
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My concern is that instead we'll get the Trump who showed up at that debate a couple of days ago, didn't know where Azerbaijan was, or was it Azerbaijan?
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I think that the real fear going into tonight is that Donald Trump thought that he was in a WWF match.
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I mean, he's good at WWE, right, and it's all crap talking beforehand, but Biden didn't take the bait.
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And what you're left with now is that Trump has basically set the bar so low for Joe Biden that it's hard to see how Trump can actually have a victory.
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If Joe Biden does stay on his feet for 90 minutes, he all but wins the debate.
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It's a very dangerous thing to go into a debate that neither you nor your supporters believe you can lose.
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No, I think that's fair, but you've got to remember about these debates.
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They are opportunities to get a viral moment, and there are two or three viral moments.
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All of Trump's big moments in 2016 came from, I don't want to live in Trump's America.
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The problem is, and I think this really is the difference between 2016 and 2020.
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It's that Hillary Clinton is not Joe Biden, and Joe Biden is not Hillary Clinton.
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What I mean by that is that people despise Hillary Clinton, and legitimately so.
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I don't get the feeling that people viscerally despise Joe Biden.
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They're kind of mildly annoyed by Joe Biden, if anything.
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Even if you really dislike him, it's mostly because you think he's a stand-in and kind
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But in the same way everybody else in Washington, D.C. is a liar and corrupt, not in the unique,
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horrible way that Hillary was, where just every time people on the right looked at Hillary
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Clinton, they saw this machine that was designed to go after the presidency in the most
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I mean, he's a klutz and he's a buffoon, Joe Biden, who somehow found himself in this
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And so there isn't the same sort of drama to the debate, meaning that going up to the
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debate against Hillary, and this really pervaded the primaries in the Republican side, it was
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Who is going to go in that debate and just throw at her the Clinton Foundation and throw
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at her corruption and throw at her bill and who's going to do a press conference with
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And the only person up here who's going to do that is this crazy reality TV show host.
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I think that was worth 10 points to him in the primaries.
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This time around, I just don't get the sense that it's like people are just drooling, you
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know, foaming at the mouth to see somebody clock Joe Biden.
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Since we don't know what's going to happen, I can agree with anything could possibly happen.
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But the one thing is, is that Biden has not been hit with a single tough question, not
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I mean, he was being asked about the state of Trump's soul.
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He, one of the questions he was asked is, why aren't you more angry at Donald Trump?
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I mean, they haven't been playing softball with him.
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But he did take some blows during the primary and he held up.
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Meaning that the blows from the left, his whole candidacy was, I am the moderate bulwark
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against the Kamala Harris's, against the Bernie Sanders's, against the Elizabeth Warren's.
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If he takes a blow from the right, like a serious blow from the right, it could theoretically
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hurt him because his whole campaign is that he's a moderate.
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So what that means to me is that the temptation for Trump, I think tonight and always, is going
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to be go after the fact that he's quasi-senile, go after the fact that he seems like he's
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in poor health, go after Hunter Biden's cocaine use, right?
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Like go after the fact that he has grandchildren that he apparently doesn't know about, right?
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Go after all the things that Trump really is animated by.
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All the National Enquirer stuff is the stuff, like he won't read the Intel reports, but
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And so that's the stuff he's really interested in.
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But the stuff he actually needs to hit him on is the radicalism of packing the court.
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He needs to force him to answer whether he's going to disassociate from both Antifa and
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And he should say why, he should ask him on the stage, Joe Biden, you expressed sympathy
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for an alleged rapist in Kenosha while ripping into the police and saying they should be
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That's the stuff where he really needs to hit hard.
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And I think I, my fear is that he won't, that he'll go after all of the kind of red meat
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I wonder if this is the kind of thing that he has learned because he does, like, this
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is where he's been living for the last four years.
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So he does know stuff that he didn't know before.
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Well, Jenna Ellis, your friend Jenna Ellis and ours, got mad at me on Twitter because
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And she said, well, I think the president has earned a measure of trust that he always knows
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The problem is the president has not demonstrated for four years that he always knows what he's
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He's demonstrated that he often knows what he's doing.
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But there are several blunders that we've all skipped right over.
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And the way that he has framed this debate, listen, if he, if he wins, then he did, then
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But he's made it harder to win by the way that he set it up.
00:12:37.260
I got this new kid, you know, I adopted this child, this human baby.
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And well, I mean, I have nothing to do with it.
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Unfortunately, I, I have found this amazing thing though, that I am so much more defensive
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and protective now that I have this child in my home.
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Before you just had a wife and it was like, whatever.
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If you're a Daily Wire all-access subscriber, you're going to be able to join us as we watch the debate.
00:14:33.380
You can go up there, click on discussion, come on over.
00:14:35.340
We'll be answering questions as we go and maybe making little comments if I know us.
00:14:42.340
And we will be back here with the live stream episode of Backstage for some instant analysis from, you know, us.
00:14:47.800
If you're an all-access member, again, head over to the discussion page because that's where we will be taking questions and making, I think, pithy little comments that are sure to delight.
00:14:59.580
Because what I have found is that all of our super fans, they actually are not, like, if you were a band and you have some super fans, they're, like, always excited to hear the new song.
00:15:09.240
You know, they're always excited to find out, like, who you're dating now or what you're wearing.
00:15:13.220
Our super fans come for the dopamine hit of being pissed off every time.
00:15:29.960
Well, holy crap, if you're watching after all of that.
00:15:45.420
I do want to acknowledge, after the worst debate that I've seen in my adult life, serving politics, I do have to confess that the debate did, in fact, happen.
00:16:08.920
No amount of money to compensate for what we just experienced.
00:16:17.560
As a conservative grifter, every now and then, it's good to part with some of the money that I've made.
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Well, that was absolutely the worst debate I've ever had.
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I have to say, I think we're all agreed on that.
00:16:30.940
Because it was like a disaster all the way around.
00:16:34.300
From a 30,000-foot level, if you think Trump already is winning, then you're real happy because nothing changed.
00:16:39.940
If you think Trump is losing, like the polls say, then you're happy because nothing changed.
00:16:45.240
Meaning that what the debate really did more than anything else was just to underscore all of the personality foibles and flaws of both of the candidates.
00:17:03.340
And there is a theory out there that one of the reasons that Trump has not been able to pick up support, despite the fact that Biden is an incredibly weak candidate, is because people are just tired.
00:17:11.240
If you are of the mind that people are so tired of all of this, this has been an exhausting year from beginning to end.
00:17:17.700
And really, it's been exhausting since before the election, 2015.
00:17:20.700
But it's been exhausting for four years because the news cycle has been nonstop for four years.
00:17:25.340
If you abide by the theory that the least exhausting candidate wins, Trump was absolutely exhausting tonight.
00:17:33.140
Now, if you are somebody who thinks, okay, well, he took it to Biden and he was punching him and he was rabbit punching him and it was just punch, punch, punch, punch all night.
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But if you're thinking of this outside of the vacuum of the debate alone.
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The reason he's, and you and I talked about this in the West Wing three years ago.
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The reason that Biden is the greatest threat to Trump is because he is the alternative to all the chaos of the last three years.
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Whereas a Bernie would have represented a new kind of chaos.
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But Biden, despite all of his flaws, I think benefits from tonight for the simple fact that I wasn't exhausted when I watched him.
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I half agree with you then that it was a chaotic, horrible debate.
00:18:17.920
It's worse for Trump because if the polls are right, he's trailing in the polls.
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I think that Biden, it confirmed everything we thought about each candidate.
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He said some pretty horrible things, by the way.
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There's a two-tier system in America, in every single part of America.
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He said not just about the justice system, but in the economy, everywhere.
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I mean, that's an evil thing to say because it is not true.
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And Trump benefited from the fact that Chris Wallace was the worst thing in the debate.
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He benefited from that, but his constant interruptions, A, were bad strategy.
00:19:08.020
The funny thing is, Donald Trump and Chris Wallace had the same strategy.
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Which was just Hector and Badger and Interrupt.
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The best thing that the president had going for him tonight was Chris Wallace.
00:19:18.660
I do want to say this because a lot of people watching-
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Which was by default, by the way, that Biden wins.
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Meaning that if Trump and Wallace were the losers of the evening, being with all the badgering,
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He's the guy who's still standing after the giant NASCAR wreck.
00:19:33.640
I want to say out of the gate before we talk any more about this, the vast majority of the
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people watching us are going to vote for Donald Trump.
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The vast majority of the people watching us want the president to win.
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It may be frustrating to you that we say that the president had a bad night.
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A lot of media outlets take the position that what we're supposed to be doing right now is
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No matter what he did tonight, our job is to come out and tell you how great he did.
00:20:02.440
How successful he was, how undefeatable he is, and give you some kind of talking points
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so that tomorrow, when you're at the water cooler, you can defend the president's performance.
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I think if you want that, go tune into Fox News.
00:20:15.240
If you start getting mad because we say the president didn't do great tonight,
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be mad at the president for not doing great tonight.
00:20:29.840
But if he gives that performance at each of the two subsequent debates, I don't see how he-
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I agree that the badgering was frustrating and he shouldn't have done it.
00:20:44.960
The only way you can have peace, you can have it in the next minute.
00:20:48.080
The only guaranteed way to have peace is surrender.
00:20:50.500
And this is the issue and this is why Trump's got to pester and badger.
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Because when you actually threaten the left, I'm not talking about just cutting taxes or something.
00:20:58.220
I mean, actually threaten what the left is about.
00:21:00.640
They come at you relentlessly like Chris Wallace did tonight.
00:21:03.840
Chris Wallace, I think, is a Democrat, but he's on ostensibly the right-wing network.
00:21:12.920
I will say that Wallace did morph over the course of the night.
00:21:15.540
So for the first 45 minutes, he wasn't terrible.
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And then he started to get very, very terrible.
00:21:20.460
On climate change, he interrupted the president six times and debated him.
00:21:24.440
The white supremacy question was absolutely awful.
00:21:26.380
Because the premise of the critical race theory thing was completely awful, where he suggested
00:21:30.840
that it was just, you know, racial sensitivity training, where we're all supposed to be nice
00:21:33.980
And that's also Trump's fault for not being able to explicate it.
00:21:36.300
But it is Wallace's fault for asking a garbage question.
00:21:38.640
But you got the impression with Wallace that he came in with a game plan and Trump completely
00:21:44.760
And so he just became another one of the debaters.
00:21:48.140
And we saw this a lot in 2012 with Romney and Obama, where the moderator trying to save
00:21:53.820
Obama would insert themselves into the debate and become part of the story.
00:21:57.160
I thought you saw that with Wallace a lot tonight.
00:21:59.760
But to me, the bottom line is that when it comes to Trump's hectoring and badgering,
00:22:10.300
When you ask somebody a question and they refuse to answer the question, and you follow up
00:22:13.680
with the same question, and they refuse to answer the question.
00:22:15.700
And so you follow up again, and you ask them the same question.
00:22:18.420
And so he could have done that a series of times.
00:22:22.260
And then he did it a little bit again later when he said, you know, can you name a single
00:22:26.000
police organization across the country that supports you?
00:22:28.600
The problem is when you do it on every single thing all night, there is no point of contrast.
00:22:35.660
No, even I want to hear what Joe Biden has to say.
00:22:37.800
And it's not just I want to hear what Joe Biden has to say.
00:22:39.500
It's that you really have to pick your spot, right?
00:22:41.360
If all you're doing is throwing haymakers all night long, and some are hitting and some
00:22:45.420
or not, it's very difficult at that point to even tell which ones are hitting and which
00:22:48.800
All you get is the general sense that he's punching.
00:22:52.060
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00:25:01.360
There, it's totally, I agree, I totally agree with your point that Trump was throwing way
00:25:05.800
too many haymakers and he was badgering too much.
00:25:07.600
But the thing I think we're overlooking here is, here's what I think we're overlooking.
00:25:12.140
In a normal presidential year, yes, no, in a normal presidential year, you want the president
00:25:16.240
to seem stately and in control and to, right, and he's just debating the Democrat.
00:25:22.620
That's not how he's ever thought about running for office.
00:25:24.900
He is this different thing, which is he's got to be the outsider.
00:25:27.680
I think one-on-one does not work as well for Trump as two-on-one.
00:25:31.760
I think he actually, it benefits Trump to have Chris Wallace jumping in there, Jeremy
00:25:36.300
And the crazy thing about Trump is, he is this billionaire who is outside the establishment.
00:25:43.960
He talks like a truck driver from Queens is part of it.
00:25:46.500
And what's even crazier is, he's a billionaire for 40 years or whatever, he's now the president
00:25:51.040
and he somehow presents as outside of the establishment.
00:25:54.660
The only way that works is when you're fighting Joe Biden, very establishment Democrat, and
00:25:59.620
Chris Wallace, who's been part of the D.C. establishment forever.
00:26:07.340
The only thing I think about this is I just think it was a wash.
00:26:13.620
Their whole story is going to be that he didn't denounce white supremacy clearly enough.
00:26:18.320
You know, that when they said white supremacy, he said, proud boys, stand back, but somebody
00:26:23.040
That sounded like he was saying, you know, wait, hold your water and then go into an
00:26:28.560
So that's what they've been doing to him for the whole time.
00:26:31.660
If everything else is a wash and he's behind in the polls, that means he remains behind.
00:26:38.740
And by the way, that's typical for a first debate for the incumbent.
00:26:43.420
I mean, maybe on Jeremy's side, I'm not sure there will be a second.
00:26:46.300
I mean, like, especially after that one, I could easily see Joe Biden saying that was completely,
00:26:52.880
And I'm calling a lid on the rest of the campaign, basically.
00:26:55.020
I really, I could absolutely see him doing that.
00:26:57.920
The last answer that he gave about voting and the Supreme Court and not accepting the
00:27:07.480
Honestly, it's extraordinarily counterproductive.
00:27:09.520
It's discouraging his own voters from voting by mail, which is idiotic because all the Democrats
00:27:14.640
And it's legitimizing all of the Democratic complaints that he's not going to hand over
00:27:17.980
power because he's going to try and go through the Supreme Court, which now puts Coney Barrett
00:27:21.060
on the hook for whatever dumb crap he says about, you know, ballot counting or whatever.
00:27:26.520
But do I think that he can afford any mistakes at this point?
00:27:30.160
If you want him to win, the whole thing is he has to do better than this.
00:27:34.680
OK, when you're behind nine points in the polls, in two separate polls in Pennsylvania,
00:27:38.080
when you are running dead even in Florida and you're running within three in Georgia,
00:27:42.680
And there's a poll today that had Biden up in Georgia.
00:27:44.960
OK, these are not the numbers you need in order to be this sanguine about these opportunities.
00:27:54.800
I'm not angry at him because I want him to lose.
00:27:57.820
OK, I'm angry at him the same way I'm angry at my six-year-old and my four-year-old when they're
00:28:04.680
The problem is that I go home and I deal with my six-year-old and four-year-old slapping
00:28:08.600
And then I figure, OK, well, you got a couple of people who are 70.
00:28:12.160
And then I realized that the most rational part of my day was my six-year-old calling my
00:28:16.400
four-year-old a poophead and my four-year-old smacking her on the grill.
00:28:25.200
I think if you take the debate out of context and you just look at it as a debate, it was a wash.
00:28:29.300
But I think if you put it in the context of what the polls are saying, if the polls are right,
00:28:39.620
And in the moments, in the moments when he did what you say, in the moments when he punched
00:28:43.240
properly into Biden's talk, then he was winning.
00:28:48.940
Because in the moments where he was doing what he should do,
00:28:52.120
Chris Wallace would interrupt him and stop him from being able to.
00:28:55.700
And what the president didn't do a good job with tonight.
00:28:57.940
So I don't think he did a good job debating Biden, but I also don't think he did a good
00:29:02.940
And if he had handled Wallace more like Newt Gingrich handled the press in 2012,
00:29:08.940
or even as Trump handled Anderson Cooper and whoever it was during the debate with Hillary
00:29:17.960
right after the Access Hollywood tape broke, the president did a great job of handling an
00:29:21.760
oppositional debate moderator in that particular debate.
00:29:25.520
And so you can't really come up with a single time when the president won an exchange.
00:29:31.760
Because he either did a poor job with Biden or he did a poor job with Wallace.
00:29:34.600
I think that the reason for that is what Ben said, though, the reason is that it crept
00:29:40.940
And I also think that part of that is because Wallace, so to people who are watching, you
00:29:45.860
know, closely, I think you can see Wallace change over the course of the debate from a
00:29:49.500
guy who wants to ask the question, then let them talk and let it go.
00:29:51.640
Because at the beginning, he is letting it go a fair bit.
00:29:53.380
Like, they're really talking over each other for the first 15 minutes of the debate.
00:29:56.180
I mean, solid 15 minutes where Wallace really does not interject.
00:29:59.100
And then Wallace starts to realize, I need to actually get in control of this debate.
00:30:04.040
And the problem is that because Trump has talked over Biden so much at that point, that
00:30:07.320
when Wallace steps in and says, Mr. President, you need to show etiquette, then everybody
00:30:11.720
kind of goes, well, somebody needs to reestablish some sort of control here.
00:30:14.900
But the problem is, of course, that Wallace didn't reestablish some level of neutral control.
00:30:19.260
He then proceeded to, instead of saying, listen, the time limit has run.
00:30:24.580
Instead of doing that, he went to, I'm now going to badger the crap out of you on a bunch
00:30:28.700
of questions where I would not badger Joe Biden or I'm going to step in to protect Joe Biden.
00:30:37.940
In the first 45 minutes, I'm not sure I agree with that.
00:30:39.580
But even beyond that, you know, he keeps attacking the president for his lack of etiquette.
00:30:44.220
Joe Biden called the president of the United States a clown twice.
00:30:47.480
Told the president of the United States to shut up two or three times.
00:30:54.540
Have we ever had a presidential debate in the last hundred years?
00:30:57.460
Have we had a presidential debate that that contentious?
00:30:59.900
No, but I'm again, like, I don't mean to be I feel like a parent here.
00:31:03.960
But when my kids are fighting, like, it is rarely one of them who is being a jerk.
00:31:09.260
I mean, the president did say that Joe Biden was was mentally inept.
00:31:12.420
He said, you know, you couldn't even spout these sentences or he called them stupid.
00:31:16.080
Like, forget the truth of whatever these insults are to each other.
00:31:19.140
And my general view of insult fights is that generally everybody's correct.
00:31:21.480
But the reality is that who is the target audience is the question that we should all have in mind.
00:31:30.220
The target audience is really not really supposed to be the base.
00:31:33.540
I mean, the debates are really for the people who are in the middle.
00:31:35.720
Is there anybody in the middle who changed their mind in any significant way on this?
00:31:39.700
If they did, I think it's suburban moms who are like.
00:31:41.920
If I hadn't thought that Jeremy was going to give me $100 after this debate, I would have tuned out after the first.
00:31:47.400
I think for the first 15 minutes, the sucker was over.
00:31:52.660
It's not just a debate, though, about the people right now.
00:31:55.860
It's also a debate to establish what's happening on Election Day and after the election.
00:32:00.120
And this is why I'll push back a little bit on the mail-in answer.
00:32:05.780
But I do think he had to address the issue of the widespread mail-in voting.
00:32:09.420
He made this distinction maybe too many times, but he made it importantly, between a solicited mail-in ballot, absentee ballots, ballots for the military.
00:32:20.680
Now we are told, by the way, if you criticize, if you suggest there could be fraud with the unsolicited widespread mail-in ballots, even though you can point to it, right?
00:32:28.420
The James O'Keefe story about Ilhan Omar's district or the box found on the side of the road or the box found mislabeled.
00:32:35.420
They'll say mail-in ballots have never had any problem in America.
00:32:39.320
And you say, sure, widespread unsolicited mail-in ballots have never occurred.
00:32:44.880
First, Chris Wallace wouldn't actually let him make that answer about solicited versus unsolicited.
00:32:49.020
Because by that point, Wallace was fully a third debater in the contest.
00:33:01.820
I've never liked the technique for repeatedly interrupting people who aren'tā
00:33:05.180
If you aren't filibustering, you shouldn't interrupt an answer.
00:33:08.600
But now he's got a little bit of Trump derangement syndrome.
00:33:11.660
I think he really thinks there's something about Trump that is specifically offensive to him that he goes after.
00:33:18.260
And after all, listen, we all know Trump has his big flaws and he can be incredibly offensive and all this.
00:33:24.020
But Joe Biden also has his huge flaws and is incredibly offensive.
00:33:31.460
To me, the one that stuck out when it came to Wallace is Wallace specifically, I believe, said before the debate that he was really going to follow up with Biden on the packing the court thing.
00:33:41.460
He asked Biden about it and Biden elided it again.
00:33:43.880
And instead of him just terriering him the way he did with Trump on global warming, instead he just sort of let it go.
00:33:50.360
And that was the first, I thought, indicator of the night.
00:33:53.280
That was the first indicator of the night where I was like, oh, this is going to go south on Wallace real fast here.
00:33:58.680
But as far as the mail-in ballot thing, here's the problem.
00:34:04.340
Biden was saying, listen, I mean, his answer at the end was, whatever the answer is, all the ballots will be counted and then you'll have a president.
00:34:11.260
And Trump's answer was, well, there could be widespread mail-in voting.
00:34:17.760
And so people go, wait a second, there may not be an end to this ever.
00:34:22.580
Because even if he plans on contesting it, the right answer tonight was, I'm going to make sure that we have a fair election.
00:34:29.900
But if I lose a fair election, I will, of course, concede the election.
00:34:34.260
What's so funny about this is we know Biden plans on contesting it.
00:34:41.140
And this is part of the issue, though, on the mail-in, encouraging mail-in versus in person, is I think I'd be willing to put money down right now that Trump wins on election night.
00:34:49.520
If they even count the votes on election night, they might not even do that.
00:34:52.580
But the votes counted on election night, I suspect he wins.
00:34:57.120
They're saying he'll win, but it'll be a red mirage.
00:35:00.100
And then they're going to find some boxes of ballots on a truck somewhere in Jersey or whatever.
00:35:05.000
By the way, to be fair, that did happen in 2018.
00:35:07.000
I mean, we were here and we said this is not a blue wave.
00:35:08.680
And then over the course of the next three weeks, it became a blue wave.
00:35:11.020
There were a bunch of seats that we thought were going to go red that ended up going purple, particularly in Orange County.
00:35:18.280
For the first time Orange County has these mail-in ballots, it's the first time that they've gone Democratic.
00:35:29.200
But he is wrong to go on for five minutes about how the election might be fraudulent.
00:35:39.180
And I'm not just tired because I got up at 5.30 this morning, right?
00:35:47.140
Who was more exhausting on the stage, Trump or Biden?
00:35:54.420
I thought that they were, it was, I think it was Jonah Goldberg who tweeted,
00:36:00.840
I did not think that Trump was more exhausting than Biden.
00:36:09.000
Again, taking the debate out of context, out of the polls, out of everything.
00:36:12.720
If I just, if you just showed me that debate and I didn't know the context,
00:36:18.960
The problem is that Biden didn't contribute to the chaos.
00:36:22.500
Biden gave a bad performance, but he did not contribute to the chaos.
00:36:26.380
No, but that's not the, the chaos is Donald Trump didn't allow Joe Biden to get a word
00:36:32.780
in edgewise and Chris Wallace didn't let Donald Trump get a word in edgewise in the second
00:36:38.260
In fact, that is the one thing that Biden has been very consistent about throughout these
00:36:42.420
He strategically withdraws from the debates, right?
00:36:44.620
In the primaries, he would withdraw for 20 minutes in the debates.
00:36:48.120
And then he would duck back in and say, my time has elapsed.
00:36:53.060
And then he would, and then he would stop himself literally dead in the middle of the answer.
00:36:58.900
Like, it was the difference between somebody saying jerky things, which he did.
00:37:03.060
He said a bunch of terrible jerky things tonight, horrible things.
00:37:05.640
Like, in fact, I think he said a couple of things that are actually outright evil, including
00:37:08.480
the idea that America is racist in all of its iterations.
00:37:14.040
But he, but it is the difference between a person occasionally saying nasty things you
00:37:19.420
don't like and a person in your ear going, and that's, and that's, that's what it was.
00:37:28.840
Jeremy can attest that when we are on the phone and children are screaming in the car,
00:37:34.080
I doubt, I doubt five, five, there are four of us in this room.
00:37:37.200
I doubt five people made it all the way through the end of that debate.
00:37:41.300
But again, but again, I just think that they were both awful in different ways.
00:37:51.780
I think when you're, I think when you're watching a debate like this and you think back to what
00:37:55.100
debates used to be, even at their most zingy, you know, even like your most like a captured
00:38:06.700
So the zingers used to be, you're not, you're no John F.
00:38:16.480
I mean, when Reagan says, I will not make age an issue of the campaign and Mondale laughed.
00:38:22.220
It was that respectful that Mondale laughed at the joke.
00:38:25.100
Honestly, it just shows that the degree, the degradation of the American intellect.
00:38:28.800
I got to say, because like our insults used to be good insults.
00:38:31.720
Like these were crap third grade level insults.
00:38:36.960
You're like, we get what we deserve good and hard in this country.
00:38:39.780
That's the thing that has hurt me about Trump from the very beginning.
00:38:43.440
The very beginning is that I think that Trump is necessary to do what he has done, which
00:38:53.640
I think it is tragic that in order to do the kinds of things that Trump has done, you have
00:39:02.140
Again, I would be okay with all of those things.
00:39:04.540
If the, on a, on a pure Machiavellian political level, I'd be okay with all of those things
00:39:08.440
if I thought that they were drawing him closer to victory.
00:39:09.980
I just don't think that drew him closer to victory.
00:39:11.280
Because I wouldn't even be, I mean, I would be happier.
00:39:13.560
I said on a Machiavellian level, on a virtuous level, I wouldn't, right?
00:39:15.700
On a virtuous level, I prefer this is Lincoln Douglas.
00:39:20.700
As I've said before, I don't think that Trump is the murderer.
00:39:23.360
I think he came across the body of American politics.
00:39:27.740
And then people are like, oh, you're standing above it with a knife.
00:39:29.360
It's like, no, I took the knife out of the body.
00:39:35.280
With that said, like, on a pure just Machiavellian, you want to see, you like the guy's policies.
00:39:40.620
What you want the tragedy to be is not a tragic flaw, right?
00:39:43.760
I mean, normally the tragedy ends with like an actual tragedy where he does all the good things.
00:39:47.220
And then it turns out that his tragic flaw eats him alive.
00:39:49.660
I mean, then that's the narrative that's being drawn right here.
00:39:53.960
Because Donald Trump, the one thing we know about Trump, more than any other human being, living or dead,
00:40:03.960
And in a time when people do not like you, the best move you have is to leave the spotlight.
00:40:10.000
The best thing that happened to him in 2016, I heard Chris Steyerwald, I thought, had an excellent analysis of this.
00:40:18.080
He said the best thing that happened to Trump was the Access Hollywood tape.
00:40:21.120
Not because of the Access Hollywood tape, but because of two factors.
00:40:23.240
One, Democrats thought he'd lost the election and they stayed home.
00:40:25.640
And two, Donald Trump was so put off by the Access Hollywood tape, he went into hiding for three weeks.
00:40:31.140
And because he went into hiding for three weeks, the center of the election went, and it suddenly focused on Hillary.
00:40:35.400
And when Comey hit her with that letter near the end of the election cycle, the only thing people were talking about in the week leading up to the election was Hillary Clinton.
00:40:41.540
Do you think anyone is coming away from this debate talking about Joe Biden?
00:40:44.020
Yeah, no, I think that's why it was a strategic error, leaving everything else aside.
00:40:49.520
It was a strategic error to keep interrupting him, because if you let Biden talk, he makes a fool of himself.
00:40:55.760
He should have rope-a-doped him a little bit more.
00:41:00.460
We're going to be back for whatever debates might ensue.
00:41:04.700
I'm not going to make any bets about whether or not they will or will not.
00:41:09.200
Until then, you can hear from these guys on the morrow as they bring you their normal podcast, and you can hear from me hopefully never again.
00:41:39.200
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina, and our audio assistant is Robin Fenderson.
00:41:43.300
Playback is operated by Nick Sheehan, and hair and makeup is by Nika Geneva.
00:41:47.480
Daily Wire Backstage is a Daily Wire production.