Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have finally kissed and made up with Donald Trump. Is this a good or bad move? Is it time for a new Morning Joe Version 2.0? And what will it mean for the future of the show and the country? Today's After Show Was Hosted By: Rachel Maddow, John Avlon, Jake Tapper, Jordan Peterson, Michael Wolff, and Michael Bloomberg. Hosted by: Joe Scarborough, Mika and Alex Blumberg. Produced by: Rachel Goodman, John DeKorte, Michael Hyatt, and Rachel Goodman. Music by: Hayden Coplen and Mark Phillips. Art: Mackenzie Moore. Editor: Steven Kanter. Executive producer: Patrick Svendsgaard. Audio Engineer: Patrick McElroy. Technical direction: Matthew Boll. Special thanks to Rachel Goodman and John Voegtlin. The opinions expressed in this piece are our own, not those of our employers. We do not own any of the music used in the show. If you have a dilemma you d like us to discuss, please reach out to us. Please take a hollywood@whatiwatchedtonight.co.uk and we'll get back to you. Thank you. Thank you for all the support we've gotten so far. - Thank you so much for all of the support and all the work you've done so far, thank you. We appreciate all the love, support, support and support, and thanks for the support. Your support is so much, bye bye bye Bye bye bye. Sarah, bye Bye Bye Bye. Amy and Good Morning Joe - Sarah and Joe and Joe & Mika. Love ya. Timesticks. Cheers, Amy and Joe. Caitie. Joe and Mikey. x - EJ. . - Mika & Mikey . . . EJ & Sarah Sarah and Sarah and Katie. Billie and her husband, EJ and her family. Mikey and her and her partner, Sarah and her boyfriend, Jake and her significant other, Sarah & her husband. , and her fianc , & her and her daughter, And so much more. and so on and so much love, etc., etc., and much more! etc.
00:00:00.000Well, folks, it's time for Joe and Mika version 3.0.
00:00:04.000So yesterday, big announcement on Morning Joe.
00:00:07.000It had a lot of heads spinning because Joe and Mika of Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who are now a married couple, they weren't originally.
00:00:14.000They were married to other people when they first started the show, and now they're married to one another.
00:00:17.000In any case, they have decided that it is time for a little kiss and make up with Donald Trump.
00:00:22.000I think that we need to take a bit of a trip down memory lane with Joe and Mika to understand just how astonishing this is and just how dishonest this is.
00:00:32.000So if you go all the way back to 2015, 2016, Joe and Mika were largely responsible for Donald Trump receiving the Republican nomination.
00:00:42.000They sat with him as primary results came in in 2015, 2016.
00:00:46.000They were so close that Joe Scarborough was legitimately asked by radio host Hugh Hewitt whether he would actually be Donald Trump's VP nominee.
00:01:02.000I tell people, I really believe if Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination, your phone, Joe Scarborough, is going to ring and he's going to offer you the vice presidential nomination.
00:01:36.000I mean, first of all, Donald Trump has, I think we all know, has about as much media savvy as...
00:01:44.000Anybody that's been in politics for a long time, you always get me in trouble with questions like this.
00:01:49.000Okay, so, again, they were very tight at this time.
00:01:52.000And then, after Trump got the nomination, and he didn't keep making time with Joe and Mika, and they decided that instead they were going to favor Hillary Clinton for political reasons, they became quite vicious about President Trump.
00:02:03.000And they were vicious for legitimately years about President Trump.
00:02:06.000Here is just some of what they had to say about President Trump over the course of the next eight years or so.
00:02:13.000Donald Trump keeps talking about how America sucks.
00:02:17.000And before he got elected, America sucked.
00:02:20.000And then he got elected, suddenly America was great.
00:02:22.000Then he lost, and now America sucks again.
00:02:29.000What rises to the threat of democracy that we have ever seen in America since the Civil War, if what Donald Trump has done over the past four years does not?
00:02:40.000Double and triple checking and shilling for him and suggesting that somehow they're being biased, bending over backwards, treating him like a normal candidate.
00:03:12.000Well, it's going to be very hard for the former president to convince anybody, except for diehard MAGA, the types of people who will follow him To anywhere.
00:03:23.000It's going to be very hard for him to convince most Americans that he had a modicum of sense.
00:04:47.000Morning Joe's team apparently went to Mar-a-Lago.
00:04:50.000And yesterday, they opened by recounting their visit to Mar-a-Lago to make kissy face nice-nice with President Donald Trump.
00:04:58.000Joe and I went to Mar-a-Lago to meet personally with President-elect Trump.
00:05:04.000It was the first time we have seen him in seven years.
00:05:10.000Now, we talked about a lot of issues, including abortion, mass deportation, threats of political retribution against political opponents, and media outlets.
00:05:20.000And it's going to come as no surprise to anybody who watches this show, has watched it over the past year or over the past decade, that we didn't see eye to eye on a lot of issues, and we told him so.
00:05:34.000What we did agree on was to restart communications.
00:05:38.000My father often spoke with world leaders with whom he and the United States profoundly disagreed.
00:05:45.000That's a task shared by reporters and commentators alike.
00:05:49.000Okay, so they are walking this thing back.
00:05:51.000And then, of course, they have to maintain that they are just doing this for the sake of their journalistic objectivity.
00:05:56.000Here is Joe Scarborough saying, listen, just because we're talking with Trump, that doesn't mean that we're going to start, you know, paying homage to him again like we did in 2015-2016.
00:06:04.000We're still going to have our journalistic skepticism.
00:06:08.000Well, and of course, you look at the results of the election, too.
00:06:11.000A new approach, I think, is needed where, again, we speak truth to power.
00:06:16.000We push back hard like we push back hard, whether it was with Barack Obama, whether it was with George W. Bush, whether it was obviously with Donald Trump or Joe Biden.
00:06:28.000You didn't push back hard with Joe Biden.
00:06:30.000You just called Donald Trump Hitler for eight years.
00:06:31.000So what does this say about the legacy media?
00:06:39.000How do you go on bended knee to Hitler in the same way that it was ridiculous when Joe Biden was in the Oval Office with Donald Trump grinning ear to ear after suggesting not only that Trump was Hitler, but that his supporters were Hitler supporters.
00:06:52.000And it showed that he was lying that entire time, that actually that was just an act of demonization, of demagoguery.
00:06:58.000It's the same thing when it comes to Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski and so much of the legacy media, who have suddenly switched and realized, hey, wait a second, maybe Donald Trump is just a politician with whom we very frequently disagree.
00:10:03.000Folks on the left, they cannot deal with Mika and Joe visiting Donald Trump, but the radical left can't deal with a lot of things.
00:10:10.000Like, for example, the profound and unshakable bond between the Christian and Jewish communities in America.
00:10:14.000While the secular left pushes their anti-religious agenda, Christians and Jews have stood together, defending our shared values and religious liberties.
00:10:20.000That's why I'm proud to partner with the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.
00:10:23.000For over 40 years, they've been doing something remarkable, building bridges between our communities through faith, shared values, and mutual respect.
00:10:30.000And the fellowship doesn't just talk, they act.
00:10:32.000Right now, they're on the ground providing real help to vulnerable Jewish families and elderly around the globe.
00:10:36.000We're talking about food, medical care, emergency assistance, and security to people who need it most.
00:10:40.000Look, as somebody who spent years talking about Judeo-Christian values, I can tell you, this organization represents exactly what makes our line so powerful.
00:10:46.000It's all about Christians and Jews coming together to do what our faith's command, helping those in need.
00:10:50.000If you want to be part of this incredible mission, visit benforthefellowship.org.
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00:13:16.000What are we supposed to make of him now?
00:13:18.000Here is Sonny Hobson again, one of the members of the low IQ Democratic Party, talking about how Donald Trump only won because of racism and misogyny.
00:13:27.000I know that as a country, it's very difficult for people to believe that racism and misogyny, they're just alive and well.
00:13:37.000I think that we don't want to think that about ourselves, our neighbors, our friends, but my lived experience tells me that it does still exist, even if your lived experience doesn't tell you that it exists.
00:14:26.000And so I've said that before, and there was so much backlash because I think it's an uncomfortable, inconvenient truth about this country.
00:14:33.000I love the idea that she is a victim of racism in the United States.
00:14:38.000She received a Bachelor of Arts in English and Rhetoric from Binghamton University, a JD from Notre Dame Law School.
00:14:43.000She was a law clerk on the Maryland Court of Appeals and was an attorney with the DOJ. And then she became, believe it or not, a regular Fox News guest on The O'Reilly Factor and with Megyn Kelly.
00:14:53.000And then she ended up at CNN. This is a person who clearly has experienced tremendous racism.
00:14:56.000And she knows better than anybody exactly what Kamala Harris has experienced.
00:15:00.000The problem is, the Democratic Party has pitched that line so often that now they are stuck with it, and they are bleeding support because of it.
00:15:07.000As the New York Times points out, Democrats hope to lose by less in blue-collar areas that had drifted toward Donald Trump.
00:15:12.000In many places, they may have lost by more.
00:15:15.000The New York Times asks, is this the end of the white working-class Democrat?
00:15:20.000Eight years after fury among white working class voters propelled Donald Trump to victory, Democrats swore this time they would try to do better with that group.
00:15:26.000Instead, the party's staggering challenges with blue-collar voters have only worsened.
00:15:30.000Widespread frustration with high prices, alienation from Democrats have turned the party's lawmakers in Trump territory into an ever more endangered species.
00:15:37.000The new inroads Trump made this year with working class voters of color, particularly Latino ones, have alarmed Democrats.
00:15:43.000At the same time, the party's Trump era Achilles heel, its struggle to earn the trust of white working class voters was even starker this year, especially in the industrial Midwest, where the blue wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin all broke for Mr. Trump.
00:15:55.000And in many of those states, blue collar counties, Harris lost by greater margins than Biden did in 2020.
00:16:01.000The legacy media led the Democratic Party into a box canyon, and now they are stuck there and they're going to have a very, very difficult time getting out.
00:16:09.000Well, speaking of people having a difficult time getting out, Joe Biden has now said goodbye to the international community.
00:16:15.000He went to the G20 Summit in South America.
00:16:23.000It's a six-day trip that, according to the Wall Street Journal, has featured wistful reminiscences and attempts to highlight accomplishments White House officials fear are in danger of being forgotten or erased.
00:16:33.000Well, I mean, I think what people are recognizing, of course, is that he had an absolutely terrible four years, a truly bad four years.
00:16:43.000And partially, that's because, of course, he is senile.
00:16:46.000Here he was babbling about languages in the Amazon forest.
00:17:52.000Anyway, there he is, about to be eaten by a dinosaur in the rainforest, but not before Xi Jinping lectures him.
00:18:00.000According to Breitbart, Xi Jinping sternly warned outgoing American President Joe Biden during what is expected to be their final in-person meeting of Biden's tenure that, quote, democracy and human rights are a red line for communist China.
00:18:11.000Xi identified human rights as a red line alongside the Taiwan question, meaning supporting China's false claims over the sovereign nation, China's path and system, meaning communism and China's development, meaning supporting China's status as the world's worst polluter while it tries to economically outcompete the West.
00:18:25.000Biden reportedly replied, according to China's Global Times propaganda newspaper, America, quote, does not seek a new Cold War, does not seek to change China's system, does not support Taiwanese independence, has no intention to have a conflict with China and does not see its Taiwan policy as a way to compete with China.
00:18:41.000Well, most of those things are simply not true.
00:19:02.000All Joe Biden had to do was be normal, and he couldn't do it.
00:19:05.000He just couldn't do it because the Democratic Party has not been normal for quite a while.
00:19:08.000They've not been normal on issues of race.
00:19:10.000They've not been normal on issues of sex.
00:19:12.000They've not been normal on issues of economics, and they've not been normal on issues of the border.
00:19:16.000Where now President Trump is about to use massive executive power in order to crack down on illegal immigration.
00:19:23.000According to Axios, President-elect Trump confirmed on Monday he's planning to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military to carry out mass deportations.
00:19:32.000Apparently, Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, posted on Truth Social earlier this month that Trump was, quote, prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program.
00:19:44.000Trump then reposted Fitton's comment on Monday on Truth Social with the caption, True.
00:19:50.000So again, not a giant shock there, considering that he's already tapped Tom Homan, the bulldog, who is the former acting head of ICE, who serves as border czar, and of course he has Kristi Noem, who is about to crack down on illegal immigration as well, for Department of Homeland Security.
00:20:03.000Apparently, the president-elect's team is aiming to craft executive orders that can withstand legal challenges to avoid a similar defeat that befell Trump's Muslim ban in his first term, according to Politico.
00:20:11.000Their plans also include ending the parole program for undocumented immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, per Politico.
00:20:19.000And before there's a lot of hue and outcry about the use of a national emergency declaration in order to Achieve executive power on all this.
00:20:31.000Congress could theoretically seize back its power by changing the National Emergencies Act in 1976.
00:20:36.000But the reality is the National Emergencies Act, which gives the president the ability to declare a national emergency under a wide variety of circumstances, has been used repeatedly, often, constantly, actually, by a wide variety of presidents up to and including Joe Biden, who used it most recently, for example, in February of 2024 to crack down, supposedly, on West Bank settler violence in the middle of the war against Hamas and against Hezbollah.
00:21:04.000It was Joe Biden who used a national emergency declaration to crack down on people giving money, as we'll talk about a little bit later in the show, to people who are actually just building homes in Judea and Samaria.
00:21:14.000That was a national emergency, according to Joe Biden.
00:21:16.000So suffice it to say, that's not actually a national emergency.
00:21:20.000You You know what actually is kind of a national emergency?
00:21:22.000A giant, wide-open border that has allowed in 10 million illegal immigrants over the course of the last four years.
00:21:29.000And again, Democrats are trapped here because they've spent so long on this idea that it is absolutely bigoted to point out the open border that they're kind of stuck.
00:22:17.000And treating God's children with dignity and respect, it seems to me if you want to treat American citizens with dignity and respect, you ought to deport criminal illegal immigrants.
00:22:23.000That's Representative Sylvia Garcia, who represents Texas' 29th Congressional District.
00:22:29.000There's some fundamental truths that Democrats are denying at this point, but one of them is that universities have become a trash heap.
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00:24:40.000Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, who is absolutely awful.
00:24:43.000She says that Democrats are going to work to avoid complying with deportation notices in the city of Boston.
00:24:50.000What will Boston's response be if these mass deportations take place?
00:24:54.000Yeah, look, elections have consequences, and the federal government is responsible for a certain set of actions and cities.
00:25:01.000No individual city can reverse or override some parts of that, but what we can do is make sure that we are doing our part to protect our residents in every possible way, that we are not cooperating with those efforts that Michelle Wu, awful, awful mayor.
00:25:23.000And just another reason why, if there are illegal immigrants in the state of Texas or in the state of Florida or in the state of Arizona, they should immediately be given bus tickets to Boston where they can be safe with Mayor Michelle Wu.
00:25:33.000Now again, this is one of the approaches Democrats across the country are taking to Donald Trump.
00:25:37.000They have to choose between conciliation and pragmatism and the resistance.
00:25:43.000But the problem is they've been in resistance mode for full-on a decade at this point, which is why the Washington Post reports today that California is going to lead a Trump resistance again.
00:25:53.000Well, I noticed that the last time they led to Trump resistance, literally hundreds of thousands of people fled the state because it was so badly run.
00:25:59.000I know because I was one of them and I took my family and my company with me.
00:26:02.000But according to the Washington Post, within hours of Donald Trump's victory this month, California's top elected officials readied themselves to reprise familiar roles as leaders of the Democratic resistance.
00:26:12.000Governor Gavin Newsom called a special session of the state legislature to discuss the best ways of Trump-proofing California and traveled to Washington to ask for President Joe Biden's help.
00:26:21.000Attorney General Rob Bonta held a news conference in front of the Golden Gate Bridge to declare, quote, If Trump attacks your rights, I will be there.
00:26:26.000And Democratic lawmakers at every level of government here issued statements assuring residents they'll fight hard against any federal incursions.
00:26:33.000By the way, that obviously includes immigration.
00:26:36.000According to the LA Times, immigration is an area of likely conflict, as Trump's promised mass deportation could wreak havoc in California, home to an estimated 1.8 million unauthorized immigrants.
00:26:46.000Many Californians live in mixed status families.
00:26:48.000The state's agricultural industry relies on a largely undocumented workforce.
00:26:52.000So we'll see if that works out well for Democrats.
00:26:55.000Again, it turns out that actually Trump's immigration program is one of the most popular parts of his agenda.
00:27:01.000That is also part of a broader anti-immigration sentiment that is growing across the world, particularly in the West.
00:27:07.000The major problem of human migration that has plagued the West for years at this point The attempt to wash over national borders is having tremendous consequences across the world.
00:27:22.000The entire article in the New York Times today, quote, On migration, Europe warms to ideas once seen as fringe.
00:27:27.000Europe has been struggling for years to limit the number of unauthorized migrants entering by land and sea, instituting increasingly tough policies.
00:27:34.000Those moves now appear to be working, with the number of migrants crossing into the EU decreasing dramatically from highs last year.
00:27:40.000As in the United States, the steep drop in border crossings has done little to diminish the political potency of the issue.
00:27:46.000In Italy, Prime Minister George Maloney is trying to send migrants rescued in the Mediterranean to Albania.
00:27:51.000Germany has extended patrols to all of its land borders.
00:27:55.000Poland plans to introduce legislation to temporarily suspend the right of new arrivals to ask for asylum.
00:28:00.000None of this is a giant shock considering again that a huge percentage of people who are coming across Europe's borders have very little in common with Western European values.
00:28:12.000And I think one of the things that we are seeing globally is that the left-wing agenda, which sounds sometimes nice, it sounds empathetic in theory, the actual material consequences of those theories are quite ugly.
00:28:23.000And when they materialize, people do not like them on a very real level.
00:28:27.000That's true whether you're talking about defund the police sorts of policies in America's major cities, which are turning increasingly red, or whether you're talking about the idea that vast migration over national borders is somehow an act of empathy that betters everyone's life, which is certainly not true in Europe, where you now have huge percentages of Muslim migrants and a huge problem with Muslim migrants involved in crime, involved in welfare policies, and involved in rioting or even pogroms in places like Amsterdam.
00:28:55.000It turns out that international leftism is a really bad program for governing.
00:29:02.000Now, speaking of President Trump, there's been a lot of debate in the last couple of days over Ukraine policy and what ought to happen now.
00:29:09.000So, of course, Joe Biden has now greenlit the ability of Ukraine to strike across the Russian border at supply lines.
00:29:15.000That's something that he should have greenlit a long time ago if he actually wished to reach a solution.
00:29:19.000Joe Biden pursued, bizarrely enough, the exact same strategy that LBJ and his generals pursued during the Vietnam War, a strategy of graduated escalation.
00:29:28.000The idea that if you slow walk aid in and that if you gradually increase pressure, that's going to bring somebody to the table as opposed to the real way you get to a peace deal, which is overwhelming force, even in short bursts in order to get to a deal.
00:29:39.000Well, now Biden is accelerating all of that.
00:29:42.000And there are a lot of people out there who are fearful that this is going to lead to some sort of nuclear conflagration with the Russians.
00:29:50.000Russia's been threatening this since the very beginning of the war.
00:29:54.000You're seeing a lot of alarmist coverage, I think, of this particular issue.
00:29:58.000The reality, of course, is that everyone knows that Trump is coming, and they know that Trump wants an off ramp.
00:30:02.000And so the idea that Ukraine is going to seize the upper hand in preparation for a negotiation is actually not horrific policy.
00:30:11.000Apparently, U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor John Finer responded from the Group of 20 summit in Brazil to a statement from Dmitry Peskov, who suggested that NATO has gone to war with Russia and Moscow will proceed accordingly.
00:30:25.000Finer said the fire was lit by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
00:30:27.000He said, I think this notion of fuel on the fire is frankly a side issue to the main issue, which is Russia waging a war of aggression across the sovereign border into Ukraine and continuing to do so.
00:30:36.000Now, again, all of this is in preparation for Donald Trump entering and then presumably, Moving toward a solution to the problem.
00:30:43.000In fact, even Vladimir Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, he has suggested that the Ukraine war will actually end faster under Donald Trump.
00:30:51.000He says that with the policy of the team that wins, the war will end faster.
00:31:01.000This is their approach, their promise to their country.
00:31:04.000And for them, it is also very important.
00:31:06.000So, again, that is Zelensky acknowledging the obvious.
00:31:10.000Now, Democrats are suggesting that President Trump is going to let Vladimir Putin win the war.
00:31:20.000My worry is that Donald Trump was telling the truth when he refused during the debate to say he wants Ukraine to win the war.
00:31:30.000It may be that Donald Trump wants Russia to win the war and he is going to essentially Hand Ukraine to Putin because he is going to refuse to continue to fund the war.
00:31:40.000There's no real negotiation if Russia knows Trump is cutting off military support for Ukraine.
00:31:46.000Okay, but the reality of the situation is that Trump has never actually articulated the idea that he's going to full-on cut off military support to Ukraine.
00:31:53.000There are a lot of people in the Republican Party who have suggested that.
00:31:56.000And in fact, J.D. Vance, who's very much on that sort of side of the aisle, supposedly, he was asked if that means that Russia takes over Ukraine.
00:32:04.000Should the United States cut off military support?
00:32:07.000This has all been a lever in order to get Europe to pay more of the freight with regard to the war in Ukraine.
00:32:12.000The Wall Street Journal points out, the Trump administration must find new levers to move Putin from his intransigence.
00:32:17.000Among these are threats to increase the economic costs of sustaining the war and to increase the pain Russia and Russians bear for doing so.
00:32:23.000Trump has alluded to such an approach.
00:32:25.000As a strategy paper from the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute noted, a successful policy would require, quote, enabling Ukraine to negotiate from a position of strength and developing a long-term security architecture for Ukraine's defense.
00:32:37.000Trump's ability to press Putin into accepting a settlement could be undermined by the eager public declarations of many in Trump's inner circle to curtail or seize U.S. spending on Ukraine.
00:32:45.000But again, it is one thing for the Republicans in the Senate to clamp down on the possibility of Ukraine spending when Joe Biden is slow walking the aid and has no plan.
00:32:54.000It's another thing for Republicans in the Senate to greenlight an actual plan determined to get to an endpoint.
00:33:00.000And the big problem with Joe Biden's strategy in Ukraine is it didn't have a goal and it didn't have a means.
00:33:51.000As we've been saying, Democrats are struggling to put all the pieces back together.
00:33:55.000It turns out that not only did they blow it on inflation, they're now insulting Americans for being concerned about the effects of that inflation.
00:34:02.000So they're searching for a new leader inside the Democratic Party and they're having a lot of trouble.
00:34:06.000Polls suggest that today, if the Democrats were to hold a primary for president in 2028, Kamala Harris would still win with 41 percent of the vote.
00:34:30.000Like, seriously, Carrie Lake might be somebody who you love as a primary voter.
00:34:34.000After he loses two separate major races in a state to the wet dishrag known as Katie Hobbs for governor, and then to Ruben Gallego, a far-left insane Democrat for Senate, in a state that Donald Trump won by five, it might be time to find a new candidate.
00:34:48.000But, you know, unfortunately, it is true that Republicans have blown races before that have national implications.
00:34:53.000I'm old enough to remember when Jack Ryan blew a Senate race against Barack Obama.
00:34:57.000He had to step out of that race over some sort of bizarre sex scandal involving his wife.
00:35:01.000And then Barack Obama became a senator from Illinois and then president of the United States.
00:35:05.000Ruben Gallego sort of wants to luck into the presidency as well.
00:35:08.000The problem for Ruben Gallego is that the Democrats, they just can't stop insulting the American people.
00:35:13.000They think the reason that they lost is because the American people are selfish and bad.
00:35:17.000Here's Ruben Gallego explaining that the reason that democratic values were sort of put to the side is because Americans are selfish.
00:35:25.000The biggest lesson we have to learn here is when people are hurting economically, they're gonna take care of themselves first.
00:35:31.000And that's what we've seen for the last, you know, change elections for the last, you know, 20 years.
00:35:35.000And I think it's important for Democrats to remember from now on, you have to take care of people at the bottom line.
00:35:39.000You have to give them some level of economic security.
00:35:42.000Okay, so he thinks the reason that Democrats lost on many of the big issues of the day is not because Democrats have taken a scornful attitude toward the traditional morality of most Americans.
00:35:52.000The Democrats have crossed swords with Americans on issues ranging from our boys, girls, to whether churches are indeed good or should be forced to participate in abortion care.
00:36:02.000He thinks the reason is because when the economy is bad, people think of themselves first.
00:36:08.000Democrats can't get out of this habit.
00:36:09.000They cannot get out of this habit of just insulting half of America.
00:36:13.000Which is why, presumably, you still have a wide variety of Democratic commenters saying to Democrats that they cannot dump the trans issue.
00:36:21.000Now, again, the trans issue is sort of the number one with a bullet reason why Democrats lost.
00:36:26.000Not because it's the biggest issue in the country, but because it is the most indicative of the disconnect that Democrats have With the normal American.
00:36:35.000This was everybody who considers themselves a normie fighting back against the idea that there is no normal in the United States.
00:36:40.000That basically all of moral life is a matter of apathy.
00:36:45.000And yet Democrats can't let go of that.
00:36:47.000So here's Melissa Murphy on MSNBC explaining that Democrats should continue to promote the idea that men can be women and women can be men, which is the number one idea.
00:36:56.000By polling data, it was like the number one idea dividing Democrats on morality from Republicans.
00:37:01.000And even on issues like same sex marriage, those bridges have been crossed a long time ago.
00:37:05.000When it comes to the baseline idea that men and women are the same, malleable and changeable from one into another, even many Democrats are like, that's not true.
00:37:13.000But Democrats cannot let go of this thing because to Democrats, this is the core of their entire being.
00:37:20.000Truthfully, the question isn't why this is a major issue for Republicans.
00:37:23.000You should be able to understand why it's a major issue for Republicans to go along with the idea that boys can be girls and girls' boys.
00:37:29.000There's no more fundamental area of life than the idea of sexual dichotomy.
00:37:33.000The question is, why don't Democrats let go of this?
00:37:36.000And the answer is that they are so ensconced in the idea that all forms of disparity are a form of discrimination and that individuality lies in your feeling about yourself.
00:37:47.000To let go of it would be to let go of something far deeper and more important to Democrats, which is the very idea that normality is an imposition.
00:37:54.000Democrats believe, at least progressive Democrats, that normality...
00:37:58.000That the basic roles of daily life, these things are an imposition on your freedom.
00:38:02.000And transgenderism is the ultimate rejection of those norms and those rules, which is why they can't let it go.
00:38:09.000Here's Melissa Murray trying to make the case.
00:38:11.000None of this is new from Republicans, but unfortunately some Democrats seem to be taking the bait and internalizing the GOP talking point that defending trans rights cost them the election.
00:38:24.000Days after Trump's victory, Democratic Congressman Tom Suozzi of New York told the New York Times, quote, I don't want to discriminate against anybody, but I don't think biological boys should be playing in women's sports.
00:38:35.000Democrats aren't saying that, and they should be, end quote.
00:38:41.000The answer is it is not controversial, actually.
00:38:44.000By new polling data, three quarters of voters say it should be illegal to subject children to transgender medical interventions, according to a new poll from Neapolitan News Service.
00:38:54.000The majority of those in both major political parties say they oppose allowing minors to attempt to quote unquote change their gender.
00:39:00.000That includes 86% of Republicans and 58% of Democrats.
00:39:04.000But the top elite Democrats, they cannot let go of this.
00:39:17.000People are now freely saying what they believe on this issue for the first time in a long time.
00:39:21.000There's a poll that came out recently that suggested that 41% of Americans now feel more comfortable saying what they actually thought about things like child transition.
00:39:31.000The question is, why were they remaining silent in the first place?
00:39:34.000All of that is over, and Democrats can't let it go.
00:39:37.000They simply can't let it go, and that's a major problem for them going forward.
00:39:42.000In Pennsylvania, we have some updates.
00:39:44.000So as you'll recall, Pennsylvania Democrats were attempting to illegally count votes in Pennsylvania to overturn the election of Dave McCormick, the senator-elect from Pennsylvania Republican.
00:39:54.000Now, apparently, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has decided that they are going to order the boards of elections throughout the state to follow their previous rulings and not count mail-in and absentee ballots that fail to comply with the state election code.
00:40:07.000The Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued that ruling on Monday as election board officials in Bucks County in particular have defied Pennsylvania Supreme Court precedent and moved to count ballots that the court has determined cannot be counted.
00:40:18.000So that at least is a piece of good news.
00:40:20.000It is insane that the people who are illegally counting ballots were not arrested for the crime of having done so.
00:40:26.000Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania put out a statement saying, quote, As I've made clear for years, every eligible Pennsylvanian's vote should be counted in every race.
00:40:32.000And thanks to the hard work of Republican and Democratic election officials all across the Commonwealth, Pennsylvania has held another free, fair, safe, and secure election.
00:40:40.000As counties continued, counting ballots from the 2024 general election and a mandatory statewide recount begins in the U.S. Senate race.
00:40:47.000They were confronted with a lack of legal clarity surrounding undated mail-in ballots that caused significant confusion and put counties in a challenging legal position.
00:40:54.000Given this lack of clarity, county officials in each of our 67 counties were damned if they did and damned if they didn't.
00:41:02.000Democrats were just illegally counting ballots, and Josh Shapiro should not lie about that, especially if he considers himself a sort of Pragmatic Democratic moderate with hopes for a political future.
00:41:12.000Don't lie about illegally counting votes if that is your thought.
00:41:15.000Okay, meanwhile, on the Donald Trump nominee front, Donald Trump has now nominated a new Secretary of Transportation.
00:41:37.000And instead, we say that you were on Fox and Friends weekend.
00:41:39.000If you're Sean Duffy, then we ignore the fact that you served in the House of Representatives for eight years.
00:41:44.000And instead, we just call you a co-host on Fox Business.
00:41:48.000Trump in a statement praised Sean Duffy as, quote, a tremendous and well-liked public servant and said he was a respected voice and communicator in the Republican conference during his time in Congress.
00:41:57.000Duffy served as chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations and on the House Committee on Financial Services during his time in Congress.
00:42:04.000CNN says he has little or no experience in the transportation field.
00:42:07.000Well, I mean, I'm sure that he has more information on the transportation field than, say, Pete Buttigieg, a mayor of a mid-sized to small city in the Midwest who was and liked trains.
00:42:18.000That was literally his only qualifier for being Secretary of Transportation under Joe Biden.
00:42:26.000The most controversial pick remains Matt Gaetz.
00:42:28.000There's a new story out from ABC News about the Attorney General nominee.
00:42:34.000A lawyer representing two women who testified before the House Ethics Committee has now told ABC News that former Representative Matt Gaetz paid both of his adult clients for sex.
00:42:43.000This is Florida Attorney Joel Leppard talking to ABC News' Juju Chang.
00:42:48.000Both of your clients testified that they were paid by Representative Gates to have sex.
00:43:16.000Not after the way that we have seen a wide variety of Republican nominees smeared along these lines.
00:43:22.000So it may be true and it may not be true.
00:43:24.000We really don't know at this point, considering the Justice Department spent years, according to ABC News, probing those allegations against Gates, including allegations of obstruction of justice, before informing Gates last year it would not bring charges.
00:43:36.000Apparently, according to Alex Pfeiffer, who's the Trump transition spokesperson, these are baseless allegations intended to derail the second Trump administration.
00:43:42.000The Biden Justice Department investigated Gates for years and cleared him of wrongdoing.
00:43:48.000So we'll see how all of this plays out.
00:43:50.000Obviously, this is one of the issues surrounding Gates when it comes to the nomination fight to come.
00:43:55.000Meanwhile, internationally, the bizarre targeting of Israel continues on a wide variety of fronts.
00:44:00.000Pope Francis has now called for a genocide investigation in Gaza, which is just an absurdity on every possible level.
00:44:07.000Francis reportedly, privately, used the term genocide last year to describe Israeli military actions while speaking to a group of Palestinians, according to the Washington Post.
00:44:15.000And apparently, he has a new book called Hope Never Disappoints, Pilgrims Toward a Better World, that was based on interviews with him.
00:44:22.000And Francis' quote in the book is saying, according to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of genocide.
00:44:26.000Okay, that is idiocy on the highest possible level.
00:44:29.000But then again, Pope Francis has expressed a wide variety of views that can only be declared idiocy throughout his tenure as Pope.
00:44:35.000That does not mean everything that he says is stupid, obviously.
00:44:38.000Many of the things he says, I think, are quite wise.
00:44:40.000International relations do not fall into that category.
00:44:43.000He has said a wide variety of foolish and counterproductive things.
00:44:46.000But that, again, is because Pope Francis is has strong tendencies, shall we say, toward liberation theology, which is essentially Marxist inflected Catholicism, which is a real problem inside the Catholic Church.
00:44:58.000It is just another indicator of the moral foolishness of people on the left to suggest this sort of thing.
00:45:30.000And so they're attempting to now label this a, quote, key part of the Israeli extremist settler movement.
00:45:36.000Now, meanwhile, the Biden administration is flowing something like $230 million into Palestinian coffers in the middle of a war in which the Palestinian Authority has been supportive of Hamas.
00:45:48.000It's absolutely unbelievable, but it's just too predictable, obviously.
00:45:53.000According to the Washington Free Beacon, the new sanctions are the broadest today, imposing unprecedented punitive measures on three Israeli organizations the administration accuses of fomenting violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
00:46:04.000They were leveled just days after a coalition of nearly 90 congressional Democrats petitioned the Biden administration to ramp up sanctions on Israel before leaving the White House.
00:46:11.000And this has become sort of de rigueur on the part of Democrats leaving the White House.
00:46:14.000Remember that Barack Obama, as he was leaving the White House, essentially abstained from an absurd decision.
00:46:26.000As Joe Biden is on his way out, he's going to grant some sort of SOP to the wildly anti-Israel progressives.
00:46:31.000The sanctions were announced just three days after the Biden-Harris administration awarded another $230 million in funding for humanitarian projects in the West Bank and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
00:46:40.000That is more than $2 billion in taxpayer funds to the Palestinians since Hamas' October 7th terror spree on Israel.
00:46:46.000Which, by the way, is unbelievable considering that everyone distributing that aid is, again, on the side of Hamas or supports terror in other ways.
00:46:53.000Because the Palestinian Authority still has on its books pay-to-slay laws that actually pay people in jail for killing Jews.
00:47:01.000Again, the latest sanctions are targeting this group Amana, which is designed, as we say, to help people actually move into homes in the West Bank.
00:47:12.000But according to the State Department, they say that Amano has established dozens of illegal settler outposts and directly engaged in dispossession of private land owned by Palestinians in its support of settlers.
00:47:23.000They mean people illegally grabbing a home that's already legally owned?
00:47:27.000Or do they mean that these are disputed territories and both sides claim sovereignty over them, which is actually what's happening in Judea and Samaria?
00:47:34.000The reality is that Palestinians have been illegally building in the West Bank for a very long time.
00:47:38.000All you have to do is take a drive through the West Bank.
00:47:40.000You can see entire villages that have been illegally built there by Palestinians.
00:47:43.000They're completely empty, but they've been put there without the windows there so they don't have to pay tax in order to occupy that particular land for supposed future negotiations or simply to change the facts on the ground.
00:47:56.000But the Biden administration has taken the position that illegal building by Palestinians in the West Bank is legal, and Israeli building in the West Bank is somehow illegal, which is ridiculous on its face, legally speaking.
00:48:07.000And of course, the idea of leveraging sanctions or levying sanctions against a group like Amana is specifically designed to misuse U.S. sanctions to oppose Jews who tend toward the right.
00:48:19.000The Foundation for Defensive Democracies wrote in an analysis, quote, usually sanctions target those responsible for severe wrongdoing, like terrorist financing, nuclear proliferation, and large-scale human rights abuses.
00:48:28.000The new sanctions break this mold by targeting Israeli Jews in the West Bank accused of property crimes and vandalism, or of simply associating with the wrong people.
00:48:37.000Of course, the Biden-Harris administration sanctions list, according to the Washington Free Beacon, was built with the support of anti-Israel non-governmental organizations, including the Muslim Brotherhood tide, Dawn Mina, a radical anti-Israel organization, according to Eugene Kontorovich, another analyst from FDD. Not a shock at all.