Time Magazine's Molly Ball lays out the growing clout of the so-called " MAGA Gang" in Congress, and how it could change the balance of power in the next election. Joe Biden responds to the growing influence of the "firebrand" conservative wing of the Republican Party.
00:02:11.000Torching the news cycle is what Gates and Green love to do.
00:02:15.000Gates and Green are the ringleaders of the GOP's most hardcore pro-Trump congressional faction.
00:02:22.000The MAGA squad, as you might call them, is not a formal caucus, but its numbers are growing.
00:02:27.000There have long been rabble-rousing right-wingers in Congress, but this group makes the Freedom Caucus seem tame.
00:02:35.000Democrats and many Republicans deride the group as gadflies, irrelevant to the serious business of lawmaking.
00:02:42.000But in fact, the MAGA squad has been cannily building leverage and clout in the halls of Congress.
00:02:50.000Now, with the primary season in full swing across the country, they're looking to pad their numbers, recruit like-minded firebrands in red districts, endorsing and campaigning for fellow insurgents in intraparty contests, and even in some cases, campaigning against their own colleagues.
00:03:23.000It's Time Magazine, so of course, there's going to be stuff there that's editorialized and not particularly true.
00:03:28.000But nonetheless, I think the central thesis is one that is controlling.
00:03:33.000We are those who are carrying the torch of the America First policy agenda.
00:03:40.000And if there's anything that Molly Ball's piece, I think, underserves, it's those very policy objectives, those goals, to ensure that we have focused, effective foreign policy, that we aren't dithering all over the world in forever wars.
00:03:55.000That we actually have trade and economic nationalism in our country and trade policies that build up the American worker instead of building up the economies of other countries.
00:04:07.000And we believe in restricted immigration.
00:04:10.000I wish that would have been more central.
00:04:12.000But these are the issues that are animating people all over the campaign trail.
00:04:16.000And that ultimately informs who gets to Congress and what drives the agenda.
00:04:21.000And it is true, I expect Republicans to be in control, and I'm doing everything I can to make sure that we are worthy of the trust that our constituents place in us.
00:04:32.000I don't want to win this thing by default.
00:04:34.000We're going to go over in the show today a number of Joe Biden failures at home, abroad, where he's missing the mark on the economy and the utilization of American force in other countries.
00:04:46.000But I don't want to just win this election because he is just in this precipitous decline and bringing our country into decline.
00:04:55.000I want to have a mandate to actually govern around the ideas and the policies that led to an economic boom for our country and pride around the world.
00:05:06.000And if that means the MAGA squad has to be the tiller in the water for the Republican caucus, so be it.
00:05:13.000I'm ready to serve, and I look forward to getting more backup and adding to our growing ranks.
00:05:19.000So Joe Biden understands that right now the American economy is failing.
00:05:24.000It's failed on a number of fronts, and he sees how this is a drag on Democrats.
00:05:29.000The White House knows that Joe Biden has to look at least engaged or informed on some sort of domestic economic agenda.
00:05:39.000It seems like lately when you see Joe Biden talking, it's about China or about his global trips or about Ukraine and Russia.
00:05:49.000And the American people rather reasonably are feeling like we're not even a priority to the American president.
00:05:55.000And so he makes this big trip out to Long Beach, California, the port of Long Beach that I personally observed backed up for miles with an utter failure of the American economy while he was subsidizing people to stay at home and not work.
00:06:32.000When I first started talking about the supply chain when I came here well over a year ago, the American people understand and we wondered supply chain.
00:06:40.000Well, I mean, that's not a usual part of their jargon every day, but they understand it fully now.
00:06:47.000So wasn't that Joe Biden didn't understand how his policies of printing a ton of money and providing a bunch of stuff for free like that caused inflation.
00:07:00.000He thinks that because you don't understand the supply chain because it wasn't part of your jargon that, you know, this was something that was just unavoidable.
00:07:08.000Another point when making a major domestic economic speech, of course, any American president would have to spend about half the time blaming.
00:10:15.000Because inflation is excessively regressive in the way that it impacts the American economy.
00:10:21.000Gary on Facebook says their plan is to put us under their control.
00:10:26.000And in a lot of ways, this failing Biden economy makes the American people more susceptible to that control, to the false promises of socialism that have failed in so many other lands.
00:10:41.000Maybe we should blame like the America last policies of the establishment for these failures rather than MAGA.
00:10:48.000You know, the policies that offshored making things that we need in our country.
00:10:53.000Of course, the elites grifted off of that.
00:10:56.000They financially benefited off of that globalist system.
00:10:59.000But it was members of both parties, not MAGA, who led to this offshoring and to a lot of these bad trade policies that mean that the American people are at risk because so much of what we need is made elsewhere.
00:11:15.000Joe Biden himself said the quiet part out loud in Long Beach.
00:11:19.000People at home trying to make it, you know, paycheck to paycheck are wondering, like, what in God's name do nine, understand it, nine shipping companies have to do with it?
00:11:31.000Well, almost everything you're doing, everything from what you're eating to what you're having to drive to what you're, what you need in your home, it relates to supply chains and what's coming from abroad.
00:11:44.000We are back broadcasting live out of the House office building, room 1721 in Longworth in Washington, D.C.
00:11:55.900And there you have it, Joe Biden saying, well, gosh, everything that you need is somewhere else.
00:12:01.840So when things go wrong, that's really tough.
00:12:06.560Look, our vision for economic nationalism ensures that we are more resilient against the fragility of a supply chain that seems to put the American people under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party.
00:12:21.360Like, who do you think runs all these transit enterprises that have privileges at Chinese ports?
00:12:27.820Like, you think that you think those are the good folks in China?
00:12:30.560Those are the people with government connections because government is fused with business in that economic system.
00:12:37.800And frankly, that's increasingly what the left wants to see in our country.
00:12:42.180What they don't want to see is American independence, whether it's the stuff we make or the energy we use.
00:12:50.040Joe Biden doesn't at all understand how the energy economy works and how rising energy prices create compounding inflation at different levels of the economy.
00:13:02.040What he thinks is that American companies just need to drill more despite the things that Joe Biden himself has said.
00:14:03.040You cannot, as a candidate, say that you want to put people out of business.
00:14:06.840And then when your president and your policies put the country in a jam, become exasperated that they're not willing to make the capital investment.