Ben Shapiro is back with a special Halloween edition of The Ben Shapiro Show. This week, he's talking about the latest in the Bidenflation crisis, the impact of the mid-term elections, and why you should be worried about what's to come in 2020. Plus, what's going on with Amazon and Joe Biden, and how to get your hands on some of the $26,000 you could be eligible for in a payroll tax refund from the government. Thanks to ExpressVPN, I'm free to roam the internet free from Big Tech's prying eyes. If you don't like Big Tech tracking you and selling your personal data for profit, fight back using ExpressVPN. They do all the work, no charge up front, simply share a percentage of the cash they get for you. That's E-XP-R-E-S-V-P-N-N, and you get 3 extra months of ExpressVPN for FREE! That's ExpressVPN on all your favorite streaming services, including Skype, Vimeo, and Strava, wherever you get your news and entertainment. It's free and easy to use! You don't have to be a billionaire to take a stand against Big Tech. You just need to be 7 bucks per month to join Express VPN. Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN! Subscribe to get 3 months free of Express VPN for 7 months of service! Get Refunds! Click here to get a FREE 3-month trial offer from Express VPN! Get refunded on your first month of your first bill, and get 20% off your entire annual plan when you sign up for 3 months, up to $99/month, and a total of $99,000 in total, plus an additional 3 months of free shipping when you upgrade to 7 months get a maximum of 3 months for your first year, plus a 2-month discount when you buy a second year of Vimeo membership starting at $99 or two years and get an additional year, they get an ad-free version of the service, they also get a discount of $24,99 gets you an additional 2 months for two months and they get free, plus they get $5,000, they'll get an extra $10,000 and they'll also get two months of FREE, FREE, they say they'll give you a discount, they can help you access all kinds of perks like that.
00:01:30.000Innovation refunds might be able to help you out.
00:01:32.000If your business has five or more employees and managed to survive COVID, you could be eligible to receive a payroll tax rebate of up to 26 grand per employee.
00:02:42.000The reason that this could theoretically make a difference?
00:02:45.000Not being in the majority, but the fact that the majority is slim is the fact that very often you don't have all of the members of Congress actually showing up to vote on things.
00:02:52.000So theoretically, three Congress members are sick that week, and suddenly your majority is sort of gone.
00:02:57.000But that does not mean that they won't control how things move on the floor.
00:03:02.000All of that, the Republicans will in fact control in the House.
00:03:05.000So worst case scenario was in fact avoided here, which is Republicans lose both the Senate and the House and get two more years of Joe Biden's unchecked, horrible governance.
00:03:13.000In this particular case, Republicans dramatically underperformed.
00:03:17.000Because when you look at the popular vote in the House elections, Republicans in sort of the generic ballot, as we would put it, were up by about five points.
00:03:25.000The problem is it was all located in heavy red districts.
00:03:28.000Or the upsurge that Republicans saw was actually in heavy blue districts.
00:03:31.000So they did better with black voters, with Hispanic voters.
00:03:34.000And so Democrats in those districts, instead of winning 70% of the vote, won 55% of the vote, still would blow out their Republican opponent.
00:03:40.000But they would lose a lot more of the popular vote.
00:03:43.000What it really meant is that this entire election and the way the seats were allocated, it came down to these purple seats, these very split seats.
00:03:50.000And in those split seats, Republicans have dramatically underperformed.
00:03:53.000There are a bunch of districts Republicans just gave away.
00:03:55.000For example, the Washington 3rd District, Jamie Herrera-Butler, that was the district where the Republican in that district running in a very Trump-y seat.
00:04:02.000I mean, that seat was, I think, R plus 17 in the last election cycle.
00:04:07.000In that particular seat, Jamie Herrera-Butler had voted in favor of the impeachment of Trump.
00:04:10.000And so Trump endorsed Herrera-Butler's opponent, a person named Joe Kent.
00:04:14.000Joe Kent then proceeded to lose by two to the Democrat.
00:04:25.000His primary challenger then proceeded to lose to the Democrat.
00:04:27.000This happened in a bunch of different places across the House.
00:04:29.000The Republicans underperform in terms of sort of general number of seats they should have won in the House, but they end up taking the House anyway.
00:04:36.000The underperformance is leading people to question exactly whether Kevin McCarthy will be Speaker of the House.
00:04:41.000Now, realistically speaking, does Kevin McCarthy still have the best shot of being Speaker?
00:04:45.000And the reason for that is because Kevin McCarthy has built up a large base of support inside the Republican Party hierarchy.
00:04:52.000With all of the other members of the House.
00:04:53.000And there really is no rival to him in the House of Representatives at this point.
00:04:57.000Some people have mentioned the possibility of Jim Jordan challenging him from the Freedom Caucus.
00:05:00.000The problem for Jim Jordan is he would have to swing over the other Republicans, right?
00:05:04.000When you have this split a majority, when you have a majority that is this slim, and there are significant splits, coming up with a quote-unquote consensus candidate who can win a majority of the Republican Party and then the entirety of the Republican Party, which is what you need.
00:05:16.000Because again, None of the Democrats are going to vote for Kevin McCarthy for Speaker.
00:05:19.000That means pretty much all the Republicans have to.
00:05:22.000All the Democrats have to do is peel off four or five different Republicans to vote against Kevin McCarthy and he's not the Speaker.
00:05:26.000But that's a lot easier if the person up for the Speakership is Jim Jordan, who's opposed by a lot of the moderates in the Republican caucus.
00:05:33.000So just strategically speaking, the likelihood is that McCarthy will in fact be the Speaker despite the underperformance.
00:05:38.000Well, now that he has the power, it is up to him to actually prove that he has deserved the power.
00:05:42.000This is something that McCarthy has been pursuing for nearly all of his career.
00:05:46.000All the way back when he was a so-called young gun with Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan, going all the way back to like 2008.
00:05:51.000This is something that Kevin McCarthy has been pursuing pretty strenuously.
00:06:01.000And that vision is going to have to be independent from all of the day-to-day politicking of dealing with Donald Trump.
00:06:05.000So much of McCarthy's sort of image has been tied in with how to navigate the choppy waters of Trump land.
00:06:12.000Because Donald Trump has been such a dominant figure in the Republican party, continues to be a dominant figure in the Republican party. The question is, can he lead the Republican party forward and actually become a leader in his own right, which is what you need from a Speaker of the House. The Speaker of the House is not supposed to be a cat's paw for anybody else.
00:06:25.000The Speaker is supposed to have an independent agenda and he's supposed to be capable of bringing his majority to bear when need be.
00:06:31.000So we'll see if Kevin McCarthy has the ability to do that.
00:06:34.000According to the Wall Street Journal, House Republicans will choose their leaders for the new Congress on Tuesday.
00:06:38.000In a vote that could reveal how much resistance McCarthy faces within his own conference.
00:06:42.000McCarthy is running to lead his party again in what analysts believe will be the narrowest GOP majority in recent history, much slimmer than Republican leaders had initially hoped for.
00:06:48.000The election results have complicated the path for the California Republican.
00:06:51.000He needs to win the backing of his conference on Tuesday in a closed-door meeting, and then 218 votes on the House floor if all members are present and roll call vote in January.
00:06:58.000No Democrats will back McCarthy, so he will need to keep most Republicans united for a floor vote, giving each individual lawmaker significant leverage.
00:07:05.000McCarthy said, ask Paul Ryan, ask everybody who ran for Speaker before.
00:07:08.000When asked what it meant, he was unable to get 218 votes from his conference in the initial vote.
00:07:13.000In a closed door meeting, McCarthy emphasized Republicans would have the majority and would hold the committee gavels no matter the size of the conference.
00:07:19.000According to a couple of people in the meeting, McCarthy received a standing ovation, according to two people.
00:07:22.000So again, he's very likely to end up as Speaker of the House.
00:07:24.000The question then is going to be what he does with it.
00:07:27.000Because the reality is that McCarthy leading the House minority, he's done a good job of keeping them united against Joe Biden's agenda.
00:07:35.000Being in the majority is a bit of a more difficult proposition.
00:07:38.000Also, the question for Kevin McCarthy is how do you expand that majority?
00:07:41.000And that's going to mean, again, now that he has the speakership, actually carving out a position for himself as a Republican leader with an independent vision of his own, not merely parroting what any of the other so-called leaders of the Republican Party say.
00:07:54.000According to the New York Times, McCarthy scrounged on Monday for the support he would need to become Speaker if Republicans gained control of the House, facing resistance from a newly emboldened right flank as his party grapples with its historically weak performance in the midterm elections.
00:08:05.000Republicans began the week limping toward the finish of an election cycle McCarthy had confidently predicted would be a GOP bonanza they were bitterly divided over who should lead while he was shaping up to be a tiny and unruly majority.
00:08:15.000Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, member of the Freedom Caucus, said no one in this town has 218 votes for Speaker of the House.
00:08:19.000We're going to have a debate and make sure we set up the structure properly to then figure out how someone will get to 218 votes.
00:08:24.000What this is going to look like is a lot of Freedom Caucus members basically lobbying for leadership positions on important House committees in order so that McCarthy is able to lock down this level of support.
00:08:34.000Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona, who was a former Freedom Caucus chairman, he is going to try to challenge McCarthy.
00:08:41.000He doesn't have the support to defeat McCarthy.
00:08:44.000Again, there have been some talks about Jim Jordan.
00:08:46.000Steve Scalise says that he doesn't want to run for it.
00:08:48.000So there are not a lot of rivals for McCarthy who have a legitimate amount of support inside the Republican caucus.
00:08:53.000A lot of this is going to be sort of negotiating for better position for some of the fringier players in the Republican Party, which in fact could hamper McCarthy going forward as Speaker.
00:09:01.000Because the fact is that if you are Kevin McCarthy and you take one lesson away from this election, it is run back to sanity.
00:09:07.000Do not put the people who are the most controversial in the most important committee slot.
00:09:11.000Because if you do, they will absolutely crush your chances of expanding your majority in 2024 and increase your chances actually of losing a majority in 2024.
00:09:20.000So I don't envy McCarthy his sort of political position, but now is the time for him to actually demonstrate a spine.
00:09:26.000Because when you're in the minority and you're negotiating against Joe Biden, it's a lot easier.
00:09:30.000Once you actually have to lead, it's a different thing.
00:09:33.000A lot of talk about who's going to lead the RNC.
00:09:35.000So apparently, Ronna McDaniel wants to continue to lead the RNC in the aftermath of what was a tremendously underwhelming performance by the Republican Party in the last midterm elections.
00:10:21.000Remember, the Republicans picked up three to four seats in New York, specifically because there were moderate Republicans running in New York who ran directly away from Trumpism, and Zeldin gave them the cover to do that.
00:10:32.000Zeldin, running strong at the top of the ticket, dragged a lot of those Republicans to victory.
00:10:35.000It remains unclear if Rhonda McDaniel or Tommy Hicks is going to run for re-election, but Zeldin's consideration follows a relatively lackluster midterm election performance for Republicans, despite the fact the GOP had six million more votes than Democrats did in the House races.
00:10:48.000While the signs point to the GOP taking the House, Democrats maintain a slim majority in the Senate.
00:10:52.000Some Republicans are demanding change moving forward.
00:10:55.000And Zeldin, I think, would be a good candidate for this.
00:11:04.000He's sort of a moderate Republican being from a blue state.
00:11:07.000But he does have good conservative principles and he's able to negotiate, again, a lot of the difficult pathways inside a very fractured Republican party.
00:11:16.000Meanwhile, there's been some talk in the Senate about what happens with Mitch McConnell.
00:11:19.000So there's been a bit of a revolt inside the Republican caucus over having a very quick sort of vote for Mitch McConnell for minority leader.
00:11:31.000Reality, again, very unlikely that McConnell is ousted as minority leader.
00:11:34.000The truth is that on an obstructive level, he has done a pretty good job obstructing Joe Biden's agenda and before that, Barack Obama's agenda.
00:11:41.000McConnell as majority leader, I think, was far less successful than McConnell as minority leader in the Senate.
00:11:47.000With that said, there are a bunch of Republicans, a bunch of people I respect and like, people like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, who are calling for delay in the actual senatorial election process for McConnell as minority leader.
00:11:58.000One of the big complaints that I'm hearing from the inside, from a bunch of different Republicans in the Senate, is that McConnell has a bad habit of preventing any amendments to bills that he brings up.
00:12:06.000Basically, he brings up the bill and forces people to vote up or down on it, and a lot of the Republicans in the Senate don't particularly like that.
00:12:11.000On a strategic level, McConnell does that because, again, the Senate is a bunch of people who want to run for president, and so all of them are constantly adding amendments and holding up bills.
00:12:19.000But that said, when you're the leader of the Republican caucus, you do sort of have a duty, as McConnell has sort of avoided, of allowing members of your caucus to actually add amendments to bills and change the bills and propose legislation themselves.
00:12:30.000McConnell has run that place like a dictatorship, again, in the minority that matters a lot less than it would in the majority.
00:12:35.000The minority basically are just there to unify and vote no on things.
00:12:38.000When you're in the majority, it changes rather radically.
00:12:41.000However, Should the vote be put off on McConnell?
00:12:43.000I don't see why it should happen right away.
00:12:45.000Seems to me that McConnell waiting for a couple of weeks until we actually know what happened in Georgia isn't the worst idea in the entire world.
00:12:53.000Now, all of this, all of this sort of hubbub that's been occurring obscures the bigger question of what exactly is going to happen in the House once Republicans do take over.
00:13:02.000So there's been a lot of talk from the Republican base about investigate, investigate, investigate.
00:13:07.000Investigate the things that need investigating.
00:13:08.000Sure, Hunter Biden's business contacts and whether those actually tie to Joe.
00:13:12.000Not just to go after Hunter Biden, because that doesn't matter.
00:13:14.000The question is whether Joe Biden was benefiting from Hunter's business contacts and from the giant grab bags of cash that Hunter was picking up in China and Ukraine.
00:14:31.000I'm here to defend the American dream.
00:14:33.000And that's making Americans' life easier.
00:14:37.000Again, this would be the way the Republicans are actually gonna win back seats.
00:14:39.000I know that we've all forgotten about the baseline, you have to govern.
00:14:42.000The baseline of, why don't you focus on the agenda?
00:14:45.000But all of the use of the institution of Congress in order to make headlines for yourself, it turns out that's a really, really negative thing.
00:14:52.000Whether you're a Democrat or whether you're a Republican, this is not what we demand from our plumbers.
00:14:55.000This is not what we demand from our accountants.
00:14:56.000This is not what we demand from our lawyers or our doctors.
00:14:58.000What we demand from them is to do a job.
00:15:00.000Only in Congress do we demand that members of Congress, senators and Congress people do my job, okay?
00:15:07.000I spoke to the House Republican caucus a couple of years ago and I literally said this to them.
00:15:10.000I said, your job is to go out and it is to govern and it is to represent principle as best you can while also making the compromises necessary in order to incrementally forward the agenda.
00:15:18.000It's my job to talk about the principles.
00:15:22.000In other words, if you want to go into the commentary business, go into the commentary business.
00:15:25.000If you should be in government, be in government.
00:15:27.000But because so many members of both parties now wish to be in commentary and not in government, I'm talking about like the AOCs of the world on the left side of the aisle.
00:15:34.000And I'm talking on the right side of the aisle about people like Marjorie Taylor Greene.
00:15:38.000Governing is not quite the same thing as speaking out publicly.
00:15:41.000And when you look to your political leadership, As sort of the prophets who are going to stand for principle.
00:16:06.000That's not where I get my moral leadership.
00:16:07.000That's not where you should get your moral leadership either.
00:16:10.000I get moral leadership from my parents.
00:16:12.000From great thinkers of the past, from religious leaders of all stripes.
00:16:16.000That's where I get my moral leadership.
00:16:18.000I don't get my moral leadership from a bunch of schmucks who were a used car salesman five seconds ago, and now they're representing me in Congress.
00:16:57.000With that said, when it takes a week to count all of the votes, and when Carrie Lake leads for like 75% of the time, and then as the votes come in from Maricopa County, suddenly Katie Hobbs jumps into the lead, and then Carrie Lake never catches up, I don't understand why there are not penalties attached to secretaries of state across the country who cannot get the voting procedures done the night that the votes come in.
00:17:25.000If you're a Democrat and had gone the other way, I assume you would feel the same way.
00:17:30.000According to the Washington Post, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs was projected on Monday to win the race for Arizona governor, narrowly defeating Republican Carrie Lake.
00:17:37.000Hobbs pitched herself as a moderate alternative to an extreme candidate who she argued could sow chaos if elected.
00:17:42.000The Democrat oversaw the 2020 election in Arizona, defended it against the claims of malfeasance that Lake made central to her campaign.
00:17:49.000Lake appeared not to accept the defeat.
00:17:51.000Instead, she tweeted out, Arizonans know BS when they see it.
00:17:55.000Now, she could theoretically call for a recount.
00:17:57.000The chances that that recount are going to result in Carrie Lake being the actual governor of Arizona are incredibly low.
00:18:04.000The current vote count right now has Katie Hobbs up about 20,000 votes.
00:18:09.000I've never seen a recount shift more than about 500 votes across the course of a state.
00:18:13.000So, very, very unlikely that Carrie Lake would ever be able to actually take the seat.
00:18:19.000With that said, the amazing sort of Ridiculous sickening for the vote counting process that you're seeing from the mainstream media.
00:18:27.000Like people having questions about the vote counting process in Arizona when it takes this long, when nobody knows how it's done.
00:18:33.000Same thing in Nevada where they're talking about curing votes.
00:18:34.000Whenever this sort of stuff comes up and people are like, I don't really trust this process because the outside indicators appear that there's a lot of room for error.
00:18:42.000And then the media are like, this is the cleanest election ever run.
00:18:45.000Okay, if Kerry Lake won, I really doubt that Andrea Mitchell would be saying this.
00:18:47.000Here's Andrea Mitchell saying, Maricopa County is doing it absolutely right.
00:18:50.000It's the best way, is to take a couple of years to count all the votes.
00:18:53.000The most likely result here is that Republicans end up with somewhere along around 219, 220, or 221 seats, which is pretty astonishing considering that Republicans are currently on track to win about 4% more votes than Democrats nationally.
00:19:10.000Despite all of what has been said by Donald Trump and other election deniers, and now beginning to be also Kelly Ward, who's falling behind, about Katie Bob, Hobbs, but for the governor's race, Maricopa County had some of the best vote counting processes because of past problems.
00:19:30.000Yeah, Andrea, they have a whole lot of practice, and we have a whole lot of practice watching the Arizona returns.
00:19:35.000We saw this in 2018, we saw it in 2020, and we're seeing it again in 2022.
00:19:47.000As far as the notion that Carrie Lake was an outstanding candidate in Arizona, Carrie Lake is extraordinarily telegenic.
00:19:54.000She knows how to handle herself on TV.
00:19:56.000Also, she dramatically underperformed the House Republicans in Arizona.
00:19:58.000I mean, this is just the fact of the matter.
00:20:02.000As Esoteric CD points out on Twitter, the generic House Republican vote in Arizona was crushing this year.
00:20:06.000The GOP will likely hold six of the nine congressional districts throughout the state when it's all done.
00:20:10.000Carrie Lake ran six percent behind the generic congressional vote in Arizona.
00:20:13.000Blake Masters ran even further behind that.
00:20:16.000So this was an underperformance by Carrie Lake in a state that Doug Ducey was the governor of for a couple of terms.
00:20:23.000And we should all remember, by the way, that it was the sort of Arizona Republican Party that prevented Ducey from running for the open Senate seat against Mark Kelly.
00:20:31.000It should have been Doug Ducey running in that seat and not Blake Masters.
00:20:34.000And Ducey was convinced not to do so by the Arizona Republican Party, who had gotten very, very Trumpy.
00:20:39.000We'll get to more on all this in just a moment.
00:20:40.000First, as an Orthodox Jew, obviously Israel is very important to me.
00:20:44.000It's important to millions of Christians who stand with Israel.
00:20:46.000This is one of the reasons I partnered with the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.
00:20:49.000Founded by an Orthodox rabbi 40 years ago, the fellowship is the leading non-profit dedicated to building bridges between Christians and Jews, blessing Israel and the Jewish people around the world with humanitarian care and life-saving aid.
00:20:58.000This trusted organization is on the ground right now, helping the poor not only in Israel, but throughout the former Soviet Union, and especially in Ukraine.
00:21:05.000The Fellowship is doing incredible work inside Ukraine right now, providing basic food and necessities for Jewish families, especially the elderly.
00:21:11.000Many of those families have nowhere else to turn.
00:22:39.000Which does lead to the question of exactly how Donald Trump did across the board.
00:22:44.000Now the reason that this comes up is because when you look at what's about to happen tonight, which presumably will be Donald Trump declaring for the presidency, one of the things he's claimed is that he's done an amazing job picking candidates across the board.
00:24:34.000Well, it suggests that Trump's endorsement can get you across the finish line in the primary, but it can't get you across the line in the general, which should make a bit of a difference if you're talking about, can Republicans win in 2024?
00:24:45.000And the question is whether Republicans are going to continue to find it so cathartic to vote for Trump that they actually don't mind if they lose in 2024.
00:24:51.000And what the polls show is that Trump is not going to perform well in a general election in 2024.
00:24:54.000And before everybody starts shouting about how the polls were wrong, the polls actually were not very wrong this year.
00:24:58.000They were actually pretty good this year.
00:24:59.000I know everybody is out there saying the polls were, were, were terribly, they were not terribly wrong this year.
00:25:04.000People were misreading the polls, but all the polls within margin of error and pretty much all the races finished within margin of error.
00:25:10.000The only ones that were wrong were wrong in the direction of Republicans, like New Hampshire, where people thought that was going to be close and it turned out to be a complete blowout in favor of Maggie Hassan.
00:25:18.000All the others, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, like all these polls ended up being fairly correct.
00:25:24.000So when we cite poll data for 2024, always take poll data with a grain of salt because it's also about a snapshot of now.
00:25:30.000It's not a snapshot of two years from now.
00:25:31.000We don't know what's going to happen over the course of the next year and a half, but that does make a difference if you would like to win.
00:25:36.000And so this becomes the question moving forward for Donald Trump.
00:25:39.000So Donald Trump is supposed to announce tonight.
00:25:42.000He has made a big deal out of this in his emails.
00:25:45.000He is going to he's going to make what he calls the most historic speech, maybe in the history of the United States, which is a heavy lift.
00:25:51.000And there have been some historic speeches in the history of the United States, ranging from Lincoln's House divided speech to to the Gettysburg Address.
00:25:59.000To Franklin Delano Roosevelt announcing World War II had begun.
00:26:03.000To Martin Luther King on the Washington Mall.
00:26:05.000But you know, that's Trumpian bloviation.
00:26:18.000If you are the biggest gorilla in the room, usually announcing late is what you want to do, because you wait for everybody else to jump in, and then you jump in the pool, and then the tide of you jumping in the pool, it's like the fat kid jumping in the pool, boom, all the other kids just get washed out of the pool.
00:26:29.000You wait for everybody else to jump in, and you wait for them to kind of spend all of their money, and you wait for them to establish themselves, and then you just wipe them out.
00:26:55.000That was after Ted Cruz had announced.
00:26:59.000And now he's the incumbent president, right?
00:27:02.000I mean, he's already been president once.
00:27:03.000He could wait until the day before the election and announce and probably clean up.
00:27:07.000I think what Trump doesn't understand is that the less the public sees of him, the more the public likes him.
00:27:11.000The dirty little secret of Trump's 2020 campaign is that if he had followed Joe Biden's strategy, he might still be president.
00:27:16.000If he'd actually just gone to the basement for the entirety of the election, and the election had been about Joe Biden, Trump might still be president.
00:27:22.000But he insisted on being the center of attention, and he's doing the same thing now, which is poor strategy.
00:27:27.000The reason it seems insecure is because, again, to use the poker analogy I used the other day, if you are dealt a pocket pair of twos, It's like an okay hand, but not a great hand.
00:27:37.000It's a tricky hand because basically anything on the flop, anybody who gets a pair now has more than your pocket pair of twos.
00:27:42.000Before the flop, during the blinds, you go all in just to push everybody else out.
00:27:57.000He knows he's in a particularly weak position right now, and so that's why he's eager to jump into the race, even before, presumably, Herschel Walker has his election.
00:28:05.000All of his advisors, by the way, have been telling Trump not to do this, but apparently he's going to go ahead and do this anyway.
00:28:10.000According to the Washington Post, a trio of longtime Republican operatives will lead Donald Trump's 2024 campaign, which the former president is set to announce Tuesday evening in the ballroom of his private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, according to five people familiar with the staffing decisions.
00:28:21.000There are expected to be notable differences from his 2020 campaign.
00:28:24.000His nascent presidential bid is not currently expected to have a traditional campaign manager.
00:28:28.000With multiple advisors and top roles, according to some of the people familiar with the situation, Trump is famous for firing his campaign managers.
00:28:34.000The 2024 bid is expected to have a smaller staff and budget compared with 2020.
00:28:37.000Trump has complained his failed 2020 campaign had too many people and spent too much money.
00:28:42.000Some of the people who are crucial to his 2020 campaign presumably are not going to be part of the 2024 campaign.
00:28:49.000Jared and Ivanka were considered very crucial to both his 2016 and his 2020 campaign.
00:28:53.000There's very little indication that they're going to be deeply involved in this particular campaign, at least at this point, maybe later.
00:28:59.000Now the question as to who exactly the campaign is, is it Kellyanne Conway?
00:29:04.000That's an open question, but a lot of those people seem to have very little taste for jumping back in.
00:29:09.000Top advisors include Chrysalis Sevidya, a longtime Republican strategist directing a Super PAC tied to Trump, and Susie Wiles, a Florida-based political consultant who helped Trump win the state his previous two presidential bids and has led his political operation for the last 18 months.
00:29:22.000A group of top advisors also includes Brian Jack, who served as the senior political aide in the White House and has advised both Trump and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy since 2021.
00:29:31.000Taylor Budowich, Trump's current spokesperson, will move to leading an outside Super PAC, Make America Great Again, Inc.
00:29:38.000So he is obviously eager to jump back in.
00:29:44.000There's some polling data to suggest that he still has the upper hand in the Republican Party, which of course is not a shock.
00:29:48.000Again, he was the sitting president of the United States.
00:29:52.000According to Politico, a new political morning consul poll shows 47% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they would back Trump if the Republican presidential primary were held today.
00:30:00.000About 33% said they would back Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
00:30:03.000No other prospective candidate received about 5% in the poll, except for former Vice President Mike Pence, who stood at 5%.
00:30:11.000But if the poll says Politico shows a clear path forward for Trump as he readies his third White House run since 2016, it also exhibits the peril ahead.
00:30:17.000Among all voters surveyed, 65% said Trump should probably or definitely not run again, with 53% in the definite camp, which is, that's not a good number.
00:30:24.000When two-thirds of the American public say you should not run again, and you're not actually, I mean, the same numbers say, by the way, that Joe Biden shouldn't run again.
00:30:29.000The difference is that Joe Biden is the current president of the United States.
00:30:35.000Trump's standing has not dropped significantly since pre-election.
00:30:38.000He stood at 48% in the most recent morning consult poll, but DeSantis' star has risen.
00:30:42.000He continues to gain in the polls against Trump.
00:30:44.000So you're not seeing a lot of the Trump fans drop off from Trump, but you are seeing more support that was sort of uncommitted come off the sidelines, not in favor of Trump, but in favor of DeSantis.
00:30:55.000He's not gonna declare for a long time, even if he does declare.
00:30:58.000It'll probably be close to a year before Ron DeSantis declares.
00:31:02.000And in fact, there's some other polling data that sort of suggests the opposite.
00:31:05.000There are some new polls that have been coming out.
00:31:09.000According to Mediaite, the Club for Growth has done some state-level polls.
00:31:13.000They show that in the Iowa caucuses, DeSantis currently leads Trump 48 to 37, 52 to 37 in New Hampshire, 56 to 30 in Florida, 55 to 35 in Georgia.
00:31:26.000Now, again, DeSantis has the hot hand right now.
00:31:29.000He's obviously the hottest name in Republican politics right now, given the fact that he just won what used to be a swing state by 20 points.
00:31:34.000Trump, however, still has the weight of his former presidency on hand.
00:31:42.000He then spends the next six months not attacking Democrats, but attacking all of the people who have not yet declared, because he spent the last two weeks doing this.
00:31:48.000If you want to tick off your own fans, the way to do that, if Trump wants to run a smart campaign here, Put aside whether you like, dislike, just as a political matter of strategy.
00:31:56.000If Trump wants to run a smart campaign, he has to be the leader of the Republican Party, not the leader of the Trump Party.
00:32:01.000And what that means is that he actually has to focus all of his ire and all of his anger against Biden and the Biden agenda.
00:32:08.000He can't be focusing it on people that the Republican base actually likes, like Glenn Youngkin over in Virginia.
00:32:13.000He can't be focusing it on losing senatorial candidates like Don Balda, who he endorsed in New Hampshire.
00:32:18.000He can't be focusing it on Mitch McConnell's wife, which is what he's been doing over on Truth Social.
00:32:23.000He can't be focusing on Ron DeSantis and calling him Ron DeSanctimonious.
00:32:46.000If Trump blows all of his ammo now, whatever ammo there is, I don't think he has tons of ammo against Junkin or DeSantis by the look of it.
00:32:53.000But if he blows all of his sort of anger and ire right now at a bunch of people who aren't firing at him, he looks petty and he looks demagogic.
00:32:59.000And I don't think that the Republican voting base likes that very much.
00:33:02.000And again, what Trump needs to convince the American people of are two things, particularly Republican voters.
00:33:07.000He needs to convince Republican voters of two things.
00:33:09.000He needs to convince them, one, that he's a winner, not a loser.
00:33:12.000And two, he needs to convince them that he actually stands for their interests, not his own.
00:33:16.000Those are the two things that are the obstacles to Trump winning the nomination in 2024.
00:33:29.000In 2021, he lost two Senate seats in Georgia after telling people not to vote.
00:33:33.000And in 2022, his candidates dramatically underperformed.
00:33:37.000So he's got to try to spin this into I'm actually the only person who can win, which there's still a base in the Republican Party who's going to believe that, but it's like 30% of the Republicans.
00:33:45.000It is not 70% of the Republicans, particularly after the terrible 2022 performance.
00:33:51.000And then the other question is an even more of an uphill climb for Trump, which is he actually has to use some discipline.
00:33:56.000He would actually have to say, listen, Same thing I said in 2016.
00:34:00.000I'm standing here taking the bullet for you.
00:34:02.000Not you need to take the bullet for me by claiming that election 2020 was stolen and that's the key issue and that's the only thing that matters in the universe.
00:34:26.000It's because Trump isn't doing much of that.
00:34:29.000So if Trump wishes to convince the Republican Party base that he's the best guy to go up against Biden, he actually has to run against Joe Biden.
00:34:35.000That will require him to let go of all of his animus against the possibility of anyone else even running.
00:34:43.000And the animus is already ramping into high gear.
00:34:45.000He's already angry at people who haven't even declared yet.
00:34:48.000That seems like a misplaced emotion at best.
00:34:52.000And meanwhile, by the way, Federal agents are now announcing what was obvious in the first place, which is why Donald Trump was refusing to give documents back from Mar-a-Lago.
00:35:01.000Remember, there's all this legal peril still following Trump around.
00:35:03.000The sort of typical explanation here electorally is that the more Trump is targeted legally, the more his base rallies to his defense.
00:35:09.000That's only true when people think that he is being targeted legally to prevent him from running for president.
00:35:14.000If they think that he is being targeted legally just because he made mistakes, that's not quite the same thing.
00:35:20.000When he was president and people were doing the Russian collusion stuff, And trying to impeach him is very obvious why they were going after him.
00:35:25.000When he's not the president, and when he is, in fact, in an undeclared dogfight with other Republicans for the nomination, it's not quite as clear-cut as people attack him legally, and this is going to immediately redound to his benefit electorally.
00:35:38.000I'm not sure that the correlation is quite as quick there.
00:35:40.000We'll get to more of this in just one second.
00:35:41.000Folks, last year we launched our daily news podcast, Morning Wire.
00:35:44.000In this short period of time, it's become one of the top news podcasts in America.
00:35:48.00015 minutes or less, you can get all the news you need to know without the liberal slant of NPR.
00:35:53.000New episodes are available every morning, seven days a week.
00:35:55.000They cover stories other media outlets won't touch.
00:35:57.000So, check out Morning Wire on Daily Wire, plus Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
00:36:02.000Okay, so we do have an update on the Trump-Mar-a-Lago investigation.
00:36:05.000You remember that the FBI Quote-unquote, raided the place.
00:36:08.000I say quote-unquote because they didn't go in like guns blazing, but they actually did go to Mar-a-Lago and search and ransack his house and all this kind of stuff for these supposedly very important documents.
00:36:16.000And remember, there's all the speculation from the left, as always.
00:36:19.000The story with Donald Trump is always the simplest.
00:36:44.000As I said, from literally day one, the entire story of Trump keeping documents in Mar-a-Lago and not handing them over to the National Archives was, I like papers.
00:36:54.000And now federal investigators, after spending months and months and months investigating, came to the most obvious conclusion, which is that Trump likes stuff until he doesn't.
00:37:02.000I mean, sorry to break it to the multi-million dollar federal investigation, but we all knew this within 20 seconds of this story breaking.
00:37:09.000According to the Washington Post, federal agents and prosecutors have come to believe former President Donald Trump's motive for allegedly taking and keeping classified documents was largely his ego and a desire to hold on to the materials as trophies or mementos, according to people familiar with the matter.
00:37:29.000As part of the investigation, federal authorities reviewed the classified documents that were recovered from Trump's Mar-a-Lago home and private club, looking to see if the types of information contained in them pointed to any kind of pattern or similarities.
00:37:39.000According to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, that review has not found any apparent business advantage to the types of classified information in Trump's possession.
00:37:48.000In other words, it wasn't like a systematic pattern of the papers he was picking.
00:38:08.000Do not point to any nefarious effort by Trump to leverage, sell, or use the government secrets.
00:38:12.000Instead, the former president seemed motivated by a more basic desire not to give up what he previously believed was his property, these people said.
00:38:18.000Now, by the way, the question that you have to ask whenever you see a story like this is this is being leaked from inside the FBI.
00:38:21.000And these are the only people who know this.
00:38:26.000When a leak like this happens, doesn't this suggest that the FBI and the DOJ may be on the verge of dropping the case?
00:38:32.000And maybe they actually do not want to prosecute Donald Trump.
00:38:34.000Now, I know that Andy McCarthy over at National Review, he suggests an indictment is on its way because now that Trump has declared and now that he's not sort of the foregone conclusory winner of the primaries, because who the hell knows what's going to happen, that the DOJ is going to file charges against him.
00:38:48.000But when you leak stuff like this that undermines any case for the possibility of motive and puts Donald Trump squarely in the same basket as Hillary Clinton, right?
00:38:56.000Hillary Clinton, the entire case that James Comey made in not prosecuting her was she had no intent to Disseminate the information to America's enemies.
00:39:06.000So this suggests is maybe the prosecution from the DOJ doesn't go forward.
00:39:08.000Merrick Garland is trying to soften the ground for that, which is really, really interesting stuff.
00:39:12.000And it does raise the question of if people on my side of the aisle think Merrick Garland is so politically motivated, why do you think Merrick Garland would drop a prosecution that has Donald Trump in its crosshairs?
00:39:37.000But is it pretty obvious that Democrats would prefer Trump to another Republican candidate in 2024?
00:39:41.000I think it's pretty obvious from the statements that they are making.
00:39:45.000Several Trump advisors said each time he was asked to give documents or materials back, his stance hardened, and he gravitated toward lawyers and advisors who indulged his more pugilistic desires.
00:39:53.000Trump repeatedly said the materials were his, not the government's, often in profane terms, two of those people said.
00:39:57.000The people familiar with the matter cautioned the investigation is ongoing, no final determination has been made, and it is possible additional information could emerge that changes investigators' understanding of Trump's motivations, but they said the evidence collected over a period of months indicates the primary explanation for potentially criminal conduct was Trump's ego and intransigence.
00:40:13.000Again, list that one in the how is this possibly a shock to anyone category.
00:40:19.000Why are we supposed to be surprised about all of this?
00:40:22.000Now, meanwhile, if Trump were to be the nominee, or whoever the Republican nominee is going to be, that Republican nominee is going to have somewhat of a tailwind.
00:40:55.000They're more registered Democrats than Republicans in virtually all of the purple states.
00:40:59.000This is why Florida is no longer a purple state.
00:41:00.000They're more registered Republicans than Democrats.
00:41:02.000But in Pennsylvania, they're way more registered Democrats than Republicans.
00:41:05.000So they have a built-in advantage, which means the Republicans do have to run excellent candidates in order to win, and Democrats can run people who literally do not have functional brains.
00:41:14.000So yeah, I'm sorry that life isn't fair, but life isn't fair.
00:41:17.000With that said, the tailwind that Republicans are going to have in 2024 is that Democrats are going to keep doubling down and they're going to keep suggesting that America is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad place.
00:41:54.000So Michelle Obama, some audio was released of her book talking about how Barack couldn't fix the country.
00:41:59.000He tried his best, but even Messiah couldn't fix the country.
00:42:02.000It shook me profoundly to hear the man who'd replaced my husband as president openly and unapologetically using ethnic slurs, making selfishness and hate somehow acceptable, refusing to condemn white supremacists or to support people demonstrating for racial justice.
00:42:26.000Running behind all this was a demoralizing string of thoughts.