Trump and Biden are getting ready for their first debate tonight, and there are plenty of reasons to be excited about it, including the fact that Biden has been in office for a long time, and is actually pretty good at what he does well. But there's a problem. 70% of Americans say the debates make no difference to them, and 30% say they don't even care about them. So what do the expectations need to be for each side in order for them to have a good night? And what should we be focusing on in the lead-up to the first debate? The answer to both of those questions and more can be found in this episode of The Ben Shapiro Show on Daily Wire, wherever you get your news and information. The show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. You have a right to privacy. Go protect it right now at ExpressVpn.me/TheBenShapiroShow and go protect it! Ben Shapiro is a conservative commentator and writer who writes for The Daily Wire and The Weekly Standard. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times, and has been featured on CNN, NPR, CBS, and many other media outlets. He's also a frequent contributor on Fox News and NPR. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and tell a friend about Ben Shapiro on social media! and I'll get 5% off your first month when you sign up for the Daily Wire newsletter! Subscribe to Daily Wire. Subscribe and Review Ben Shapiro's newest book is out now on amazon. It's coming out on Tuesday! is a must-listen to be sure you get the latest issue on the best of the latest podcast on Ben Shapiro s latest podcast of the greatest podcast on the 21st century edition of the place you get all the latest in the best thing on the podcast I've listened to so you can be the most authentic and the most up to it's all that you'll get the most of Ben Shapiro gets the most profound and most of the best guy on the greatest thing that s the best in the place on the place anywhere you hear it's also the most like it's everything you'll be reading it anywhere else on the thing you're listening on it's it's podcast on it too...listening to it, too watch it on the whole thing, too...and most of it's not even better than that's the most amazing thing he's listening to, too!
00:01:56.00070% of Americans say the debates make no difference to them.
00:01:58.000So 30% of Americans say that the debates make some difference to them.
00:02:02.000So what do the expectations need to be for each side?
00:02:05.000Well, the problem for President Trump is that Trump has set the expectations so low for Biden that basically all Biden has to do is not obviously have a needle hanging out of his arm and stay alive.
00:02:15.000Those are literally the only two things that Biden has to do.
00:02:18.000He needs to not have a complete physical or mental collapse on the stage.
00:02:21.000And he needs to be not caught using performance enhancing drugs.
00:02:24.000Those are the standards that Trump has set.
00:02:26.000And frankly, that's kind of Trump's fault.
00:02:28.000One of the keys to politics is lowering your own expectations and heightening expectations for the other side.
00:02:33.000So what you really should be doing in the lead up to a debate is talking about how incredible the other guy is at debate.
00:02:39.000You should be talking about how Joe Biden is a pro.
00:02:45.000And then he goes in and he disappoints.
00:02:47.000When you set the expectation at Joe Biden is dead, and if he is not dead, it's because he is using some sort of cocaine.
00:02:53.000Well, then the standards are really, really low.
00:02:55.000So that means that all Biden basically has to do to be declared the winner is stay somewhat coherent Maybe for the first hour of the debate, because nobody is going to watch both hours.
00:03:04.000This is the dirty secret also, is that most people tend to tune out over the course of the debates.
00:03:09.000The first 15-20 minutes makes the biggest difference in the debate.
00:03:13.000And you can expect that there will be a lot of rock'em, sock'em robots in those moments, which we'll discuss in just a second.
00:03:18.000Meanwhile, the expectations for Trump are weightier.
00:03:21.000Trump actually has to somehow swivel opinion.
00:03:23.000Now, what he has been good at in debate historically is tearing down his opposition.
00:05:05.000Instead, what you're going to get is Joe Biden implying that Trump killed 200,000 people of COVID and also that Trump is the worst person in the entire world.
00:05:12.000And from Trump, you're going to get that Joe Biden is senile, maybe on performance enhancing drugs and corrupt, right?
00:05:17.000I just saved you two hours of your time.
00:05:19.000So tonight you can watch Cobra Kai instead of watching the debate and then show up tomorrow and sum it up all for you.
00:05:24.000How do I know this is what the debate is going to be like?
00:05:26.000Because we got the preview over the weekend.
00:05:27.000So Joe Biden over the weekend did an interview in which he suggested that Trump was like Joseph Goebbels, which is one hell of a supposition.
00:05:35.000Trump is a lot of things, but comparing him to the Nazis, I think probably not on that.
00:05:41.000And put aside the fact that he's the most pro-Israel president in American history, it seems like you should just generally make a non-habit of citing Joseph Goebbels as in like the Nazi propagandist in conjunction with the president of the United States.
00:05:54.000Here was Joe Biden doing that over the weekend.
00:05:57.000I'm not sure anybody hadn't already made up their mind there for Trump, but who knows?
00:06:03.000But that's, you know, he's sort of like Goebbels.
00:06:05.000You say the lie long enough, keep repeating, repeating, repeating, it becomes common knowledge.
00:06:11.000Okay, Stephanie Ruhle tried to humor Biden through this particular interview on MSNBC.
00:06:15.000You can see her kind of smiling through that.
00:06:16.000Wouldn't you think that merits a follow-up at some point?
00:06:19.000Like, if you're the media member, that he compares the sitting president of the United States to the Nazi propagandist, wouldn't you think that might merit some sort of follow-up?
00:06:28.000And then, by the way, how biased are the media?
00:06:30.000And this is going to play into the debate, too, because, of course, Chris Wallace, who I think will be a good moderator, he's been good in the past.
00:06:38.000I don't think he's going to jump in necessarily and start Really shaping the contours of the debate the way that Crowley did in 2012, when she fact-checked Romney and got it absolutely wrong.
00:06:48.000And by the way, apparently must have leaked to Barack Obama that she had certain documentation in her pocket.
00:06:52.000I mean, in the middle of the debate in 2012, if you remember back eight years, Barack Obama was debating Romney, and Romney said a thing, and it was a true thing.
00:06:59.000And Obama literally said to Candy Crowley, in your pocket, isn't there some documentation showing he's wrong?
00:07:06.000I don't think you're going to get that from Chris Wallace.
00:07:08.000However, the media spin afterward is going to be that if Biden remains alive, that he won.
00:07:12.000How in the tank are the media for Biden?
00:07:13.000OK, in the middle of the Stephanie Ruhle interview, he literally gets lost in the middle of the interview and Stephanie Ruhle starts guiding him out.
00:07:19.000And she's like, put your hand on my shoulder this time with my permission, Joe, and I will guide you out of these wilds.
00:11:13.000OK, so this actually is a really good angle for Trump.
00:11:16.000The problem, as always with the Trump campaign, is that the message is split.
00:11:19.000If his message had been for months that Biden's been there for 47 years, he did none of the things he is talking about doing.
00:11:24.000He's been incompetent every step of the way.
00:11:25.000The only reason that he's famous is because Barack Obama plucked him from presidential failure and obscurity and decided to make him VP specifically because he was kind of the go along to get along chummy fellow from the Senate.
00:11:44.000Because once you say that Biden is taking performance-enhancing drugs, basically, unless the man keels over on the stage completely, people are just going to declare that he surpassed expectations.
00:11:53.000If you look at some of those debates, I said, there's no way he can continue.
00:12:58.000No one's going to know what the hell is going on tonight.
00:13:00.000So watch it for the entertainment value.
00:13:02.000Unless there is some sort of epic Biden collapse, I don't think it's going to make much of a difference because it's hard to change opinions about Trump.
00:13:09.000It's not super easy to change opinions about Biden because the expectations have been so wildly lowered.
00:13:14.000OK, with all of that said, the two big topics that will certainly come up tonight are Amy Coney Barrett, the Presidential nominee to fill the RBG seat, which that'll be a good topic for Trump, a very good topic for Trump, especially because Joe Biden has been attempting to avoid all responsibility for talking about packing the court and Trump's taxes.
00:13:31.000That will come up because the media decided to lay out a hit on Trump two days before the debate.
00:13:37.000It seemed pretty obvious, given how quickly the Biden campaign started turning around ads, that they had some sort of prior knowledge of this.
00:13:43.000But in any case, we'll get to that in one second.
00:13:44.000First, let us talk about the fact that there are cases, we are seeing them every day now, where there is somebody who has to use a gun in self-defense and then the cops come and arrest the person who had to use the gun in self-defense.
00:13:55.000And frankly, that's not the cop's fault.
00:13:56.000I mean, very often local regulations mean that they have to pick the person up.
00:14:21.000You will learn how to detect attackers before they see you, how to survive a mass shooting, the safest and most dangerous places to sit in a restaurant, how to responsibly own and store a gun even if you have little kids, and a whole lot more.
00:15:58.000It is a Supreme Court seat that was filled by RBG.
00:16:00.000Just like it is not Trump's Oval Office, it is the Oval Office and Trump occupies it.
00:16:04.000That seat does not belong to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which is why it's so unbelievably silly when you hear these ridiculous people suggesting that RBG's dying wish Judge Ginsburg had a dying wish that the next president choose.
00:16:15.000be filled by somebody that she selects.
00:16:16.000This is something Chuck Schumer continues to push over the weekend.
00:16:19.000Judge Ginsburg had a dying wish that the next president choose as the American people learn of Judge Barrett's views, they're going to she is going to become very unpopular with average Americans.
00:16:34.000And as that unpopularity rises, I hope they will put pressure on their Republican senators to adhere to Judge Ginsburg's dying wish and let the next president decide.
00:16:48.000Hey, there is no dying wish provision in the Constitution of the United States.
00:16:51.000As my friend Bridget Phetasy has said, filling a Supreme Court seat is not a make a wish foundation kind of thing.
00:16:55.000You don't get to decide exactly how that seat is going to be filled.
00:17:11.000Okay, but the Democrats continue to push forward against Amy Coney Barrett.
00:17:15.000The problem is that Amy Coney Barrett happens to be a fantastic nominee and people from both sides of the aisle know that she's a fantastic nominee.
00:17:20.000Noah Feldman, who teaches at Harvard Law School, And is very much on the left.
00:17:24.000You'll remember that Noah Feldman testified on behalf of the impeachment inquiry into President Trump, suggesting that he should in fact be impeached over his activities with regard to Ukraine.
00:17:32.000He came out, he wrote a column, he said she's very well qualified for the Supreme Court.
00:17:35.000There are a bunch of folks left, right and center who have come out and said that she is qualified for the Supreme Court.
00:17:39.000So over the weekend, Trump did what he does best.
00:17:41.000He provided a very good event in which he introduced Amy Coney Barrett.
00:17:44.000Here was what Amy Coney Barrett had to say.
00:17:46.000I am so grateful to you and the First Lady, to the Vice President and the Second Lady, and to so many others here for your kindness on this rather overwhelming occasion.
00:17:59.000I fully understand that this is a momentous decision for a President, and if the Senate does me the honor of confirming me, I pledge to discharge the responsibilities of this job to the very best of my ability.
00:18:14.000I love the United States, and I love the United States Constitution.
00:18:18.000Okay, she continued along these lines, and she pointed out her own political philosophy.
00:18:24.000She said, judges are not policy makers.
00:19:07.000So they know that they can't attack her on her basic judicial philosophy because it's the same philosophy that animates Thomas and Scalia and Alito.
00:19:16.000And there are variations within that sort of rubric, but those variations are fairly well established.
00:19:21.000So instead, they've decided to go after Amy Coney Barrett on a personal level.
00:19:24.000So Amy Coney Barrett has seven children.
00:19:25.000Two of them are adopted and are from Haiti.
00:19:27.000She is, by all accounts, an excellent mother.
00:19:30.000She certainly is not a subjugated woman.
00:19:32.000She's being nominated for the Supreme Court.
00:19:34.000Here's Amy Coney Barrett explaining that her children are her greatest joy.
00:19:38.000Our children obviously make our life very full.
00:19:42.000While I am a judge, I'm better known back home as a room parent, carpool driver, and birthday party planner.
00:19:49.000When schools went remote last spring, I tried on another hat.
00:19:53.000Jesse and I became co-principals of the Barrett E-Learning Academy.
00:19:58.000And yes, the list of enrolled students was a very long one.
00:20:03.000Our children are my greatest joy, even though they deprive me of any reasonable amount of sleep.
00:20:08.000So the good news about Amy Coney Barrett's nomination is not just that she will be a very good justice, in my opinion, but also that she is just a magnet for the hatred of the left.
00:20:20.000And because she has seven kids, including two adopted from Haiti, you knew the left was going to lose their mind over the fact that this is a religious person.
00:20:26.000Because the dirty little secret is, for many on the left, people who are religious are evil.
00:20:31.000People who are religious are benighted morons who cannot be let near the levers of power.
00:20:35.000Anybody who is religious is a theocrat by nature.
00:20:37.000It cannot be that you're a religious person who believes in the strictures of the American Constitution, that you believe in a very solid and very rich social fabric that exists outside of government, but you believe that government's job is not to intervene in the lives of Americans.
00:22:03.000I don't believe that that has anything to do with Catholicism.
00:22:05.000But in any case, Bill Maher, you know, this is the attack, right?
00:22:09.000The line of attack on Amy Coney Barrett is that she's too religious and she's very, very bad.
00:22:13.000In order to promulgate that attack, all they have to do is just ignore all the facts about Amy Coney Barrett.
00:22:17.000So, there's a piece in The New Yorker today by Jeffrey Toobin suggesting that she's going to be an anti-abortion extremist because she's religious.
00:22:27.000The only reason that she's being nominated is because she wants to get rid of abortion because she is, in fact, a Catholic nutjob.
00:22:38.000There are people left, right, and center who acknowledge that Roe v. Wade is a poorly reasoned decision that has nothing to do with the Constitution of the United States.
00:22:45.000The truth is Roe v. Wade is not going to be overturned by Amy Coney Barrett or nearly anybody else.
00:22:49.000Instead, they may pare back Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which is the Undue burden standard, which is, again, a very, very silly standard.
00:22:55.000But in any case, the anti-religious nature of what's going on right now is very clear to everyone.
00:23:01.000And that is a good thing for Trump, politically speaking, because there are a lot of Catholics in Michigan.
00:23:05.000There are a lot of Catholics in Pennsylvania.
00:23:06.000There are a lot of Catholics in Wisconsin.
00:23:07.000Those are three fairly heavily Catholic states.
00:23:10.000And he needs at least one of those three states right now.
00:23:14.000Right now, if I'm looking at the polling data in these various battleground states, Trump is basically running dead even inside the margin of error with Biden in Florida.
00:23:22.000And he is running about five points down in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, according to the latest polling averages.
00:23:27.000He's running about even in North Carolina, and he's running slightly down in Arizona.
00:23:30.000In order for Trump to replicate the map, he needs to win Arizona, and then he needs to pick up one of those other three states.
00:23:35.000The attacks on religion that are being levied by the Democrats against Amy Coney Barrett could be helpful in that.
00:23:41.000And the media are falling right into the trap.
00:23:43.000So that is good political news for Trump.
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00:25:03.000So you've seen the Associated Press run a ridiculous story targeting a group to which Barrett belongs called People of Praise.
00:25:10.000People of Praise is basically just a religious get-together group.
00:25:12.000By the way, it's non-ecumenical, meaning that it is not a purely Catholic group.
00:25:15.000The AP ran a long story about the evils of this People of Praise group, and they used specifically the descriptions of a woman named Coral Anika Thiel.
00:25:25.000To talk about how evil this group was.
00:25:28.000There's only one problem, according to Kevin Daley over at The Federalist.
00:25:31.000This woman has a track record of hyper-partisan online posting, far-fetched lawsuits, and fantastic grievance peddling that cast doubt on her credibility.
00:25:38.000A review of this woman's writings, and again, she was used as the chief source in the attacks against People of Praise.
00:25:42.000A review of her writings, litigation history, and social media footprint.
00:25:46.000Shows Thiel has accused her own children, her parents, her therapists, and her attorneys of abuse and neglect while waging a quixotic legal crusade against them since the late 1990s.
00:25:54.000Her ex-husband, Vaughn Martin Warner, obtained a defamation judgment against her in 2014.
00:26:00.000So once again, the media jumped on the story, which is that people of praise is evil and terrible, and also suggested things that are just patently false about people of praise, which again is just basically a social group for Catholics and some Protestants to get together and try to do good in their community.
00:26:13.000There are a couple of things where they have jumped specifically on them.
00:26:16.000One is that women call themselves handmaids in this group until a couple of years ago when the handmaid's tale became like a big cultural phenomenon.
00:26:23.000The reason they were called handmaids is not because, in fact, they were involved in some sort of bizarre sex cult, a la The Handmaid's Tale.
00:26:29.000It's because, in the New Testament, Mary is described as a handmaiden for God.
00:26:39.000Also, apparently, it is deeply controversial to say that men ought to be the head of their household, because, biblically speaking, it talks about a man being the head of the household.
00:26:47.000Now, for those who are non-religious, let me explain.
00:26:50.000When it says that a man is the head of a household, so in Judaism, the head of the household, the man, is called the Baal Habayit, right, which literally means the master of the house.
00:26:58.000That doesn't mean that the master of the house is the unparalleled ruler of the household.
00:27:02.000In fact, if you read the Bible, what you'll see is that women are very often in control of the household.
00:27:05.000Sarah is much more in control of the household than Abraham ever is.
00:27:09.000Okay, well all it means that you're the master of the household is that you are held responsible for what happens in the household.
00:27:16.000Okay, it doesn't mean that every single decision that gets made is made without the input of your wife.
00:27:21.000First of all, any husband who does that will be divorced within five minutes or will be in a deeply unhappy marriage.
00:27:26.000But for non-religious people, they see master of the house and they think, oh, well, that means that he's enslaving his wife and he's enslaving his children and they're his property.
00:27:32.000No, it means that you are held responsible for what happens in your household.
00:27:35.000And as the person held responsible, that means you have a higher degree of responsibility for what happens inside your household.
00:27:43.000It also means that in issues of justice with kids, typically, men tend to be the court of final appeal, which every single human being knows.
00:27:49.000If you've ever lived in a household with a father and a mother, they hold very different roles in the household, generally speaking.
00:27:57.000Not true in every single case, but on average, the disciplinarian in the house is dad.
00:28:01.000Because you've got a teenage boy who's 13 years old and he's making trouble, and mom gets mad, guess what a 13-year-old boy does?
00:28:30.000The other angle that I saw emerging over the weekend, and this one is just insane.
00:28:33.000I think Democrats will be smart enough to stay away from this, but not the radicals in their own party.
00:28:37.000So Ibram X. Kendi, who's just a disgusting human being.
00:28:39.000I mean, Ibram X. Kendi's view of anti-racism, which I've talked about extensively on the program, is itself racist as well as fascist.
00:28:46.000This is a person who has openly proposed creating inside the executive branch of the United States a department of anti-racism tasked with striking down any law in the United States, local, state, or federal, that has a disparate impact on people.
00:28:59.000Meaning that if a law has a different impact on black people than white people, Not because it is intended to have a different impact, or because it is directed at black people and white people differently, but because people act differently in particular groups.
00:29:13.000Then that will be declared racist, and this fascist department will have the power to strike it down and simply rewrite the law without being elected, right?
00:29:19.000I mean, this department of anti-racism is not subject to outside pressures.
00:29:22.000That is the view of Ibram Kendi, who's an idiot.
00:29:24.000Okay, but he's a very successful idiot.
00:29:27.000He's made an extraordinary con out of this.
00:29:28.000I mean, the guy writes for The Atlantic, and he has gotten a $10 million donation from Moron Jack Dorsey over at Twitter.
00:29:35.000After Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party USA, or of the Tea Party, Generally.
00:29:42.000Jenny Beth Martin tweeted out about Amy Coney Barrett about her kids, and she pointed out that Amy Coney Barrett has two adopted children from Haiti.
00:29:50.000Here's what Ibram Kendi tweeted out, and this is just morally benighted.
00:29:57.000The response to Amy Coney Barrett is not a racist.
00:29:59.000again, scare quotes, these scare quoted savage children in the quote unquote superior ways of white people while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity.
00:30:14.000The response to Amy Coney Barrett is not a racist, she has two adopted black children is, some white racists used to adopt black children and then civilized these quote unquote savage children and then use them as props.
00:30:25.000So the only reason you say that is because you're implying And maybe that is exactly what Amy Coney Barrett is doing without evidence.
00:30:31.000That she adopted two kids who needed parents from a greatly impoverished country.
00:30:36.000And Ibram Kendi's take is, well, she's a white lady who's adopting black kids, that means she's using them as props.
00:30:41.000See, whenever you get owned on Twitter, your typical response on the left is, it's Russian bots.
00:30:44.000It's not Russian bots, it's that you're an idiot.
00:30:46.000If they have or adopt a child of color, they can't be racist.
00:30:49.000I'm challenging the idea that white parents of kids of color are inherently not racist.
00:30:52.000And the bots completely changed what I'm saying to white parents of kids of color are inherently racist.
00:30:56.000These live and fake bots are good at their propaganda.
00:30:59.000See, whenever you get owned on Twitter, your typical response on the left is it's Russian bots.
00:31:03.000It's not Russian bots, it's that you're an idiot and you're a morally benighted idiot at that.
00:31:07.000If you wanna read more deeply about cross-racial adoption, Randall Kennedy, professor at Harvard Law School, has written several books about cross-racial adoption and the immense good that can be done when people adopt people as individuals as opposed to as quote unquote members of their race.
00:31:21.000Yeah, it doesn't mean ignoring the racial divisions that exist.
00:31:24.000It doesn't mean ignoring the racial background of the child you are adopting.
00:31:40.000And so far, it seems to be doing the job.
00:31:42.000Meanwhile, Joe Biden should be asked questions about Amy Coney Barrett tonight.
00:31:46.000He should be forced to call her a theocrat, which would be interesting because he is a Catholic himself, supposedly.
00:31:51.000And when I say supposedly, I mean that he's been denied communion by at least one church for his pro-abortion positions.
00:31:57.000Biden also should be asked specifically about packing the court.
00:32:01.000So Biden's entire campaign thus far has been run on the premise that he's never going to have to answer a tough question.
00:32:08.000And except for the base, he probably won't.
00:32:11.000By the way, breaking news, apparently Joe Biden asked for and was refused a half hour break every half hour for the entire debate tonight, which does not speak well to his health, actually.
00:32:22.000And if you're asking, but like on the half hour, I mean, this show, this podcast is normally an hour.
00:32:29.000If I had to get up like every single half hour, that would not speak extraordinarily well of my health.
00:32:33.000Apparently, the Trump campaign also wanted the Biden campaign to allow a third party to inspect the ears of the debaters for electronic devices or transmitters.
00:32:39.000Apparently, Trump consented to the inspection, but Biden had not as of this point at all.
00:32:45.000In any case, Biden has been dodging serious questions about court packing, and he will openly say, the reason I'm dodging these questions is because I want the focus to remain on Trump.
00:32:52.000Here was Joe Biden dodging it again over the weekend.
00:33:26.000The reason being, the true answer to this should be pretty easy.
00:33:29.000Elect Democrats, and then when a vacancy is open, then we will fill it.
00:33:33.000But instead, they don't want to deny the crazies in their base all of the passion.
00:33:37.000So instead, they suggest that if you elect them, they will solve all problems, and the way to solve problems is to break the constitutional structure entirely.
00:33:43.000Here's Kamala Harris deflecting when asked about court packing.
00:33:46.000If Judge Barrett is confirmed and the Democrats have control of the Senate next year, and the White House and the House of Representatives, should the Supreme Court be expanded?
00:33:55.000You know what, let's, I think that, first of all, Joe's been very clear that he is going to pay attention to the fact, and I'm with him on this 1,000%, pay attention to the fact that right now, Lawrence, people are voting Okay, that is... Okay, at some point they're going to have to answer this question.
00:34:18.000Would you fundamentally break institutions of government?
00:34:21.000It's amazing that they've been able to escape a follow-up on that sort of stuff for, at this point, weeks.
00:34:29.000And by the way, if these are the geniuses who are going to run our government, they're going to fix everything, it would behoove people like Kamala Harris not to screw up the distinction between Notorious RBG, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the Notorious B.I.G., you know, the rapper.
00:35:00.000Okay, in just a second, we'll get to the other topic that will come up at tonight's debate, I am sure, at length, and that is President Trump's taxes and the New York Times dropping a supposed bombshell that really is not a bombshell.
00:37:06.000Pacific, Donald Trump and Joe Biden face off in the first of three presidential debates this election season.
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00:38:13.000All righty, so the other big topic that I'm sure will come up tonight is obviously this New York Times report on President Trump's taxes.
00:38:24.000So first things first, if somebody actually leaked proprietary information on Trump's taxes from like the IRS to the New York Times, that's illegal.
00:38:33.000That should be somewhat disturbing to all of us.
00:38:35.000Now, I've been a proponent for a long time that Trump should have released his tax returns in 2016, and then certainly after he was president, he should have just released his tax returns.
00:38:42.000Like, what the hell was the downside of just releasing the tax returns?
00:38:45.000I'm also not of the opinion that this is going to be an entirely damage-free scenario for Trump, because what they report is that Trump, in the last couple of years, has paid like a combined $1,500 in federal taxes.
00:38:56.000And the natural reaction of people is not a logical one, namely that our system itself is screwed up, that our deduction system is really messed up in this country, that we should basically just have a flat tax in this country, and we should get rid of all of the deductions entirely.
00:39:09.000Instead of that, people react with, well, he's a rich guy, why isn't he paying lots of taxes?
00:39:12.000Okay, the answer is that over the years, he has, I'm sure, paid many, many, many taxes.
00:39:17.000Also, it is true that he has not done anything illegal.
00:39:20.000So normally, in a situation like this, you'd have to ask yourself, okay, so what did Trump do wrong?
00:39:24.000So there are a few accusations as to what Trump could have done wrong here.
00:39:27.000One, he did something illegal on his taxes, like tax fraud.
00:39:30.000Presumably the IRS would be all over that.
00:39:31.000Two, He could have obtained some sort of nefarious financial aid from some nefarious foreign players.
00:39:41.000Or three, you somehow think that just because you're rich, you should be giving more money to the government than you are actually legally obligated to do, which is idiotic, and even Joe Biden doesn't do that.
00:39:48.000As it turns out, Joe Biden has been spending years dodging the payroll tax.
00:39:53.000I mean, in August, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Bidens dodged the payroll tax.
00:39:59.000They used an S-corp to avoid paying more than half a million dollars in levies for Medicare and Obamacare as well.
00:40:06.000Apparently, both he and Jill went out of their way to avoid funding seniors entitlement benefits according to their tax returns in 2017 and 2018.
00:40:11.000The Bidens and his wife, Jill, avoided payroll taxes on nearly $13.3 million in income from book royalties and speaking fees.
00:40:18.000They did so by classifying the income as S-corp profits rather than taxable wages.
00:40:23.000The Bidens did pay themselves salaries from their corporations of nearly $750,000 between them over two years.
00:40:28.000They paid full taxes on that income, but they circumvented the payroll tax on the nearly 95% of that income that remained.
00:40:35.000A tax expert interviewed by the Journal in 2019 called the Biden scheme pretty aggressive.
00:40:38.000Another told the paper it served solely to avoid the payroll taxes.
00:40:46.000Also, if you're complaining about the fact that President Trump didn't pay enough tax, you should also point out that Trump lowered taxes for everyone.
00:40:59.000Also, if you're complaining about the fact that President Trump didn't pay enough tax, you should also point out that Trump lowered taxes for everyone, specifically more so on the bottom end of the scale.
00:41:10.000Okay, in sheer absolute numbers, whenever there's a tax cut, people at the top make the most money because people at the top had the most money to make.
00:41:17.000But in terms of the disproportionate benefit of the taxes, it really hit people lower down on the income scale more than it hit people higher up on the income scale.
00:41:25.000If you're not just talking like sheer absolute numbers, if you're talking about percentage decreases, or if you're talking about the benefits that are received under the tax bill, people like me living in California actually got shellacked by the Trump tax cuts because it got rid of the state and local tax deductions.
00:41:39.000So that meant that I had to pay both my state and federal taxes, one on top of the other, as opposed to taking the state taxes in California and taking them against the federal taxes.
00:41:46.000In any case, what exactly is the bombshell here?
00:41:49.000So the New York Times reports that Donald Trump paid $750 total, $750, in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency.
00:41:56.000In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750, period.
00:42:02.000Like, the cost of, you know, a couple of car payments.
00:42:06.000He paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years, largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.
00:42:13.000According to the New York Times, as the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed.
00:42:24.000Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the IRS over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund he claimed and received after declaring huge losses.
00:42:32.000An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.
00:42:35.000The tax returns that Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public.
00:42:42.000His reports to the IRS portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year, yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes.
00:42:50.000Now with financial challenges mounting, the records show he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.
00:42:58.000So somehow, the New York Times obtained tax return data extending more than two decades for Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business.
00:43:04.000Again, this is probably a legal violation in some way.
00:43:08.000Trump, for his part, called them fake news.
00:43:13.000You can't simultaneously say that they are fake news and also that you have, and also that you are smart for avoiding taxes, which is something that he has said in the past.
00:43:20.000The New York Times, Dean Paquette, put out a full note talking about why they put this out.
00:43:24.000And the answer is because they hate Donald Trump.
00:43:27.000They say, we're not making the records themselves public because we do not want to jeopardize our sources who have taken enormous personal risks to help inform the public.
00:43:33.000We are publishing this report because we believe citizens should understand as much as possible about their leaders and representatives, their priorities, their experiences, and also their finances.
00:43:41.000So in other words, it's not a violation of law for the New York Times to do this.
00:43:45.000Just a note, the New York Times was a lot more divided in nature about publishing the WikiLeaks stuff, which again, I think there's a case we made we shouldn't have published the WikiLeaks stuff.
00:43:55.000Than they have been about publishing Trump's taxes.
00:43:59.000The basic idea here is threefold from Democrats.
00:44:02.000One, Trump is not the successful businessman he says he is, which, I mean, okay, sure.
00:44:09.000Also, whatever you think about how Trump has handled his businesses, he has not used public office in order to enrich himself.
00:44:14.000Joe Biden was worth no money, then he was vice president, now he's worth tens of millions of dollars.
00:44:19.000Barack Obama had the same deal, like his net worth when he entered office was like a million bucks or something, and now Barack Obama is probably worth nine figures, probably worth $100 million now.
00:44:28.000It turns out that people who make money after being in public office pose significantly more of a threat to the institutional architecture of the republic than people who had a lot of money going in.
00:44:37.000I've always been bewildered by the idea that if you were rich before you went in, somehow this is a demerit.
00:44:42.000It seems like that should actually be a merit.
00:44:44.000But it is true that part of Trump's pitch for a long time has been that he is world-breaking business genius, and I've doubted that story for a very long time.
00:44:50.000I've always said I'm not even sure that he's worth a billion dollars.
00:44:52.000That doesn't mean that he's poor, but it does mean that he is not the great businessman he said he was.
00:44:57.000Okay, that's a hit, but it's not much of one.
00:44:59.000The other hit is supposedly that Trump is dodging taxes.
00:45:04.000Okay, and again, there's no evidence of this.
00:45:05.000The New York Times itself says there's no evidence either that Trump has dodged taxes or has violated the law, or that he is in hock to the Rooskies.
00:45:13.000And yet, those are all narratives that Democrats are trying to throw out there today.
00:45:16.000So first of all, as far as paying no taxes, that actually is not breaking news.
00:45:20.000All the way back in 2016, Hillary Clinton suggested that Trump paid no taxes, and Trump said, in open debate, right, I didn't pay taxes because I'm smart and not stupid.
00:45:29.000Maybe he doesn't want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he's paid nothing in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody's ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn't pay any federal income tax.
00:45:49.000So, if he's paid zero, Okay, so he said that makes me far smarter, right?
00:45:55.000He comes back and says it makes me far smarter than anybody else.
00:45:58.000Okay, again, it's not like this is a big secret.
00:46:00.000Everybody has sort of speculated about this for a very long time.
00:46:04.000And the New York Times shows no evidence of illegality.
00:46:53.000Remember that one time he reported a story and it was like 15 years before I was born and we're gonna pretend like he's still a relevant figure, Carl Bernstein?
00:48:37.000So for me, this is a national security question.
00:48:41.000The question is, what does Putin have on the president politically, personally, financially, in every way that the president would try to undermine our commitment to NATO?
00:48:51.000Okay, this is just, I'm sorry, this is so tiring.
00:49:03.000I mean, do you remember there was a commercial back in the 1970s in which a guy who played a doctor on General Hospital led off the commercial by saying, I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV.
00:49:13.000Okay, well now you got Jeff Daniels, who was not in fact a newsman, but played one on TV.
00:49:17.000Now he's talking about his theories about Trump's taxes.
00:49:20.000Because we need to hear from Jeff Daniels.
00:49:22.000Okay, here's Jeff Daniels on that great news network, NMSNBC.
00:49:27.000What are they talking about in Helsinki?
00:49:29.000What were, you know, all the stuff, I mean, there's all of that.
00:49:32.000The tax returns that he won't show us.
00:50:37.000OK, meanwhile, in other news, President Trump has been saying for a while here that he is deeply concerned about voter fraud and about the possibility of voter fraud.
00:50:47.000Well, now Project Veritas has released some videos alleging widespread voter fraud in Minneapolis.
00:50:52.000They are blaming Representative Ilhan Omar.
00:50:55.000They're suggesting that she is to blame for some of this.
00:50:58.000They apparently got a hold of a person who was involved in Ilhan Omar's get out the vote effort and the suggestion is that they have basically been paying people for their votes.
00:51:08.000According to TwinCities.com, the Pioneer Press, a report by the nonprofit A report by the nonprofit suggests that the mishandling of absentee ballots in Minneapolis' Somali community is now making news.
00:51:57.000Look, look, just today we got 300 ballots for Jamal Osman.
00:52:02.000A source said they bring them, they line them, they put the open ballots in there, mark, and they take them and say here, and the people mark.
00:52:11.000Miranda Devine, reports for the New York Post.
00:52:12.000A ballot harvesting racket in Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar's Minneapolis district, where paid workers illegally gather absentee ballots from elderly Somali immigrants, appears to have been busted by Project Veritas.
00:52:22.000One alleged ballot harvester, Liban Mohamed, the brother of Minneapolis City Council member Jamal Osman, is shown in a bombshell Snapchat video rifling through piles of ballots strewn across his dashboard.
00:52:31.000Just today, we got 300 for Jamal Osman, says Mohamed.
00:52:35.000I have 300 ballots in my car right now.
00:52:52.000Under Minnesota law, no individual can be the designated agent for more than three absentee voters.
00:52:56.000So being the designated agent for 300 absentee voters is a problem.
00:52:59.000The allegations come just five weeks before a presidential election plagued with predictions of voter fraud.
00:53:04.000Both Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr have warned that the increased use of mail-in ballots due to COVID-19 concerns about in-person voting is vulnerable to fraud.
00:53:13.000According to James O'Keefe, our investigation into this ballot harvesting ring demonstrates clearly how these unscrupulous operators exploit the elderly and immigrant communities.
00:53:20.000The alleged involvement of Omar is claimed on camera by two people in the Veritas investigation, including the whistleblower Omar Jamal, a Minneapolis community leader and chair of the city's Somali watchdog group.
00:53:30.000He claims Mohammed is one of Omar's many people.
00:53:33.000She will do anything she can to get elected.
00:53:35.000She has hundreds of people on the street doing that.
00:53:37.000Meanwhile, there's another serious ballot issue in New York.
00:53:41.000Apparently, ballots have been arriving, receiving mail-in ballots marked Incorrectly.
00:53:46.000Again, according to the New York Post, voters in New York City have received mail-in ballots for the 2020 presidential election marked for military use despite never having served in the armed forces, causing confusion and concerns over whether the ballots can or should be used.
00:53:58.000The misprint makes it appear that the ballots received an official military absentee ballot instead of a military slash absentee ballot, leaving several borough residents who received the documents, including two Post journalists, worried the votes might not be properly tallied.
00:54:10.000So a bunch of people could vote and the votes could be not counted.
00:54:17.000In fact, as I've said before, there are two real dangers when it comes to the massive mail-in voting that people are pursuing right now.
00:54:24.000Danger number one is that people fill out the votes wrong.
00:54:28.000I mean, it's actually a little more complicated to fill in a mail-in ballot than it is to just go to the polling place and do it that way.
00:54:33.000Problem number two is ballot harvesting.
00:54:35.000If you have somebody who's going around to only Democratic households or to unaffiliated households and telling them how to vote, That gets really dangerous really quickly.
00:54:44.000You should have to go out to a polling place and you should have to vote unless you have some sort of medical condition preventing you from doing so.
00:54:49.000And the prevalence of COVID is not enough of a reason unless you are elderly and specifically vulnerable.
00:54:54.000If you are a 30-year-old, you should be going to vote in person.
00:54:57.000There have not been outbreaks at voting places and we have had several open votes since the beginning of the COVID outbreak.
00:55:03.000To proclaim that voter fraud is a serious problem, And that we should be concerned about in a close election?
00:55:10.000That is something that is worthy of viewing.
00:55:13.000In other sort of voting related news, there's now a There's now a story that is being put out there by Channel 4 in the UK investigating the Trump campaign strategy, and I think it is worthy of note.
00:55:25.000The Trump campaign strategy in 2016 was designed to deter particular groups from voting.
00:55:30.000Every campaign has targeted voters, and then voters that they wish to not see show up at the polls.
00:55:36.000So for Democrats, they don't wish to see religious Americans show up to the polls in very big numbers.
00:55:40.000Because if religious Americans show up in really big numbers, or non-college educated white people show up in really big numbers, that's very bad for the Democrats.
00:55:47.000For Republicans, you look at various communities, and then you say, okay, which communities are most likely to vote for us, and which communities are least likely to vote for us?
00:55:54.000The media today are playing up the fact that in 2016, the Trump campaign, using data analytics, saw that certain groups were likely not to vote for them, and certain groups were likely to vote for them, that they were going to try and, quote-unquote, depress the vote.
00:56:06.000That doesn't mean that they were going to lock people in their homes, or that they're gonna screw with the ballot, or anything like that.
00:56:11.000It means they're gonna target ads at people, making them not really wanna vote.
00:56:41.000So the media have tried to play this again as the Trump is racist thing as opposed to campaigns target their most likely voters when they try to get them out.
00:56:48.000And then they try to make it that people who are not going to vote for them stay home.
00:56:54.000And the fact that people are treating it as a giant shock is because they don't know the first thing about politics and or because they are being deliberately dishonest.
00:57:01.000Okay, so we're gonna be back here a little bit later today.
00:57:03.000We're gonna have two additional hours of content.
00:57:06.000We have a great radio show coming up for you today.
00:57:12.000Plus, we're gonna talk debate as the day progresses, so stick around for that.
00:57:15.000Also, tonight, make sure that you tune in to Daily Wire backstage because we are going to be watching this thing live, this monstrosity live.
00:57:21.000I hope you enjoy it more than I undoubtedly will, but we'll be there together.
00:58:01.000Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
00:58:04.000You know, some people are depressed because the American Republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon has turned to blood.
00:58:11.000But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.