After the Vice Presidential Debates, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden says he's not running for re-election. He tells CNN's John Avlonelow why he's staying in the race and why he thinks it's a good idea.
00:01:43.720Look, what I said was, instead of my every day starting at 7 and going to bed at midnight, it'd be smarter for me to pace myself a little more.
00:01:57.080And I said, for example, the 8, 7, 6 stuff, instead of starting a fundraiser at 9 o'clock, start at 8 o'clock.
00:02:09.600And if you look at my schedule since I've since I made that stupid mistake in the campaign, in the debate, I mean, my schedule has been full bore.
00:02:58.980In the next debate, I'm not going to be traveling in the 15 time zones a week before.
00:03:03.960When there's an excess of love and loyalty, you get 70 million Americans who will not budge from their support for a felon, from a criminal, from an adjudicated rapist who has promised to turn this country into an authoritarian country.
00:03:17.500That's what happens when you won't set aside loyalty and love and emotion.
00:03:21.300So the stakes are so high that right now the question is, you know, not that, not how loyal are you, but can we avert, forget about, and we can talk more if you like about, you know, the event that Joe Biden were reelected.
00:03:34.920But can you avert a second Trump presidency?
00:03:37.600And there is not a single number out there, not one, you know, Cook Report telling us that we may lose the House that says that Joe Biden is going to win.
00:03:45.840And so the answer to that, which is a fair answer, is that, yeah, there's still time.
00:03:49.940There's four or five months to the election.
00:03:51.740So then you need to ask yourself, what's the trajectory look like here?
00:03:57.040If you believe that the problem the Democrats have is that we haven't gotten our message across, the message of the bipartisan infrastructure law, the message of capping out-of-pocket expenses in Medicare at $2,000,
00:04:07.480and capping insulin costs at $35, and standing up for veterans,
00:04:10.540if you believe that our problem is that we haven't gotten that message across well, and if you also believe that the president has the biggest megaphone,
00:04:18.560you have to drop the emotion and the loyalty and love and say, in the next four or five months, is that story going to be told with such precision and poetry and beauty
00:04:29.400that you will turn around all the numbers that say we are going to lose?
00:04:33.600And I did this painful thing tonight because, for me, the answer to that is I just don't see that trajectory.
00:05:35.400I'm Congressman Matt Gaetz, and I've got the watch here in the War Room for the next two hours.
00:05:39.900We've got Congresswoman Paulina Luna going to join us later in the show talking about inherent contempt.
00:05:44.600Andy Biggs, the latest fights on spending on the House floor.
00:05:49.160Jim Himes, the lead Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, was just there in our cold open wanting you to fully experience his bug out and his pain with the state of the Biden campaign.
00:05:59.900Joe Biden wants you to know that he does not have a bedtime just because he wants the fundraisers to start an hour earlier.
00:06:08.560And I got to say, for a guy who didn't know that Donald Trump wasn't his vice president and didn't know that Vladimir Putin wasn't the president of Ukraine, I would say Biden had a pretty decent night.
00:06:20.760Maybe staving off some of the immediacy of this effort to try to remove him in the bloodless coup of the Democratic Party.
00:06:28.920Joining me right now to discuss this and much more, the brilliant Chip Roy from Texas.
00:06:35.620I want to get to your efforts to secure the vote and stop the tens of millions of illegal aliens in this country from getting access to the ballot and diluting the power of our movement in this upcoming election.
00:06:46.940But first, I've just got to get your take on what's going on with our Democrat congressional colleagues right now after that Biden press conference.
00:06:55.240Assess how you think Biden did and how are what stage of grief our Democrats find themselves in.
00:07:02.220You know, I was reminded last night there was a great Dennis Miller skit from the 1980s.
00:07:07.300And he's talking about when Reagan was going to be 77 by the end of his second term.
00:07:10.900And he quipped, he goes, you know, 77, my grandfather is 77 years old and we won't let him use the remote control.
00:07:18.180And, you know, that's all I could think about last night while I was watching Joe Biden kind of daughter around the stage.
00:07:23.400And as you said, he's set the bar so low in terms of our expectations while we watch him, you know, in his diminished capacity that he actually had an OK night.
00:07:32.260So to answer your question, our Democratic colleagues are in the worst possible situation right now because there's a block of them that are looking at this guy and going because they know the truth.
00:07:41.800He has no business being in the White House right now, much less being a candidate.
00:07:47.280But there's a bunch that are looking at the polls.
00:07:56.140And, look, I think we just got to keep focusing on what President Trump's going to say next week, talking about all the great policies, be organized, be solid Republicans.
00:08:04.460But we got to keep turning the screws on them on this.
00:08:07.280They know this guy is not mentally competent.
00:08:10.040He cannot carry out the powers and duties of the office.
00:08:12.680They know their vice president, who was literally a DEI vice president.
00:08:17.060Like, they got mad at me because I said that.
00:08:19.520They literally, in Biden's Senate, in the summer of 19, he said, I'm going to pick a female minority.
00:08:24.840That's not the same as President Trump, who says, I'm going to pick the best candidate.
00:08:28.220I don't care who they are, what their race is, where they're, you know.
00:08:31.040And so I think we got to just keep putting the screws on them.
00:10:57.420Because I am not aware of a single proof of citizenship document that does not cost an individual money to get it.
00:11:04.560Unless we are requiring every state to provide one for free, and then it's on unfunded mandate.
00:11:09.500This is the 2024 version of the Jim Crow poll tax, and we should vote against it.
00:11:16.460Only citizens can vote for the United States Senate.
00:11:19.100Only citizens can vote for the presidency of the United States.
00:11:23.860So, this extreme mega-republican voter suppression bill is not designed to solve any problem on behalf of the American people.
00:11:34.920It is designed to jam people up and prevent Americans from voting.
00:11:42.840So, Chip Roy, are you trying to prevent Americans from voting, or would legislation that empowers states and local governments to check citizenship stop the non-Americans from voting?
00:11:56.500Who are you trying to jam up, Congressman Roy?
00:11:59.860Yeah, you know, what's really funny is they try to turn this into the race card, right?
00:12:06.240And I would note five Democrats voted for this bill, five, 198 voted against it.
00:12:11.980And of those five, two that I know of were Hispanic members of Congress from South Texas.
00:12:17.400So, I'm sure they're going to be really interested in hearing how their colleagues think that they voted for a so-called poll tax.
00:12:22.660Or maybe our good friend, mutual friend, Byron Donalds or Burgess Owens or any number of our members of the Republican Conference that are being accused of advancing a poll tax.
00:12:33.080What we're doing is simply saying you've got to be a citizen to vote.
00:12:36.240We provide all manners of ways to be able to prove that, following Supreme Court precedent and making sure there's not too much of a burden.
00:12:50.540They've got the woman, I can't remember, the congresswoman from New York who literally last year said, yeah, we need more illegals so we can put them in our districts so they can pack them, you know, after the census so they can get more districts.
00:13:00.860I mean, look, we know what they're trying to do.
00:13:18.520President Trump makes the key point, which is that if this is not attached to must-pass legislation, then the United States Senate has no interest in this.
00:13:27.400They want to be able to have the illegals here packing districts for reapportionment.
00:13:30.860They don't want more congressional allocation to Florida and to Texas and the places people actually want to live.
00:13:37.700They want to create sanctuary cities, let these folks fill in every luxury hotel there, consume the resources that are intended for the people there, drive out anyone who thinks differently, and then absorb the representation.
00:13:54.640Other than government funding, any other must-pass bill you think this dovetails well with?
00:13:59.620I mean, honestly, between now and September 30th, I'm not sure there's another one that it's going to be able to jump on that's going to be a must-pass piece of legislation that we really need to do this before September because it's so critical to send this message before November.
00:14:12.100So I think absolutely the spending vehicle is the right approach to continuing resolution if that's what we're going to do come September.
00:14:19.220And as usual, again, President Trump is looking around the curve, which is exactly what we want to do.
00:14:23.840But only in Washington will Republicans go, oh, gosh, we can't have that kind of a fight in September.
00:17:01.880I mean, if you want to know what the polls say, listen to the Democrats who are desperate for Joe Biden to drop out of the race.
00:17:07.440I mean, regardless of what public data you see, when elected officials with access to their private polling,
00:17:13.000when high-ranking Democrats are out begging for Joe Biden to do the right thing and step aside, you know what the polls say.
00:17:19.840The fact is a tied race nationally means Donald Trump is going to win the Electoral College.
00:17:24.740I don't think this press conference, by the way, is going to change anything, whether he does well, whether he does poorly, or whether he does somewhere in the middle.
00:17:31.020First of all, he's already committed the gaffe of the day.
00:17:33.560I mean, he was trying to introduce President Zelensky of Ukraine.
00:17:38.840In terms of what the average American sees over the next 24 hours, they're going to see that clip of him messing up on the world stage over and over and over.
00:17:47.620And this press conference is not going to change it.
00:17:49.960But one press conference doesn't change what we know.
00:17:57.560I do think he's coming out on a carpet of prayer, and I'm one of them.
00:18:00.840I'm praying for him and his family to think hard about whether he's the right person to lead this country right now and certainly whether he can look into a camera with a straight face and tell the American people I'm capable of leading it for the next four years.
00:19:59.120There's the biggest problem he has is that he's running against a guy who was president and he has a record.
00:20:04.300And the retrospective approval rating of that presidency is skyrocketing right now.
00:20:09.540So unless he can somehow get the economy to grow at, you know, five or greater every quarter from, you know, I mean, just the quarters are over.
00:20:38.140But here, what has caused this collapse in the Biden vote seems to be the searing image of a man in great decline with anyone in control.
00:20:48.200And it's unsettling and it's just hard to get off of.
00:20:51.460Like, I don't know that good job numbers are going to fundamentally change how people are viewing Joe Biden right now.
00:20:57.320And one thing I noticed in the data I saw is that the Biden collapse seems to be quite gendered, actually, that that women are not abandoning him as the same rate as as men.
00:21:08.040But that President Trump's lead among men right now is like 28 points, which is really a ballast against any other type of shift that Biden could try to manufacture.
00:21:21.500Why do you think it's such a gendered split in how people have reacted following the debate?
00:21:27.160Yeah, I think I think part of that is human nature.
00:21:30.660And we see this in numbers among Hispanics.
00:21:33.420They're just you know, there's there's something about human nature.
00:21:36.280Men are just uncomfortable with with weakness.
00:21:39.060You know, you know, and then I think men generally, you know, get get older and they know how how different they are personally, you know, how much they can go out and, you know, do physical work or how much they could go out and tolerate a long day.
00:21:53.040So, you know, I am women do age better.
00:22:09.180And the dudes, for the most part, are like, you know, wondering who's going to change the bedpan next.
00:22:13.380So maybe it's that men kind of get the fact that women age better and they see what they see in Joe Biden.
00:22:19.540And, you know, we see it all too often just to, you know, I think Axelrod was the commentator who's repeatedly gone to the line that father time is is undefeated.
00:22:29.220There's also a lot of reporting right now that the Biden campaign is testing Harris straight up on Trump.
00:22:35.240And I want to get into this with you, because either they've gone rogue and someone has just ordered a vendor to do this poll as part of the broader campaign to try to push Joe Biden out of the contest.
00:22:47.740Or there are some Biden people who actually believe Harris will test worse.
00:22:52.080We saw that Harris X poll that showed that Kamala Harris was actually losing by almost double the margin as Joe Biden.
00:22:58.840And I've looked at some of these swing state polls and a lot of the voters there that Biden was able to appeal to in 2020 that might have voted for Trump in 2016.
00:23:07.780They look at Harris a lot more like through an image rating of a Hillary Clinton than they do a Joe Biden.
00:23:16.620So is the is the Harris heads up poll on Trump meant to bolster Biden or discourage him from your standpoint?
00:23:23.680And then how do you think that image rating is going to play out in the in the battlegrounds?
00:23:29.280That analogy to Hillary Clinton, we asked an interesting question, which is how comfortable are you with Kamala Harris basically being, you know, Biden heartbeat away from the presidency?
00:25:30.100Let me step in and ask you this, because we have some CNN reporting that there are some angry and stunned Democrats that are kind of blaming Biden's closest advisors for shielding him from the public and for the full extent of what he has been going through,
00:25:44.780which they call the president's decline, one of the top Democrats in close touch with Biden's inner circle advisors told CNN, everyone who expresses any level of suspicion or contrary views, they call everyone and they beat the S out of them and say, stay on message.
00:26:01.040These are people who are trying to get a message to Joe Biden and they feel like they're not being heard.
00:26:31.980No, I just said it's not just anonymous.
00:26:33.700We've seen 17 members of Congress come out publicly and say this, including a high ranking member, the top member of the Intel committee coming out, Jim Himes.
00:26:58.620Let me speak to the first and then the second.
00:27:00.260OK, you put out an anonymous quote that someone claims that Biden's aides are shielding him and beating the stuffing out of them when they try to express something.
00:27:10.980I was personally on a call that lasted well over an hour last Saturday where our president kept asking for input, asking for give it to me straight.
00:29:55.720He was talking about the SAVE Act, which the Congress passed this past week.
00:30:01.380And President Trump has come out with a statement that that has to be attached to the government funding legislation coming up in September.
00:30:08.280Do you have sort of a game plan, battle plan as to how to get these illegal immigrants out of the voting system with leverage, with a recalcitrant Senate and a recalcitrant administration?
00:30:23.160Well, President Trump's right on the money.
00:30:24.900The only way you're going to actually move this forward is to actually tie it to funding.
00:30:30.380That's the only thing they respond to.
00:30:33.980Now, in the meantime, what has to happen is we actually have to pass legislation, make sure we have additional legislation dealing with Help American Votes Act and the VRA that is also tied to funding that says these states are not going to get their funding for other issues unless they actually start preventing illegal aliens from voting, clear off the voter rolls so you don't have dead people voting, too.
00:30:58.920And there's a way to do that, Matt, and it's called the funding mechanisms.
00:31:04.720And I sure would like our colleagues, yours and my colleagues, to actually start saying we're going to use what the founders gave us as the most important check on a runaway government.
00:31:17.260And so the House of Representatives also considered funding legislation this past week for the legislative branch functions of government.
00:31:26.760And, you know, I'm always of the view that you've got to lead by example.
00:31:30.800And if you're going to ask other agencies of government to take cuts, then you have to take cuts, too, as the legislators, as the legislative branch.
00:31:38.820Unfortunately, the bill that Republicans brought to the floor of the House on legislative branch appropriations actually increased spending above and beyond the Nancy Pelosi levels by about $300 million.
00:31:51.560Andy Biggs and I voted against that bill.
00:31:54.420It died because it did not have the requisite votes to pass.
00:31:57.800But, Andy, help this audience understand sort of the confrontation we face within the House Republican Conference when we try to cut spending on anything at all.
00:32:09.900Yes, our team doesn't want to cut anything.
00:32:15.060So if you looked at that bill, they raised it by 5.6, almost 6 percent increase in funding overall for the legislative branch.
00:32:22.540But when you start looking at it, they were increasing funding for the Publications Office.
00:32:28.520There's $61 million more for the Library of Congress.
00:32:31.400And when we go to people, and we actually had three amendments on there to reduce some of those increases, and, Matt, they all went down.
00:32:43.580You had a majority of Republicans vote for them, but you had 20, 30, in some cases 80 Republicans vote against those amendments that would reduce spending.
00:32:52.380And you and I have seen this our entire time in Congress.
00:32:55.560Our colleagues will talk a good game about trying to bring the budget under control, but they just want to manage the decline a little more sharply than the Democrats do, but they're content with the decline based on our spending.
00:33:14.160Yeah, and, I mean, this is what is causing the inflation.
00:33:17.000I think that is the disconnect that a lot of leaders in Washington don't understand, that inflation and higher prices did not just emerge because some Wizard of Oz-like character behind some curtain twisted some dial somewhere.
00:33:30.820It is a direct consequence of our irresponsible decisions on spending and on the debt.
00:33:36.580And then we demand single-subject bills so that we can have amendments to put downward pressure on that spending.
00:33:41.780And it's our Republican colleagues who are off voting with the Democrats, and we're just not going to have it.
00:33:47.620So if there's going to be some fund-the-whole-government-all-at-once thing rolling our way, there absolutely has to be the attachment of the SAVE Act and some of the protections that President Trump has called for for election integrity.
00:34:01.880And, Andy, you're from right in the heart of this battle in Arizona, big Senate race, a number of very important House races.
00:34:10.540Of course, the electoral votes of Arizona are up for grabs.
00:34:14.700How do you assess the political climate in the state right now?
00:34:17.860You know, Cary Lake running an energetic campaign, a number of these House campaigns for the Lesko seat getting very competitive.
00:34:24.900How hot is the Arizona political climate in July?
00:34:28.160Well, it's hotter than the 120-degree temperatures we have here, Matt.
00:39:10.640And it's moving to this point of despair that they have, and they're trying to get beyond it.
00:39:15.960But I view the discussion between the group that you're talking about who's going to come to Joe Biden, this is going to be like those of us who had older parents and we had to do this, is that important thing, especially in Arizona where driving is all important, is to go to your ancient, aged parent who is a danger on the road and say, look, dad, it's time that we need to take the car keys away.
00:39:41.960Anyway, that's a tough discussion to have.
00:39:45.740And I'm going to tell you, the patriotic thing to do here, when they appeal to patriotism, it's not going to be patriotism.
00:39:52.480It's going to be personal self-interest.
00:39:54.320And you and I both know this because we've been on these investigations for years now.
00:39:57.820It's going to be, there's going to be pardons for the whole Biden family.
00:40:01.500There's going to be money that's going to have to change hands.
00:40:04.600Biden controls $240 million of campaign donations.
00:40:08.400Who gets to take it over right now, the structure set up that Kamala Harris would be the one that takes it over if Biden leaves.
00:40:15.620So there you have a whole lot of legal issues that they're going to have to work through.
00:40:19.960But they're also going to have to deal with the Biden family, which is basically a business entity rather than a collegial family necessarily.
00:40:44.500But actually, you frame it up in a different way than I thought about it.
00:40:48.940I viewed this as a psyop, that basically they had to encircle Biden with a group of people now, gain his trust, and that ultimately that would be the group that would push him out.
00:40:59.940Sort of the Goldwater-Nixon moment, the watershed moment.
00:41:03.720But what you're saying is that as you can get rid of all of the psychoanalysis, this is a business transaction, according to Andy Biggs.
00:41:11.800That at the end of the day, this is going to be about business.
00:42:01.740And that same sentiment goes in Arizona.
00:42:06.380As difficult as these moments are for them to finally get a grip that Joe Biden is what you and I knew and every American who was watching knows that he has been incapable for years to actually run the country.
00:42:20.320So they're just now coming to light with that.
00:42:23.780They have never trusted Kamala Harris.
00:42:50.720You're telling me the borders are activities can't occur from from the Naval Observatory.
00:42:55.120No, actually, actually, Joe Biden appointing Kamala Harris, the borders are might have been the first failed mental competency test that we have on record with Joe Biden, because anyone that would put Kamala Harris in charge of anything has obviously failed their their mental competency test.
00:43:13.440As vice president, I guess the theory was, you know, you send her to some funerals.
00:43:34.960We got to get into the politics on the Hill.
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00:46:29.940I've got Congressman Andy Biggs with me.
00:46:32.300We've got the watch as our good friend Steve Bannon continues as a political prisoner in this country fighting for each and every one of us.
00:46:40.700Andy, they're all waiting for Joe Biden to make the decision.
00:46:44.000But it kind of looks like Joe Biden and Jill and Hunter have decided and people aren't willing to accept the decision.
00:46:50.320What do you what do you make of a lot of these commentators on the left forecasting an upcoming decision while at the same time the sitting declining president says the decision has been made?
00:47:28.960They lie to you all the time and they're going to keep lying to you.
00:47:31.940On the other hand, you got the left wing politicians.
00:47:34.740They lied to you and gaslit you about Joe Biden.
00:47:37.300And look, I'll just get back to what you and I were talking about just a second ago in relation to this.
00:47:42.240When I've talked to my Democrat friends in the House on the floor, I tell them when we when Trump was in the White House,
00:47:49.240he had senators and House members coming to the White House daily to talk to him about about what's going on, legislation, what's going on in the world, that type of thing.
00:47:58.940I said, when's the last time you were in the White House just to visit with Joe Biden as a friend and talk to him about what's going on?
00:48:17.840Well, yeah, I mean, there are people in the witness protection program we have seen more of than Joe Biden before that debate.
00:48:24.780I mean, they had they had totally bubble wrapped the guy in an honest question.
00:48:28.240The country might ask is, how could we believe a political party that was lying to us for quite some time about the condition of the president of the United States?
00:48:37.700And you mentioned the media like I've noticed the media is big mad about this.
00:48:42.780And I can only assume it's because on most things there is an understanding between the media and Democrats that they're going to work together to lie to the country about us, about the America first conservatives.
00:48:56.720And it seems to me the reason the media is so mad now is because they weren't cut in on the lie like that.
00:49:03.440The Democrats actually made the media go peddle this fiction that Joe Biden was together and with it and sharp.
00:49:10.600And that now the media is like, wait a second, it was supposed to be us lying to the country about the Republicans.
00:49:33.480I mean, think of this, you have this propaganda machine and all of a sudden the propagandists who thought they were in the know, they missed out on it.
00:49:43.740I mean, they missed out because they did it willfully, by the way.
00:49:49.560They all knew that Joe Biden was incompetent because everybody knows that Joe Biden's incompetent.
00:49:54.900I mean, but they felt hoodwinked because KJP was in there saying, hey, look, these are deep fakes.
00:50:02.720You know, these videos have been altered.
00:50:04.700When he goes to sit in a chair that isn't there or he's shaking hands with a ghost, any of those things that have happened over the last years, the media was, you know, that they were out there.
00:50:16.380Oh, no, you know, that's just not happening and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:50:21.740Co-conspirators at worst, I would say.
00:50:23.660Yeah, and now and that and you've seen it when I was when I was in practicing law, when co-conspirators go bad, they go mad and they start ratting each other out.
00:51:34.300I am a huge admirer of the Freedom Caucus.
00:51:36.760I I attempted times to be an influencer of the good work that inspires so many around the country.
00:51:42.420Can you give people hope that the Freedom Caucus is going to continue to be a beacon, a shining light for fighting conservatives on Capitol Hill?
00:52:11.300Freedom Caucus is going to be stronger than ever, I believe, going forward.
00:52:14.680And I would always remind people, you know, the HFC with our friends like you and Timmy Burchett and Corey Mills and others.
00:52:23.120We were the ones that have always had Donald Trump's back on the make America first agenda.
00:52:29.800And and you you were right there with us.
00:52:32.460I always viewed you as kind of an associate member of HFC.
00:52:35.380But the reality is we're going to be there again, continue to fight for America first, because that is the way we're going to turn this ship around.
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