The Ben Shapiro Show - The Crying Republican Surrender Caucus | Ep. 1631

00:00:00.000 Former House Republican Speaker John Boehner tears up while paying homage to outgoing Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Republicans prepare to cave yet again to Senate Democrats, and 2024 polls show Trump fading and Joe Biden gaining.

00:00:12.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:12.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:19.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.

00:00:21.000 Protect your online privacy today at ExpressVPN.com.

00:00:24.000 And well, they finally unveiled, historically, so historic, the portrait of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House.

00:00:30.000 They have a big gallery of portraits of former Speakers of the House over at the Capitol Rotunda.

00:00:35.000 And so they had a big event for this because Nancy Pelosi is, of course, Like her or dislike her, as I do.

00:00:40.000 She is a historic figure.

00:00:42.000 And so they had a big event to unveil a portrait of Nancy Pelosi.

00:00:45.000 And everybody was super excited because she's so historic.

00:00:47.000 She's the most historic of the historic people who have been historic in the relatively historic history of the history.

00:00:53.000 So it was all very exciting.

00:00:54.000 And former House Speaker John Boehner, he showed up to pay tearful tribute to Nancy Pelosi.

00:01:01.000 I mean, so there are a couple ways to take this. 0.97

00:01:03.000 One is, as I will take it, as just an indicator of just how pathetic the Republicans generally are in office. 0.98

00:01:09.000 The other way to take it is that John Boehner just cries a lot. 0.99

00:01:11.000 That dude cries a lot.

00:01:12.000 But either way, he actually teared up while paying homage to Nancy Pelosi.

00:01:16.000 Here's what he had to say.

00:01:17.000 There is no other speaker of the house in the modern era, Republican or Democrat, has wielded the gavel with such authority or with such consistent results.

00:01:40.000 That's where he geared up!

00:01:42.000 Really?

00:01:42.000 Like that she was a good political manipulator?

00:01:47.000 But this does say something about the Republican Party, because that's not all that John Boehner had to say.

00:01:52.000 He said, Which, when you hear that coming out of the mouth of John Boehner, is even weirder than when you hear it coming out of my mouth.

00:02:02.000 The fact of the matter is no other Speaker of the House in the modern era has wielded that gavel, that's what he said, and he called her a tough cookie.

00:02:09.000 Which used to be considered a sexist thing to say. 0.99

00:02:13.000 Then he said, So I have a really basic question to ask actually here because I think this says a lot about the state of conservatism in the country, the state of the Republican Party generally.

00:02:27.000 How many Democrats do you think who sit in the House of Representatives or the Senate?

00:02:31.000 How many of them do you think have Republican kids?

00:02:34.000 How many?

00:02:35.000 Really, my guess is very, very, very few. 1.00

00:02:38.000 And the reason for that is because the Republican Party is a trash heap. 0.86

00:02:41.000 How many Republicans do you think have Democrats for kids? 0.99

00:02:44.000 I think the answer is a lot.

00:02:46.000 I think the answer is there are a lot of Republican legislators, a lot of Republican senators whose kids are Democrats.

00:02:51.000 And that's not because of the disconnect between conservative values and the younger generation.

00:02:55.000 That's always existed.

00:02:56.000 It's always been true that the younger generation tends to be liberal until reality clocks them in the face and they become more conservative.

00:03:01.000 Hence the old chestnut that Winston Churchill used to say, that if you're not a liberal when you're 20, then you have no heart.

00:03:07.000 And if you're not a conservative when you're 40, you have no brain.

00:03:10.000 That's been a long time, long standing critique of how politics works.

00:03:14.000 And when you're younger, you tend to be more worried about compassion by the state.

00:03:18.000 And when you're older, you realize that the family unit independence from the state is actually quite important and that you want a space for yourself aside from government.

00:03:25.000 Understood.

00:03:26.000 But one of the key indicators when you're talking about the most political of the political people on the planet, namely people who are in elected office for a particular party, supposedly representing a certain constituency and a certain ideology from that constituency.

00:03:41.000 How good are they at passing those values on to the next generation?

00:03:44.000 I think there are a lot of Republicans who are very, very bad at pushing those values to their kids.

00:03:48.000 And I don't think that's because of the shortcoming in the values.

00:03:50.000 I think it's because of shortcoming in them.

00:03:52.000 I think it's because Republicans do not believe many of the things that they say and Democrats believe nearly everything that they say.

00:03:58.000 Now, this is a critique of conservatives in elected office, supposed conservatives in elected office.

00:04:02.000 It's also a critique of the Republican Party generally.

00:04:05.000 So it's a critique of the Republican Party because the Republican Party is not a conservative party.

00:04:08.000 The Republican Party is a vehicle for victory.

00:04:10.000 Political parties are always vehicles for victory.

00:04:12.000 That is literally their raison d'etre.

00:04:13.000 That is the reason they exist.

00:04:15.000 The reason the Democratic Party exists is not actually to do liberal priorities, believe it or not.

00:04:19.000 The reason the Democratic Party exists is to get people elected to high office and to enrich the coffers of the Democratic Party to get more people elected to high office.

00:04:27.000 In other words, it's a vehicle.

00:04:29.000 The vehicle could be used for blue-dog Democrats, or it could be used for far-left-wing Democrats like Bernie Sanders.

00:04:33.000 It's just a vehicle for victory.

00:04:35.000 And when it doesn't win, then it loses its reason for being.

00:04:38.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second.

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00:06:42.000 The Republican Party is not a conservative party.

00:06:45.000 It's just a vehicle for victory.

00:06:47.000 It happens to be centered around people who are ideologically more conservative than the Democratic Party, but it could be a vehicle for liberal Republicans or it could be a vehicle for conservative Republicans.

00:06:56.000 It is just a vehicle for victory.

00:06:57.000 The problem for the Republican Party is that it is not a vehicle for victory anymore.

00:07:01.000 It's lost nearly all power.

00:07:02.000 The Republican Party has no institutional power to help select candidates to gain any sort of victory.

00:07:08.000 So if it's not conservative and it doesn't win victory, what exactly is it that you would say that you do here if you're the Republican Party?

00:07:14.000 If you are not achieving the ability to either select candidates who can win or to get candidates, once they win, to come together around conservative policy, what is it that you do?

00:07:23.000 You're not an organizing party.

00:07:25.000 You're not a winning party.

00:07:26.000 So what is the purpose of you?

00:07:29.000 And part of that is the simple sort of mechanisms of how parties have failed to to actually exercise authority over their own membership.

00:07:37.000 Part of that is things like getting rid of the earmarking.

00:07:39.000 A lot of people are very anti earmarking because they say, well, it's pork barrel kind of stuff.

00:07:42.000 Earmarking is the process in Congress.

00:07:44.000 Whereby, in order for me to vote for your bill, you have to give me some sort of giveaway and name the local post office after me or something and give it some money.

00:07:51.000 And people think that's really bad.

00:07:52.000 And on a raw level, it's not great.

00:07:54.000 But it's also how politics works.

00:07:56.000 And it does allow parties to actually exercise authorities over their members because then patronage matters.

00:08:01.000 And it matters how you get staffed.

00:08:02.000 It matters which committee you go to.

00:08:04.000 As earmarks faded and as parties were unable to to actually cudgel their members into place, that had some pretty dire side effects, particularly for the Republican Party, which is less ideologically coherent than the Democratic Party.

00:08:15.000 And this is what it comes down to as the Republican Party has weakened.

00:08:18.000 It is not that the Republican Party has rebuilt itself in an ideologically consistent mode.

00:08:22.000 Far from it.

00:08:23.000 What's happened instead is that you have a lot of politicians who say they believe a thing and then don't actually believe the thing.

00:08:29.000 And this is happening over and over for Republicans.

00:08:32.000 And there's a reason that John Boehner's kids are Democrats.

00:08:35.000 And I think that does say something about, again, people who have made politics the center of your life.

00:08:38.000 And there are a lot of people who are Republicans across the country who have kids who are Democrat, and that's totally fine.

00:08:44.000 But it's less fine when your literal job is to promulgate a particular set of values and you can't even promulgate them to your own kids.

00:08:51.000 Take the world of religion. 0.77

00:08:53.000 If you are a religious Christian, and all of your kids end up secular atheists, then from the religious Christian point of view, you have failed.

00:09:01.000 If you're an Orthodox Jew, and your kids all end up secular atheists, from the perspective of your Judaism, you have not done your job as a parent. 0.63

00:09:10.000 There's been some sort of, and it's not always you to blame, they're always, obviously your kids are independent actors in the world, but if all of your kids, or if multiple of your kids have moved away from what you believe to be the core ideology that matters, And if you're pretty blasé about that, if you're joking about that, if that's not something that actually kind of hurts your heart, then presumably you don't believe the values all that much.

00:09:33.000 This is a real problem.

00:09:35.000 Because I know many of these Republican legislators, and I know many of them do have kids who have decided to basically throw out their parents' values, which suggests that the parents aren't doing a job in their home.

00:09:44.000 But it also suggests that many of them don't understand the opposition and don't even understand themselves.

00:09:49.000 It suggests that many of the Republicans who go to Washington say the things that they think they need to say in order to get elected in conservative areas.

00:09:56.000 And then they go to Washington and they cut deals.

00:09:58.000 They go to Washington and the thing they actually believe is that the people on the other side of the aisle are friendly, chummy with them.

00:10:04.000 And that they have lots of shared values with Democrats on the other side of the aisle.

00:10:09.000 And that really there's not all that much wrong with the ideology of the other side.

00:10:12.000 Now listen, I think that civility in Washington is generally a good thing.

00:10:15.000 I think people should treat each other well.

00:10:17.000 I also think there are times where compromise is called for.

00:10:20.000 There are times when the best you can do is the best you can do.

00:10:23.000 And so this isn't even a critique of John Boehner and sequestration, for example, under Barack Obama, where he signed a deal that radically cut the American military in exchange for cutting some spending.

00:10:34.000 It was a terrible deal, but that's not what this is about.

00:10:36.000 What this is really about is that the Republican Party, on a consistent basis, sells out the fundamental values of its own party because I think a lot of the members of the party don't actually believe the things that they say to their own constituents.

00:10:46.000 And that's a deeper problem.

00:10:47.000 When you have a party that is not a vehicle for victory, And the substitute for a weak party is candidates who don't actually believe the core values that they supposedly believe.

00:10:57.000 And what you end up with is Republicans who cry and Republicans who lose.

00:11:01.000 And that's the worst combo.

00:11:02.000 That even the ones who win end up cutting bad deals.

00:11:05.000 And not enough of them even win because the party is not even good at picking candidates who are capable of winning.

00:11:11.000 And that's essentially what you have right now in the Republican Party.

00:11:13.000 A weak party infrastructure and a group of people who are in Congress who very often do not even understand the fundamentals of their own belief system and are incapable of pushing their belief system.

00:11:25.000 And I think that it actually says a lot.

00:11:27.000 Can you imagine Nancy Pelosi getting up there and saying, in tribute to John Boehner, starting to cry in tribute to John Boehner, and then saying, as you know, my kids are Republicans.

00:11:39.000 It's almost impossible to imagine that.

00:11:42.000 But I can imagine dozens of Republicans for whom that is true.

00:11:45.000 That is not a philosophical failing of conservatism.

00:11:48.000 That is a failing of understanding of your own ideology and the ideology of the people that you oppose.

00:11:54.000 And this rears its head all the time in the Republican Party on a practical level.

00:11:59.000 The most obvious example from this past week is 12 Republicans in the Senate deciding to vote for a bill that enshrines same-sex marriage into federal law.

00:12:07.000 fairly overtly equates opposition to same-sex marriage with opposition to interracial marriage, thereby labeling half the country bigots for believing in the concept of traditional marriage. 0.96

00:12:18.000 And these dumbass Republicans who sit around saying, well, that was a good compromise. 0.97

00:12:22.000 You know, it was a good middle ground. 0.99

00:12:23.000 Well, I don't actually believe that you believe in the fundamental tenets of your own conservative system.

00:12:28.000 I don't think that you believe that.

00:12:29.000 That's why I think that you were able to vote for that sort of thing.

00:12:31.000 Because if you did believe that, I don't think you can vote for that sort of thing.

00:12:35.000 But obviously, you think that compromise and these sort of elite systems in which you work, that is your true religion.

00:12:42.000 The true values that you care about are not the values of conservatism.

00:12:45.000 For many of these people, it's not even your religious values.

00:12:48.000 For many of you, your true religion is the go-along, get-along, chummy club that you have in Washington, D.C. 0.60

00:12:55.000 with the other elites where you get to hang out with them.

00:12:57.000 And behind closed doors, you're pretty friendly with them, and maybe you can kind of compromise.

00:13:02.000 And then when you go back to your own kids, you can't even explain your own positions.

00:13:05.000 And, um, I think that that is fairly common in the Republican Party, and I think it's why the Republican Party is moving from loss to loss, because there's no ideological strength in the party, and there's no actual party strength in the party.

00:13:17.000 So speaking of the party strength in the party, I mean, if you look at how weak the Republican Party is, I'm talking about internally, its ability to actually leverage its own members into doing the things that any successful party can do.

00:13:27.000 It's unbelievably weak.

00:13:29.000 Not the same on the Democratic side of the aisle.

00:13:30.000 So the Democratic side of the aisle is actually kind of shocking.

00:13:32.000 The Democratic side of the aisle, the Democratic Party is, in fact, not super strong.

00:13:36.000 It has many of the same systemic failings as the Republican Party.

00:13:39.000 In other words, the Democratic Party can't simply primary somebody and get them out.

00:13:43.000 You can have insurgent candidates like an AOC take down one of the top Democrats in the House, in her district. 0.98

00:13:49.000 You can have the Democratic Party moving radically to the left against the wishes of its own leadership.

00:13:54.000 But when it comes time to vote, when it comes time to vote, there is an ideological center to the Democratic Party and people who believe in the progressive transgressive belief system.

00:14:04.000 And so you have essentially no straying from the pack in the Democratic Party.

00:14:09.000 And when somebody does stray from the pack, it's a giant shock.

00:14:13.000 When I challenge you this, find me a bill in which 12 Democrats moved against a core belief system of their own party and voted with Republicans for cloture on the bill.

00:14:26.000 That sort of stuff does not happen.

00:14:28.000 In fact, it's a major issue for Democrats when you have one Democrat, like Kyrsten Sinema, who now has to re-register as an independent, right, because she strayed from the party orthodoxy.

00:14:36.000 She was so castigated by her own party. 0.99

00:14:39.000 All she got all day long from her own party was just crap. 0.99

00:14:43.000 For being a person who strayed from the orthodoxy inside the Democratic Party, from the homogeneity of the Democratic Party. 0.99

00:14:49.000 Same thing for Joe Manchin.

00:14:50.000 In other words, Democrats do have an ideological center, so they may not have tons of party power, but they do have an ideological center, which is how Nancy Pelosi, with a bare five-seat majority, was able to ram through the greatest spending binge in the history of the United States. 0.98

00:15:04.000 She was able to do that because there is an ideological center.

00:15:06.000 Meanwhile, the Republicans have no ideological center and they have no party power.

00:15:10.000 And so basically you now have the specter inside the house of the Republicans not even being able to get their bleep together enough to elect a speaker of the house.

00:15:17.000 That is where we currently stand.

00:15:19.000 There are all sorts of machinations that are happening inside the House of Representatives right now.

00:15:23.000 The House Republican caucus trying to figure out exactly what kind of speakership or if there will be a speakership of Kevin McCarthy.

00:15:30.000 There's an Arizona representative named Andy Biggs, who has no shot at being Speaker, who has announced a challenge to McCarthy's Speakership bid.

00:15:36.000 There are a number of other lawmakers who have said that they're not going to vote for McCarthy.

00:15:40.000 And McCarthy, again, has a very, very small majority to work with here.

00:15:43.000 He requires a majority of the House to vote for him in order for him to become Speaker.

00:15:46.000 No Democrats will vote for McCarthy for Speaker, which means he needs effectively a unanimity inside the Republican Party.

00:15:52.000 And because the Republicans did really poorly in the last election cycle, They did well in sort of the generic ballot.

00:15:58.000 Overall, the generic ballot, the Republicans did well.

00:16:00.000 The problem is they did really well in red areas, and in purple areas, they ran refugees from the mental institutions. 0.51

00:16:05.000 And they did poorly in those purple areas.

00:16:07.000 Because of that, they have a very small majority to work with.

00:16:10.000 And that means that if just a few Republicans drop off of McCarthy's list, then he can't be Speaker of the House.

00:16:15.000 Well, right now, that includes Andy Biggs, it includes Ralph Norman of South Carolina, it includes Matt Gaetz of Florida.

00:16:21.000 So McCarthy was talking to Dana Perino on Fox News about this, and she said, what can you do to actually get the Republicans to vote for you for Speaker?

00:16:29.000 Because if you can't even get people to vote for you for Speaker, then how exactly are you going to rally them around particular issues in order to pass or block legislation?

00:16:38.000 How's that going to work?

00:16:38.000 How are you going to keep your party in line if you can't even get them to vote for you for Speaker?

00:16:42.000 Here's McCarthy's answer.

00:16:44.000 There's a few that are basically saying they're never going to vote for you for Speaker, and you don't have the margin that you need in order to get there, at least maybe today?

00:16:54.000 Look, our goal was to stop this Biden agenda, win the majority, and fire Nancy Pelosi.

00:16:59.000 We achieved all three of those.

00:17:01.000 I do not think at the end of the day that five Republicans are going to hold up our opportunity to secure the border.

00:17:07.000 Or that five Republicans are going to sit back and make us not be energy independent. 0.67

00:17:11.000 Or let this runaway spending continue.

00:17:14.000 Because that's what will happen if we don't.

00:17:16.000 We've got to find a way to work together for the next two years, otherwise we'll lose as individuals.

00:17:24.000 Okay, and he happens to be right about this.

00:17:26.000 But if there's no ideological center of the party, how do you actually get people to rally behind you?

00:17:31.000 So what McCarthy is doing right now is he's trying to cut some sort of deal with the more right-wing members of the House of Representatives in order to try to get them to back his speakership bid.

00:17:42.000 So according to Politico, on Friday, after a group of seven House conservatives issued a public letter outlining the demands that GOP leader Kevin McCarthy would need to meet to win their support in his bid for Speaker, a key McCarthy backer quietly reached out to several moderate Republicans with a request, according to people familiar with the conversations.

00:17:56.000 The Freedom Caucus rabble-rousers had reiterated their demand that McCarthy would restore a 200-year-old, now infamous House rule known as the Motion to Vacate, which allows any one member to force a floor vote to oust the Speaker at any moment.

00:18:07.000 So they want to weaken the party infrastructure even further.

00:18:09.000 McCarthy is correct to say no to this, by the way.

00:18:12.000 I understand that there are right-wing members of the caucus who want to be able to oust the Speaker at any possible moment, but this means you have an unworkable party majority.

00:18:18.000 It just means absolute chaos.

00:18:20.000 The Speaker has to have the whip hand inside his own caucus, or he doesn't have a caucus.

00:18:24.000 It's that simple.

00:18:26.000 Kevin McCarthy counted on the centrist Republican Governance Group, which boasts 50 members, far more than the Freedom Caucus's three dozen or so, and they said that they are going to oppose that proposed rule change.

00:18:35.000 A few hours later, some members of the Governance Group met with McCarthy to double down on that position.

00:18:41.000 So McCarthy is using the moderates to essentially consolidate power inside the caucus and prevent there from being a complete undermining of the Speaker's power.

00:18:47.000 Which, by the way, needs to happen if you do actually wish to obstruct the Democrats.

00:18:50.000 I understand trying to push McCarthy to the right from inside the caucus.

00:18:53.000 But if the idea is that every time you disagree with him, you hold a no-confidence vote, that dude does not run the caucus.

00:18:58.000 It's that simple.

00:19:00.000 So it is correct.

00:19:01.000 Now, one thing that they are going to try to do is presumably lower the threshold to trigger a vote to challenge the Speaker from 40% of the caucus to 30% of the caucus.

00:19:11.000 Which makes some sense.

00:19:12.000 It'd make it a little easier to get him out if it turns out that he can't hold the caucus together.

00:19:17.000 But the fact that people want to weaken the party infrastructure at a time when the party has no ideological coherency means absolute chaos inside the Republican Party.

00:19:26.000 And so one of two things has to happen.

00:19:28.000 Either the Republican Party has to start exerting authority over its own members in search of victory, right?

00:19:33.000 Go back to its core focus and core mission.

00:19:35.000 Which means, I may not get what I like, you may not get what you like, but the Republicans continue to win elections and continue to overall push the generalized Republican agenda, even if in more moderate ways than I would like.

00:19:45.000 Or, you need a more coherent and centralized base of ideological conservatism inside the Republican Party.

00:19:52.000 And that's been a long-standing problem inside the Republican Party.

00:19:55.000 Because again, many conservatives, including elected officials, do not know how to defend their own ideology, and their kids are proof of this.

00:20:02.000 They do not understand the threat that the left poses, even the people who are in elected office.

00:20:06.000 They seem to be more interested in back slapping and making friends on the other side of the aisle than they are in actually standing up for principle.

00:20:15.000 And that's a serious problem.

00:20:16.000 Again, you should be friendly with people on the other side of it.

00:20:19.000 There's nothing wrong with that, but there is something wrong with surrendering.

00:20:22.000 And the Republicans seem to have a really bad habit of surrendering on all the big issues.

00:20:26.000 I don't mean all Republicans, but a segment of the Republican Party basically turns victory into defeat.

00:20:31.000 By joining with Democrats and not understanding what Democrats are doing, what their actual agenda is.

00:20:35.000 We'll get to more on this in just one moment.

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00:22:42.000 And you have to understand what the Democratic agenda is.

00:22:45.000 One of their big agenda items, obviously, is to spend more money than God.

00:22:47.000 They want to spend more money than has ever been created in the history of humanity.

00:22:50.000 And they've succeeded in doing that over the past couple of years.

00:22:52.000 Again, with some Republican support from useful Republicans, like Mitt Romney, for example, in Utah.

00:22:59.000 Again, I've voted for when he was Governor Romney against Barack Obama in 2012.

00:23:04.000 I don't have any sort of pathological aversion to Mitt Romney.

00:23:08.000 But Mitt Romney's position in the Senate seems to be to be holier than thou while voting for a bunch of Democratic priorities.

00:23:15.000 That is not something that I think stands for conservatism, and it certainly doesn't stand for victory.

00:23:19.000 You're not winning any friends or influencing any people.

00:23:21.000 You're just surrendering.

00:23:23.000 Well, that battle is now coming down to the budget.

00:23:25.000 So there's a big battle that is broken out between Mitch McConnell in the Senate and some of the House Republicans because right now there is a year-long budget deal that is on the table in the Senate.

00:23:34.000 Now, Republicans can block it in the Senate.

00:23:37.000 All it would take for Republicans to block this thing in the Senate is for 41 of the Republicans to vote against cloture.

00:23:43.000 On this budget bill, Mitch McConnell's trying to ram it through anyway.

00:23:46.000 There's no reason for him to ram that through.

00:23:48.000 A continuing resolution that gets you through the new year and then gives you a House to negotiate with, run presumably by Republicans if they can get their act together, is a lot better deal than trying to cut a budget deal with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.

00:24:00.000 That makes no sense.

00:24:01.000 Now, I understand that McConnell doesn't trust the House to work.

00:24:03.000 This is part of the problem.

00:24:04.000 Again, because McConnell is largely focused on Not ideological coherence, but sort of political victory, meaning continued maintenance of a majority or more senators getting elected or whatever it is.

00:24:16.000 McConnell's a party man.

00:24:17.000 I don't think he's an ideology man.

00:24:19.000 And that has borne some fruit in terms of the Supreme Court for sure.

00:24:22.000 It's borne much less fruit in terms of the budgeting process.

00:24:26.000 Well, McConnell basically wants to sign off on this because he's afraid the House won't be able to get its crap together and actually pass some bills that the Senate can then get passed.

00:24:33.000 So he is actually moving with the Democrats in opposition to people like Rand Paul.

00:24:38.000 Now, Rand Paul is obviously super hawkish when it comes to spending.

00:24:41.000 I'm not sure that he's voted for any budget deal in the past.

00:24:44.000 I agree with him ideologically.

00:24:46.000 Rand Paul is ripping on McConnell, saying, at the very least, tactically speaking, why are you undercutting the Republican Party in the House by trying to pass a deal with Nancy Pelosi in the now?

00:24:55.000 Just pass a CR that gets you for the next six weeks or so.

00:24:59.000 But the other thing is, 41 votes would stop the big spending.

00:25:03.000 If 41 of us said no and held our ground until there was a compromise, we could force Democrats to reduce spending.

00:25:10.000 We have completely and totally abdicated the power of the purse.

00:25:14.000 Republicans are emasculated, they have no power, and they are unwilling to gain that power back.

00:25:20.000 The only way they can get it?

00:25:22.000 Divide the spending into 12 bills and then decide to hold one of them hostage or two of them hostage and then apply policy changes in the House.

00:25:32.000 Okay, so Rand Paul is not wrong about any of this.

00:25:35.000 Now again, this comes down to McConnell not trusting the House Republicans to be able to get it together.

00:25:39.000 And here you understand his nervousness.

00:25:41.000 I mean, they can't even get enough together to actually elect a Speaker of the House.

00:25:44.000 That doesn't mean that it's in McConnell's playbook, or it should be in McConnell's playbook, to actually cut a deal with Pelosi and the Democrats in order to avoid giving Republicans a shot at it.

00:25:52.000 If you don't trust your own party enough to actually give it a shot in the House, then what exactly do you believe that your party is for?

00:25:58.000 McConnell's allies are saying that House Republicans are willing to risk a government shutdown in exchange for an uncertain shot at a better deal next year.

00:26:04.000 And so the thing that McConnell is afraid of more than anything is posturing by House Republicans and not passing some sort of budget.

00:26:10.000 But he has to know the Republicans will eventually cave on that because they always do.

00:26:14.000 And so at a certain point, you actually do have to stand up for the, if you want to make a change in your party, then McConnell should go to his party.

00:26:19.000 You should go to McCarthy and you should say, what does that deal look like?

00:26:22.000 You tell me what that deal looks like and you ensure me that you can ram that through your caucus.

00:26:25.000 And then I'll hold off on whatever deal I'm about to make with Schumer and Pelosi.

00:26:29.000 The House GOP, of course, is fighting mad.

00:26:31.000 They should be fighting mad about this.

00:26:32.000 They just won a majority.

00:26:33.000 And meanwhile, the Senate led by Republicans is trying to make a deal with the Democrats instead of a deal with the Republicans.

00:26:40.000 This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Democratic Party policy, which is to continue to run the ball.

00:26:45.000 They just run the ball up the gut over and over and over, and Republicans seem destined to constantly be on the defensive. 0.98

00:26:52.000 And it's pathetic, and they're not going to stop. 0.98

00:26:55.000 This has some pretty significant ramifications. 0.97

00:26:56.000 I mean, Joe Biden, the other day, just decided to devote $36 billion to bail out his union cronies.

00:27:03.000 We're in the middle of an inflationary spiral still, despite all of the popular press suggesting that inflation is ending.

00:27:08.000 It is not in fact ending.

00:27:10.000 In fact, Jerome Powell suggested it's impossible yesterday to know if recession is coming.

00:27:15.000 He said that inflation is still high.

00:27:16.000 We're going to continue to raise those interest rates and a recession may be on its way.

00:27:19.000 And meanwhile, Joe Biden is ramming through $36 billion in bailouts for his buddies.

00:27:26.000 The recent disinflation we're seeing is transitory or not, and how this affects the idea of a soft landing if you're projecting just half a percent growth for this year?

00:27:37.000 To the extent we need to keep rates higher and keep them there for longer and inflation, you know, moves up higher and higher, I think that that narrows the runway.

00:27:44.000 But lower inflation readings, if they persist in time, could certainly make it more possible.

00:27:50.000 So I don't think anyone knows Whether we're going to have a recession or not, and if we do, whether it's going to be a deep one or not.

00:27:58.000 It's just, it's not knowable.

00:28:01.000 It's not knowable, but it's knowable that Joe Biden is going to continue spending and spending and spending.

00:28:05.000 According to the New York Times, President Biden announced on Thursday he was investing $36 billion in federal funds to save the pensions of more than 350,000 union workers and retirees.

00:28:14.000 A demonstration of commitment to labor just a week after a rupture over an imposed settlement of a threatened rail strike.

00:28:19.000 Biden gathered top union leaders at the White House to make the commitment described by the White House as the largest ever award of federal financial support for worker and retiree pension security.

00:28:27.000 The money came from last year's COVID-19 relief package.

00:28:30.000 You remember that time that Joe Biden is saying that COVID is over, but also COVID is not over, so we have to dump almost $40 billion into the pockets of his best friends over at the unions?

00:28:39.000 The money comes from COVID-19 relief packages, and it averts cuts of up to 60% in pensions for Teamster truck drivers, warehouse workers, construction workers, and food processors, mainly in the Midwest.

00:28:48.000 Biden was joined by Sean M. O'Brien, president of the Teamsters, and Liz Schuler, president of the AFL-CIO.

00:28:54.000 Biden said, thanks to today's announcement, hundreds of thousands of Americans can feel that sense of dignity again, knowing they've provided for their families and their future, and it's secure.

00:29:02.000 The quote-unquote pension investment came just a week after Biden prodded Congress to pass legislation forcing a settlement in long-running dispute between the rail workers and the rail companies heading off a strike.

00:29:12.000 So as sort of a giveaway to backfill his failure to negotiate a deal with the railroad unions, now he's just dipping into your pocket and giving money to the Teamsters pension.

00:29:21.000 Of course, all of the unions were perfectly happy about this.

00:29:24.000 Democrats just participating in open corruption.

00:29:28.000 One of the most openly corrupt things in American political life is unions negotiating with the people they elect to spend your money on them.

00:29:36.000 It's an unbelievably corrupt bargain.

00:29:39.000 People on the left are constantly talking about corporate donations.

00:29:41.000 Look at all those corporate donations to Republicans and Wall Street and Republicans and all that.

00:29:45.000 And there's some truth to that.

00:29:46.000 You know what's way worse?

00:29:48.000 What's way worse is when the federal government actually signs the checks to the people who are getting the people elected to federal government they negotiate with.

00:29:54.000 That's way worse.

00:29:55.000 And the unions do it all the time. 0.85

00:29:56.000 And Joe Biden continues to do that all the time.

00:29:59.000 The end result of this, of course, is going to be a bloated public sector, a bloated union sector, a less competitive American economy, and stagnation.

00:30:09.000 Now, the Democratic Party, Joe Biden, they've done an amazing job, I will say, of renaming economic stagnation.

00:30:16.000 So Brian Deese, who's on the Council of Economic Advisors for President Biden, he says that we are seeing a transition to more stable growth.

00:30:24.000 A transition to more stable growth is a great euphemism for get ready for some economic stagnation.

00:30:30.000 What do you want to hear from the Federal Reserve and Chairman Powell today?

00:30:36.000 Well, thanks for having me.

00:30:37.000 And as you know, the Fed operates independently.

00:30:39.000 They'll make their decisions today.

00:30:41.000 But here's where I think we are.

00:30:43.000 If you step back, the President about five months ago laid out what he hoped to be the framework for the trajectory of the economic recovery, talking about this transition from a historically strong recovery to a period of more steady and stable growth.

00:30:56.000 And over the past five months is what we've seen.

00:30:58.000 We've seen economic growth continue to be stable.

00:31:02.000 Oh, so it's going to be a transition to, you know, we've seen robust growth, but we're going to get more stable now.

00:31:06.000 Again, a great way of describing economic stagnation brought about by your favorite policies.

00:31:11.000 But the Republicans continue to go along with it.

00:31:14.000 They continue to sign on to these giant spending bills, like the one that Mitch McConnell is about to sign on to in fear of the incompetence of his own House Republicans.

00:31:22.000 Meanwhile, the Democrats never stop.

00:31:23.000 The agenda never stops.

00:31:24.000 They just keep rolling forward.

00:31:27.000 Republicans are always on defensive and Democrats keep rolling forward.

00:31:29.000 This is true with regard to every single topic in American life.

00:31:32.000 And we talked about, again, about the transgressive attempt to destroy the nuclear family by redefining away all the fundamental institutions of life, including the family. 0.68

00:31:42.000 But it's not just that.

00:31:43.000 They also would like to engage in censorship because if you oppose, for example, same sex marriage or the transing of the kids, then the idea is you must be silenced.

00:31:49.000 So yesterday there was a hearing on the Hill in which Democrats Essentially called for censorship of all of their political opponents when it comes to the transing of the children or the indoctrination of small children into sexual orientation ideals of the left.

00:32:03.000 Katie Porter, representative from California who narrowly won a race over in California that she probably should have lost.

00:32:09.000 She is now saying that you're not allowed to use the term groomer because if you use the term groomer, what you are doing is you are slandering gay people, which again, seems like you're reading a little deep there.

00:32:19.000 I do not believe that if you use the term groomer to refer to somebody who is literally grooming someone into an ideology that is the same thing as accusing them of grooming someone for sex.

00:32:28.000 But Katie Porter does. 1.00

00:32:29.000 And so if you use the term groomer, we have to shut you up.

00:32:32.000 We wouldn't accept this in our families.

00:32:33.000 We wouldn't accept this in our schools.

00:32:35.000 There's no reason to accept it online.

00:32:38.000 So, I mean, I think you're absolutely right.

00:32:39.000 And it's not this allegation of groomer and pedophile.

00:32:43.000 It is alleging that a person is criminal somehow and engaged in criminal acts merely because of their identity, their sexual orientation, their gender identity.

00:32:56.000 Uh, no.

00:32:57.000 I mean, a lot of people are called pedophiles whether they are gay or whether they are straight online.

00:33:02.000 I mean, the onlines are filled with terrible words and terrible people.

00:33:05.000 But the goal here is to, again, link speech with violence so that you can shut down the speech, which is why the Democrats brought forth a bevy of witnesses to suggest that we ought to shut down, by force of government presumably, One example of this inaction is the misuse of the term groomer.

00:33:17.000 in industries to sort of mirror the government threat.

00:33:19.000 We should shut down use of particular words.

00:33:21.000 The Democrats called a witness named Olivia Hunt to explain that if you use the term groomer, then it encourages violence.

00:33:28.000 You must never ever say that word.

00:33:30.000 One example of this inaction is the misuse of the term groomer.

00:33:34.000 Anti LGBTQ activists have appropriated this terminology used by survivors of childhood sexual abuse and used it to slander LGBTQ people and our allies as predatory, harmful toward children.

00:33:45.000 This same rhetoric has subsequently been used as justification for violent anti-LGBTQ activism.

00:33:50.000 Heavily armed protesters have made numerous attacks or attempts at intimidation against family-friendly pride events and drag performances around the country.

00:33:59.000 Family-friendly drag events and pride performances, by the way, are not family-friendly.

00:34:02.000 But in any case, no one is calling for violence, nor should anyone be calling for violence.

00:34:05.000 We have a rule of law in this country.

00:34:08.000 However, suggesting that people are in fact grooming people into an ideology and doing damage to kids in the process does not mean that you're accusing them of pedophilia, nor does it mean that you're slandering all gay people, many of whom do not believe in this sort of radical indoctrination.

00:34:21.000 The Democrats also brought forth a survivor of the Club Q shooting in Colorado, and it just shows you that the narrative matters an awful lot more than the fact, because this person, who survived the shooting, or was in the club at the time, he said that the hate at the club started with hate speech.

00:34:37.000 Now, I just have a question.

00:34:38.000 The person who was arrested in connection with that attack, the person who was the alleged suspect, who murdered a bunch of people, that person identifies as trans, Hate starts with speech. 0.83

00:34:48.000 Which particular speech are you linking here?

00:34:51.000 What is your evidence?

00:34:52.000 And the goal here is to shut people up and Democrats are making pretty clear what their goal is.

00:34:57.000 Hate starts with speech.

00:35:00.000 The hateful rhetoric you've heard from elected leaders is the direct cause of the horrific shooting at Club Q.

00:35:06.000 We need elected leaders to demonstrate language that reflects love and understanding, not hate and fear.

00:35:12.000 What evidence does he have of this?

00:35:15.000 Has he provided any evidence of how any political rhetoric was linked directly to the shooting?

00:35:20.000 Did someone call for violence?

00:35:21.000 Do we even know that the suspect was a right-winger?

00:35:23.000 We don't know any of those things.

00:35:24.000 In fact, it seems the suspect was not.

00:35:25.000 It seems like the suspect identified as non-gender binary.

00:35:29.000 And now they're suggesting that this person is lying, but I'm not aware that you're allowed to do that in today's day and age.

00:35:35.000 The minute that you suggest that you're a member of the opposite gender, every single person in the United States must immediately start referring to you as they, them, or she, her, if you're a dude.

00:35:43.000 And even if you're an alleged criminal, like Sam Britton, who's busily stealing everybody else's luggage.

00:35:50.000 The Democratic Party does not stop.

00:35:51.000 They are on the move, constantly and always.

00:35:53.000 And if the Republican Party is neither a tool for victory, nor an ideological center for conservatism, then what exactly is it that you do?

00:36:01.000 In just a second, we'll get to the Democratic Party continuing to move forward on nearly every front, including COVID.

00:36:06.000 The situation in Ukraine continues to get worse and worse and worse because winter is setting in.

00:36:11.000 The conditions on the ground there are very, very ugly.

00:36:13.000 My friends over at the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews have been working in Israel, Ukraine, and the former Soviet Union for more than 30 years.

00:36:19.000 They've never seen hunger and suffering like they're seeing right now.

00:36:21.000 That's why I'm asking your help to deliver food, heating, fuel, and blankets to God's most vulnerable people in this season of giving.

00:36:27.000 Please consider donating to the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.

00:36:30.000 They're on the ground right now providing generators, building wells, providing medicine and food boxes in this very dire situation.

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00:37:07.000 Also, guys, how's that Christmas shopping list coming along?

00:37:09.000 Surely you've put a lot of effort into picking out something special for everyone.

00:37:12.000 Dad, Gramps, the in-laws, all the nephews.

00:37:14.000 Okay.

00:37:15.000 Let's cut the malarkey.

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00:37:55.000 Okay, so again, the Democrat and the Democratic bureaucracy, they don't stop ever, which means that the Republicans actually have to be better at their jobs than Democrats.

00:38:02.000 Unfortunately, they are significantly worse at their jobs than Democrats.

00:38:05.000 Anthony Fauci, even on his way out the door, will not stop, can't stop, won't stop, pop star, never stop, never stopping.

00:38:10.000 Anthony Fauci, he's very angry at Ron DeSantis.

00:38:13.000 Ron DeSantis has launched an investigation into fraudulent claims over the vaccine.

00:38:18.000 And as we discussed yesterday on the Extended Show with Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins University, the amount of misinformation that was put out by both corporations like Pfizer and Moderna and the federal government Lying to you.

00:38:28.000 Lying to me.

00:38:29.000 And many of us took action, including me, on the basis of those lies. 0.97

00:38:33.000 And when people like Anthony Fauci say that there's nothing to investigate, this raises the question as to whether he is lying or whether he is dumb. 0.89

00:38:40.000 Because it seems like there's a lot to investigate. 0.57

00:38:42.000 Like, for example, widespread claims, including today, that the vaccines radically cut transmission.

00:38:48.000 Including claims like masks work against Omicron.

00:38:53.000 Including claims like the myocarditis risks for 30-year-olds do not outweigh the risks of COVID.

00:38:58.000 There's very specific claims that have been made over and over by people in the administration, including Anthony Fauci.

00:39:03.000 And as it turns out, Anthony Fauci thinks he has done nothing wrong and there's nothing to investigate.

00:39:06.000 Shocker.

00:39:08.000 He's now asking the Florida Supreme Court to green light an investigation into, in the way he put it, is any and all wrongdoing in Florida with respect to COVID-19 vaccines.

00:39:21.000 What's your reaction to that?

00:39:24.000 I don't have a clue, Kate, what he's asking for.

00:39:27.000 I mean, we have a vaccine that unequivocally is highly effective and safe and has saved literally millions of lives.

00:39:38.000 So there's literally nothing to talk about here.

00:39:40.000 Nothing to talk about, according to Anthony Fauci.

00:39:41.000 His perspective, of course, mirrored by the entire legacy media, as well as the White House.

00:39:46.000 Meanwhile, Fauci, by the way, claims we still don't understand long COVID.

00:39:50.000 So again, Marty McHarry had a piece in the Wall Street Journal.

00:39:52.000 One thing we do understand about long COVID is that while it exists, it is not existing in the kind of numbers that the White House continues to proclaim that it is.

00:39:59.000 And again, if you ever talk to, like, any human being at any time, what you will see is that anybody who's had a flu has had the long flu at a certain point.

00:40:07.000 Meaning symptoms that last well beyond the duration of the flu.

00:40:10.000 You still don't feel great a couple of weeks later.

00:40:12.000 But we're pretending that long COVID is a major issue and the reason we're pretending that is that we can claim that everybody needs to be vaccinated, even people who have already gotten COVID or people who have already been vaccinated in the first place.

00:40:21.000 Then you get a booster and then another booster until 80% of your body material is comprised of the vaccine.

00:40:25.000 Here's Anthony Fauci jabbering about long COVID.

00:40:28.000 What is your biggest question about what still remains quite a mystery with long COVID?

00:40:34.000 It's estimated that about a million people in this country cannot work, go back to their former employment because of the post-COVID, long COVID syndrome.

00:40:45.000 So it's something that you're right.

00:40:47.000 It's a bit mysterious.

00:40:48.000 We don't know the precise pathogenic mechanism.

00:40:52.000 There's a lot of work going into trying to figure that out, because if you want to do something about it, either to prevent or to treat it, you got to understand what the underlying mechanisms are.

00:41:03.000 We're making some progress there, but we still don't fully understand it.

00:41:09.000 Well, what you don't understand about it is that the number one.

00:41:11.000 The number one coordinating factor, correlating factor For long COVID is anxiety.

00:41:19.000 Like if you're an anxious person, you tend to report long COVID symptoms.

00:41:23.000 Shocker.

00:41:25.000 In other words, a lot of this is psychosomatic.

00:41:27.000 There are some people who actually have lingering symptoms.

00:41:29.000 And then there are a lot of people who are claiming that they have lingering symptoms.

00:41:31.000 It turns out in many of the studies, what it shows is that people who are claiming long COVID were never diagnosed with COVID in the first place.

00:41:37.000 They're just claiming the symptoms.

00:41:38.000 But we're spending in this country, presumably millions of dollars over the NIH level in order to research long COVID.

00:41:43.000 But we spent no money actually launching studies on serious mask efficacy.

00:41:47.000 We have launched no studies on myocarditis with regard to Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, particularly among young males.

00:41:54.000 And by the way, in Europe, they've actually banned the use of Moderna vaccines for men under the age of 30, specifically because of this sort of data that's now emerging.

00:42:03.000 They've done no actual serious research, or at least have reflected no actual serious research, on the dangers of the vaccine, if there are any, to kids.

00:42:12.000 They just ran out there and gave FDA approval based on a lab result that was done in like four mice or something.

00:42:20.000 So in other words, the agenda never stops.

00:42:21.000 It never stops.

00:42:22.000 So who's going to obstruct the agenda now?

00:42:23.000 I think on some of this stuff, House Republicans will obstruct the agenda, but on the broader Democratic agenda, which is constantly pushing bigger spending, more social progressivism, breakdown in fundamental societal institutions.

00:42:33.000 Do I trust the Republican Party to do any of that?

00:42:36.000 The answer is no, because why?

00:42:37.000 What evidence do I have that they have really stopped anything bad other than they've preserved the Supreme Court?

00:42:43.000 That is the single thing that you can point to over the course of the last 10 years.

00:42:47.000 Where you can say with certainty that Republicans actually did the right thing.

00:42:50.000 And it was a singular move to obstruct Democrats.

00:42:53.000 It was not actually a move forward as much as it was just a move to stop Democrats.

00:42:57.000 And then Republicans got very, very lucky in 2016 when Trump was elected and he was actually able to select replacements for three Supreme Court justices.

00:43:04.000 That is all that happened here.

00:43:07.000 But in terms of the Republican Party more generally, you have to understand the shortcomings of the Republican Party in order to truly understand why so many people were attracted to Trump.

00:43:18.000 Now this brings us to Trump.

00:43:19.000 So President Trump obviously has declared his intention to run again.

00:43:24.000 His campaign thus far has been incredibly lackluster.

00:43:25.000 In fact, what the polls show is that President Trump has dropped well behind Joe Biden in any re-elect polls.

00:43:32.000 They also show that he has dropped behind Ron DeSantis in many of the primary polls.

00:43:35.000 The reason for that is because many of the reasons that people resonated to Trump in the first place are not present in the current Trump incarnation.

00:43:45.000 So if you're, like me, very frustrated with a Republican party that trots out as its former Speaker of the House, a person who cries over Nancy Pelosi and talks about how his daughters are now Democrats, if this frustrates you to no end, then you might be in favor of someone who fights, right?

00:43:58.000 This is the he-fights stuff.

00:43:59.000 This is where it came from.

00:44:00.000 It came from the fact that Mitt Romney was the Republican nominee in 2012.

00:44:04.000 ran a rather genteel campaign against Barack Obama after having run John McCain, who ran a rather genteel campaign against Barack Obama in 2008.

00:44:11.000 They both lost.

00:44:12.000 Mitt Romney now votes for many Democratic priorities in the Senate in Utah and refuses to endorse people like Mike Lee, actual constitutional conservatives in the state of Utah.

00:44:19.000 We'll sit that one out while maybe Evan McMullin runs against him.

00:44:23.000 And so many Republicans are like, I don't like that brand of Republicanism.

00:44:26.000 You know, the kind that actually doesn't stand up for, it seems, much of anything.

00:44:30.000 Well, what exactly do you do here?

00:44:32.000 So a lot of people resonated to Trump because Trump was rude and uncivil and because he would break things.

00:44:36.000 And so his anger reflected their own.

00:44:38.000 Well, right now, Trump's anger is not reflecting their own.

00:44:41.000 Trump is angry at things that most Americans are not top of mind about.

00:44:45.000 Trump is mostly personally peeved that he lost the 2020 election.

00:44:48.000 And now his ask is of the Republicans that they spend inordinate amounts of time Focusing on this.

00:44:54.000 And not only that, Trump basically promised two things when he came into office in 2016 and during his campaign in 2015-2016.

00:45:00.000 He promised to rectify both of the problems that I've been talking about the Republican Party.

00:45:04.000 One was an ideological coherence.

00:45:06.000 So Trump was never ideologically coherent, but the idea was that you knew that he was anti-left.

00:45:11.000 You didn't know whether how right he was, but you knew he was anti-left.

00:45:13.000 You knew he was going to punch your opponents in the face.

00:45:15.000 That was the appeal of his campaign.

00:45:17.000 And two, he was going to win.

00:45:19.000 So the Republican Party, again, had to provide you one of these two things, and it provided you neither.

00:45:23.000 It did not provide you victory, and it did not provide you with ideological coherence.

00:45:28.000 And so, if you get neither, then Trump pledged sort of both.

00:45:31.000 Right now, again, as a person, not ideologically, that doesn't matter.

00:45:35.000 He was anti-left, and that's what people liked about him, right?

00:45:37.000 He was anti-Hillary, and people knew that he was anti-Hillary, and that he was not going to cave to Hillary Clinton, right?

00:45:41.000 That was the pitch.

00:45:43.000 And the pitch was, he could win.

00:45:45.000 He won in 2016, and it seemed as though the Republican dreams had been fulfilled.

00:45:49.000 And then, he proceeded to lose in 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2022.

00:45:53.000 And so, the promise that Trump had made in 2015-2016, and then fulfilled a lot in 2017-2018, has basically now dissipated.

00:46:02.000 In other words, both of the main problems with the Republican Party that Trump was set to rectify, are no longer present in Trump.

00:46:07.000 This is the reason why he's fading in the polls.

00:46:09.000 He doesn't appear ideologically coherent.

00:46:11.000 It appears as though he's spending all of his days fulminating over election 2020 to the point where he's actually undermining Republican victory in particular areas and actually forwarding Democratic goals in particular areas by celebrating when Republicans lose in, for example, in, for example, Georgia, right?

00:46:29.000 Or, or suggesting that it's not, it's not a terrible thing that Don Balduc lost in New Hampshire after having elevated Don Balduc.

00:46:37.000 That's ripping on the Colorado Senate Republican who lost because that person didn't like Trump.

00:46:44.000 So he's not facilitating victory and he's also not facilitating ideological coherence.

00:46:48.000 And everybody can see that.

00:46:50.000 If it's all about Trump's personal petty grievances, then Republicans are not going to resonate to that, and that's what's being reflected in the polls right now.

00:46:55.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, Republican primary voters have high interest in Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who, by the way, does provide both.

00:47:01.000 DeSantis is extremely ideologically coherent, and he's been incredibly successful in the state of Florida.

00:47:05.000 He's offering you the two things the Republican Party has failed to offer you.

00:47:08.000 This is a guy who's highly disciplined, not just in terms of his policies, which are very conservative, but he's highly disciplined in how he actually runs campaigns.

00:47:19.000 He's a person who turned a 0.4% victory in 2018 into a 20 point victory in 2022 and turned the entire state blood red here in Florida.

00:47:28.000 And he also happens to be pushing extremely conservative policies across the board that are successful.

00:47:34.000 I'm explaining why DeSantis is picking up ground and Trump seems to be losing ground.

00:47:38.000 And it's not because people hate Trump or anti-Trump.

00:47:40.000 It's because Trump has lost the thread.

00:47:43.000 Republican primary voters, again, are looking at Ron DeSantis as that potential 2024 nominee.

00:47:48.000 In a hypothetical contest between the two, DeSantis beats Trump 52-38 among likely GOP primary voters contemplating a race in which the first nomination votes will be cast in just over a year.

00:47:58.000 The poll, according to the Wall Street Journal, found that DeSantis is both well-known and well-liked among Republicans who say they are likely to vote in a party primary or nominating contest.

00:48:06.000 86% view the Florida governor favorably, compared with 74% who hold a favorable view of Trump.

00:48:11.000 One in ten likely GOP primary voters said they don't know enough about DeSantis to venture an opinion of him.

00:48:16.000 Among all registered voters, DeSantis is viewed favorably by 43% compared with 36% for Trump.

00:48:21.000 Favorable views of Trump were the lowest recorded in journal polling dating to November 2021.

00:48:25.000 They've been pulled down by the decline in positive feelings among Republicans.

00:48:29.000 Since March, his favorability among GOP voters has fallen to 74% from 85%.

00:48:33.000 The share who view him unfavorably has risen to 23% from 13%.

00:48:39.000 And again, this makes sense because of the way that Trump has been acting.

00:48:43.000 That's not unjustified.

00:48:44.000 And it's not about antipathy for Trump.

00:48:45.000 It's about Trump not being on top of the issues.

00:48:48.000 That people actually care about it.

00:48:50.000 Also, this should be a reminder to the so-called moderate Republican chorus, the Asa Hutchinson's in Arkansas or say, oh, maybe I'll run or Larry Hogan's in Maryland.

00:48:59.000 Maybe I'll run.

00:49:00.000 No, guys, you're the John Boehner wing.

00:49:02.000 You're the people that we look at and we say, we don't know what your priorities are or why you wouldn't surrender to Democrats.

00:49:07.000 You seem like you're from the sort of Mitt Romney school of Republican politics in which buddy buddy relationships across the aisle seem significantly more important than ideological coherence or victory.

00:49:17.000 So the answer to you is no.

00:49:20.000 In other words, the people who are now pro-DeSantis, who used to be pro-Trump, are not people who are anti-Trump.

00:49:26.000 They are actively pro-DeSantis.

00:49:28.000 And this is a problem for Trump in the primary.

00:49:30.000 In 2016, there was no one who was actively... There were a few people, like me.

00:49:34.000 I was actively pro-Ted Cruz.

00:49:35.000 I thought that Ted Cruz would make a better president than Trump.

00:49:37.000 I supported him in the primaries.

00:49:39.000 So there are some people who are actively pro a candidate, but many, many people out there were actively anti-Trump.

00:49:45.000 And it turns out that that wasn't enough to cross the finish line in the Republican Party being anti-Trump.

00:49:50.000 The votes for DeSantis, the people who are supporting DeSantis are not doing it because they don't like Trump.

00:49:54.000 They're doing it because they like DeSantis.

00:49:57.000 So in other words, Hutchinson, Hogan, they're not going to be taking votes away from Ron DeSantis as part of the quote-unquote anti-Trump vote.

00:50:05.000 What's going to happen is that they're just going to die on the vine.

00:50:08.000 And that's the real threat to Trump, because Trump's needle in the Republican primaries in 2024, that eye of the needle is, he has to have the Republican base split about six different ways, and then he walks through with 26% of the vote.

00:50:19.000 Because that's about all he's going to get in these primaries.

00:50:22.000 He's not going to be getting 60% of the vote in these Republican primaries.

00:50:24.000 He doesn't walk away with this by any stretch of the imagination.

00:50:28.000 There's a core base of the Republican Party who still are willing to overlook Trump's foibles because they still are believers in the 2016 Trump.

00:50:35.000 But the 2016 Trump is not the 2022 Trump.

00:50:37.000 And all you have to do to see that is look at Donald Trump's TruthSocial account.

00:50:41.000 If you look at Trump on TruthSocial, he just does not comment on policy ever.

00:50:45.000 Ever!

00:50:47.000 I mean, his latest truths are things like, our country is a mess.

00:50:51.000 This was election interference.

00:50:53.000 The disinformation was coming from the FBI and Facebook.

00:50:55.000 It was coming from Adam Schiff and Democratic operatives.

00:50:58.000 This was a very damaging story to Biden before the election and they were going to kill it.

00:51:01.000 Bottom line, the election was rigged and stolen.

00:51:04.000 Or Donald Trump.

00:51:05.000 How can the January 6th unselect committee make criminal referrals when they haven't spoken about or studied those that rigged the 2020 election?

00:51:10.000 The troops not being brought in by Pelosi.

00:51:12.000 Or now the election fraud determinably revealed by Twitter.

00:51:14.000 These are the real criminals.

00:51:17.000 That is not the campaign that Republicans care about.

00:51:19.000 I mean, it's not that Republicans necessarily even disagree with Trump.

00:51:23.000 It's just this is not where their focus is.

00:51:25.000 It all feels tired, and it all feels self-serving.

00:51:28.000 And so when Trump puts out notices that he's going to be making major announcements, and it's a picture of him as a superhero, this is not the sort of stuff that I think is going to draw Republican primary voters.

00:51:39.000 This is why he is sinking in the polls, especially because he's also sinking in the general election polls against Joe Biden, who has been dead for several years.

00:51:47.000 Donald Trump yesterday, he put out a truth.

00:51:49.000 It's not a tweet, it's not on Twitter.

00:51:50.000 It's a truth.

00:51:51.000 In which he said, America needs a superhero.

00:51:53.000 I will be making a major announcement tomorrow.

00:51:56.000 Thank you.

00:51:56.000 Here was the video.

00:51:58.000 America needs a superhero.

00:52:03.000 And then there's a picture of him.

00:52:05.000 And it's a meme of him pulling aside his shirt to reveal a six pack and laser eyes going everywhere.

00:52:12.000 So I don't know what the major announcement is.

00:52:16.000 Maybe he's going to be cast as the new Superman.

00:52:18.000 Henry Cavill apparently is being ousted by the DC Universe as Superman.

00:52:23.000 So maybe that's Trump's actual, that's the new thing.

00:52:26.000 It's going to be super exciting.

00:52:28.000 But does this feel as though Trump is going to be the superhero who saves the Republican Party?

00:52:33.000 In 2015, 2016, to a lot of people it did.

00:52:36.000 I think it's going to be very dicey for Trump in 2024 specifically because, again, he doesn't feel like the guy who can fill these two gaping holes in the Republican Party.

00:52:43.000 The need for victory and the need for ideological coherence.

00:52:45.000 Meanwhile, DeSantis looks as though he might be the guy.

00:52:48.000 Maybe it's not DeSantis, but it certainly doesn't feel like Trump right now.

00:52:53.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, DeSantis has become a formidable force in politics, winning a second term late last month in a landslide by 19 percentage points, reflecting big gains in support in Florida since his first election by less than half a percentage point to the governor's office in 2018.

00:53:08.000 The journal poll shows that those who are very conservative favor Trump over DeSantis 54-38.

00:53:12.000 Those who say they're somewhat conservative back DeSantis over Trump 59-29.

00:53:16.000 More moderate GOP primary voters overwhelmingly favor DeSantis.

00:53:19.000 They're not the ones who tend to dominate the primary process.

00:53:22.000 I think those who are very conservative are going to continue to shift from Trump to DeSantis the more that Trump's antics continue and the less that he seems to be focused on the things that conservatives really, really care about.

00:53:33.000 Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.

00:53:34.000 You're not going to want to miss it.

00:53:35.000 We'll be talking with Senator Rand Paul about Anthony Fauci and Senate Republicans caving on the budget.

00:53:40.000 Plus, we'll be talking with my business partner, Jeremy Boring.

00:53:43.000 He's the founder of Jeremy's Razors.

00:53:45.000 Give you an update on what's going on with Jeremy's Razors after we challenged the big guys.

00:53:49.000 It's pretty amazing stuff.

The Ben Shapiro Show - December 15, 2022

The Crying Republican Surrender Caucus | Ep. 1631

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