The Ben Shapiro Show - Trump’s In | Ep. 1612

00:00:00.000 Donald Trump announces his third presidential campaign, pledging to make America great and glorious again.

00:00:05.000 Joe Biden starts his own 2024 campaign in response, and NATO puzzles over a missile strike on Polish territory.

00:00:10.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:11.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:12.000 Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.

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00:00:25.000 Now let's talk for a second about your finances.

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00:02:11.000 Well, we're in it now.

00:02:12.000 So, President Trump announced last night, as predicted, that he was going to run for President of the United States.

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00:02:24.000 Well, we're in it now.

00:02:26.000 So President Trump announced last night, as predicted, that he was going to run for president of the United States.

00:02:31.000 Now he had predicted it would be the most important speech in American history.

00:02:35.000 It wasn't, but it is important.

00:02:38.000 I mean, when the former president of the United States announces a new presidential campaign, his third presidential campaign, that is a rather large announcement.

00:02:45.000 The timing of it is really curious.

00:02:48.000 It's strategically strange.

00:02:50.000 Let's put it that way.

00:02:50.000 Because if you are Donald Trump, what you really want to do is clear the field, right?

00:02:54.000 But if you do it too early, and there are more than 700 days until the next election, This gives people a lot of time to get very tired.

00:03:02.000 And this is the real enemy for Trump.

00:03:03.000 The real enemy for Trump is that people become exhausted.

00:03:07.000 This has always been the big problem for Trump.

00:03:09.000 In 2016, people were not exhausted.

00:03:11.000 In 2017, people were like, okay, well, he's president.

00:03:11.000 It was a great act.

00:03:13.000 This is kind of fascinating.

00:03:15.000 In 2018, didn't work out well in Congress, but his administration was doing a bunch of really, really good stuff.

00:03:19.000 People are like, okay, I'll give him credit for that.

00:03:21.000 And sure, there's some bad tweets and, and yeah, the media hate his guts.

00:03:24.000 I'll give him more of a chance.

00:03:25.000 And then 2019, More of that.

00:03:27.000 And then 2020 in the pandemic, I think people got exhausted with Trump.

00:03:30.000 And that is one of the rationales for why he didn't do as well in the election as he should have.

00:03:33.000 And that's why he did not win when running against a person who's actually comatose.

00:03:36.000 Because Joe Biden was more tired than Trump, but he was less tiring than Trump for a lot of Americans.

00:03:41.000 In 2020, Donald Trump exhausted a lot of people because he was on the TV every day.

00:03:46.000 Talking about COVID because he seemed to be sort of all over the place in his approach to that because every day was revolving around him.

00:03:52.000 And so the election was a referendum on him.

00:03:53.000 And meanwhile, Joe Biden went back to his coffin in the evenings and during most of the day, and he just slept there.

00:03:59.000 And every so often they would take him out and they would spoon feed him some oatmeal just to give him the nutrients.

00:04:03.000 And then they would trot him out like directly outside of his house in Delaware.

00:04:06.000 They would train a camera on him, and he would go, democracy!

00:04:10.000 And then the media would cheer, and then he'd go back down into the basement.

00:04:13.000 And so he wasn't exhausting in the same way that Trump was.

00:04:16.000 So the problem for Trump has always been Trump.

00:04:18.000 I mean, the draw of Trump is Trump, and the problem for Trump is Trump.

00:04:21.000 It's nobody else.

00:04:22.000 And the obstacles that Donald Trump makes for himself are the biggest obstacles that he faces, not the obstacles made by other candidates about him.

00:04:27.000 Hillary Clinton tried to make him the object of ire in 2016, and it failed.

00:04:32.000 Donald Trump made himself the object of ire in 2020, and it succeeded.

00:04:36.000 Well, the problem is that if you launch this quickly, I mean, this is this is unprecedented.

00:04:39.000 I'm not aware of any other presidential campaign, certainly not by a major figure like the former president of the United States launched about a week after the midterm elections.

00:04:47.000 This is super early.

00:04:49.000 And it's a it's a weird strategy, because if you really are that intimidating, why don't you slow play this thing?

00:04:56.000 If you really believe that simply having your name out there is going to prevent people from jumping in, which, by the way, it might, then why would you launch this quickly?

00:05:04.000 What it sort of betrays is that Trump, his campaign, is very concerned with the possibility of other people getting in.

00:05:11.000 If you watch his Truth Social feed, you see a lot of this, right?

00:05:13.000 Donald Trump is attacking candidates who have not yet announced and may never announce.

00:05:17.000 I'm not aware that Glenn Youngkin is going to run for President of the United States.

00:05:19.000 I'm not sure what Glenn Youngkin's support base would be.

00:05:21.000 He's a very moderate Republican in Virginia.

00:05:24.000 Ron DeSantis, bit of a different story.

00:05:25.000 And a lot of speculation that he's going to run specifically because he's termed out, right?

00:05:28.000 Glenn Youngkin is in his first term.

00:05:30.000 Ron DeSantis is in his second term.

00:05:31.000 So that means that no matter what, he's leaving office in 2026 as governor of Florida.

00:05:36.000 So if he's going to go, he sort of has to go, but he's not jumping in right now.

00:05:39.000 And so the question, if you are Donald Trump, is if I jump in yesterday, November 15, 2022, and Ron DeSantis doesn't jump in until the after the end of the first legislative session, meaning in like June of 2023, That gives you, by my count, and I'm no expert, but I know how a calendar works, that gives you eight months to simply be out there saying things.

00:05:59.000 And that's very tiring.

00:06:00.000 It means you're the only person at issue.

00:06:02.000 I mean, if Ron DeSantis just goes about governing and doesn't pay any attention to the stuff that you're saying, and you're spending every day on Truth Social ripping into him, is that good strategy?

00:06:10.000 And do you really think that Trump has the discipline not to do that?

00:06:13.000 Now, if Trump spends the next eight months ripping into Biden, Then that would be a durable campaign.

00:06:17.000 But do you think he's going to do that?

00:06:18.000 Or do you think that he's going to be so irritated with the fact that other people are very likely to jump in halfway through next year that he's going to preemptively try to launch strikes against them?

00:06:26.000 And they're meanwhile just going to be going about their business and governing and doing their stuff.

00:06:31.000 Trump runs the real danger of looking petty.

00:06:33.000 The first real damage that Trump has done himself in terms of his 2024 presidential campaign, aside from all the January 6th stuff, Aside from sort of the oddities of what he says on Truth Social, the really big damage that he did to himself over the course of the last several months, besides picking not great candidates and not spending money on those candidates, was really over the last week when he decided that just before the election, he was going to attack DeSantis.

00:06:55.000 And then after the election, he decided he was going to attack DeSantis and Junkin.

00:06:57.000 And Republicans looked at him and they said, wait, dude, who are you attacking?

00:07:00.000 What are you doing?

00:07:01.000 So as a matter of strategy, What this feels like very much is not like Trump is holding a pair of aces.

00:07:07.000 If Trump felt like he were holding a pair of aces, then presumably he would wait to see the flop.

00:07:11.000 And he'd wait to see some other cards on the table.

00:07:12.000 Because he could afford to.

00:07:14.000 He could take his time.

00:07:16.000 He could see what the political circumstances are like in six months.

00:07:18.000 What this feels like is Donald Trump is trying to buy the pot with a pair of sixes.

00:07:22.000 And basically, you got a pair of sixes?

00:07:24.000 Not an amazing, like a small pocket pair?

00:07:28.000 And he's scared of the flop because on the flop, you could get a seven and somebody else could have two sevens or on the flop could be a king and somebody else just has one king.

00:07:35.000 And so what he's going to do right now is try to buy the pot by going all in with a pair of sixes.

00:07:39.000 We're going to buy the pot.

00:07:40.000 We're going to buy the blinds.

00:07:41.000 We're going to knock everybody out of the game.

00:07:42.000 I don't think that strategically speaking, it's going to work, but it's an interesting strategy.

00:07:46.000 It's certainly never been tried before.

00:07:47.000 And there's a lot of time, a lot of time before the 2024 elections.

00:07:51.000 I mean, the first primaries don't even happen until early 2024.

00:07:55.000 We're talking about 14 months until the January primaries, the Iowa caucuses in 2024.

00:08:00.000 So this is super early as a strategic matter.

00:08:03.000 OK, so then Trump decided that he was going to launch this thing at Mar-a-Lago.

00:08:07.000 Which again is an interesting move.

00:08:08.000 It's not a pizzazz move.

00:08:10.000 You remember that when he originally launched in 2015, it was a fascinating thing.

00:08:15.000 He launched in June of 2015, by the way.

00:08:17.000 Which is a lot later.

00:08:18.000 That would be like launching in June of 2023.

00:08:19.000 Which he's not.

00:08:21.000 He's launching way earlier.

00:08:22.000 And he launched with a 47 minute speech.

00:08:24.000 And it was fascinating because it was all new.

00:08:27.000 Trump's speech last night was very long.

00:08:29.000 Like extremely long.

00:08:30.000 Like so long that Fox News actually cut out of it about halfway through.

00:08:33.000 Because the speech went, I believe, 64 minutes, which is, by any standard, a very, very long speech.

00:08:39.000 And it read, in some ways, almost like a State of the Union address.

00:08:41.000 It had its high points, it had its low points.

00:08:42.000 We're going to go through what the president said in relaunching his 2024 campaign.

00:08:48.000 But the optics of it were a little bit strange, mainly because when he did it in 2015, and there was no base of support, and he came down the escalator, and it was like, wow, I can't tell whether this is cheesy or whether this is brilliant.

00:09:00.000 It turns out that it was quite brilliant optically.

00:09:02.000 Doing it at Mar-a-Lago looks like he's sort of holed up in his house, right?

00:09:06.000 I mean, that's where he lives.

00:09:08.000 It's sort of like me going to my living room to announce that I'm running for president of the United States.

00:09:11.000 Mar-a-Lago, everybody knows that's Trump's area.

00:09:14.000 If you were going to launch a popular movement, what you'd really want to do is do like a giant rally, right?

00:09:18.000 You announce this in advance, like I'm going to announce and we're not going to have a thousand people in the room.

00:09:23.000 We're going to have 20,000 people in the room, right?

00:09:26.000 We're going to show the power of the Trump train.

00:09:28.000 This train is going, it has no brakes, as they say.

00:09:30.000 And we have 20, 30,000, like, we'll fill a stadium with people who love Donald Trump.

00:09:35.000 And we'll scare the living bejesus out of everybody. 1.00

00:09:37.000 Because we'll be out there with a giant crowd.

00:09:39.000 Instead, he launched it at Mar-a-Lago, essentially in his backyard, in a ballroom, with like a thousand people, all of whom were sort of hand-picked friends, including people like Roger Stone, which, again, if you're going to have your campaign supporters, you probably should not try to stack people who are, actually have been indicted for crimes, like as a general matter.

00:09:55.000 You actually want kind of the best and the brightest.

00:09:57.000 Roger Stone is not the best and the brightest when it comes to like the people you want in your front row.

00:10:02.000 So there's some optical issues here too.

00:10:04.000 And what it really speaks to is that I got to say, just as an optical matter, this did not feel like it had the same sort of extraordinary impact as it did when Trump ran in 2015.

00:10:15.000 When Trump ran in 2015, it was like a bomb went off.

00:10:18.000 Like this was wild.

00:10:19.000 Nobody's ever seen anything like this.

00:10:21.000 Trump's been president.

00:10:22.000 And so your campaign as a former president versus your campaign as a real estate guru who's very famous for being on The Apprentice in 2015, that's a totally different thing.

00:10:30.000 And if you're running a very similar campaign to 2015 in 2022 or 2023, it doesn't feel the same.

00:10:37.000 And he has the gravitas of having been president behind him.

00:10:39.000 Which means he should be doing the Obama thing, right?

00:10:42.000 When Obama ran for re-election in 2012, he was doing it in, like, giant stadiums, Greek pantheon kind of stuff, fog machines, right?

00:10:49.000 That's what Trump really should have done last night in re-announcing that he was launching.

00:10:54.000 Instead, he did it in what felt like sort of the safest and most cautious way.

00:10:58.000 And he read from a teleprompter, which, of course, you would imagine he should do.

00:11:01.000 And it gave everybody who's a big Trump fan the opportunity to say, this is the moment Trump finally became president.

00:11:05.000 Listen, when he was president, I thought that best Trump was teleprompter Trump.

00:11:09.000 Whenever Trump was reading off the teleprompter, I was like, oh, thank God, he's going to say a bunch of useful things.

00:11:12.000 And then when you get off teleprompter, you're like, uh-oh, where is this going?

00:11:15.000 I have no idea.

00:11:16.000 Trump got off teleprompter a few times last night.

00:11:18.000 It was mostly funny.

00:11:20.000 But it didn't feel like top tier Trump.

00:11:23.000 It just didn't.

00:11:25.000 His energy level was fairly low last night.

00:11:28.000 He was not out there kind of roaring and growling the way that he typically does.

00:11:32.000 Now, does this mean that he can't win?

00:11:34.000 Of course not.

00:11:35.000 It's just a launch speech.

00:11:36.000 We have a long way to go.

00:11:37.000 And that's the whole point.

00:11:38.000 I think people who are jumping to, he's in, that means he's the nominee, which means he will be the president.

00:11:43.000 That is a lot of steps between here and there, my friends.

00:11:46.000 That's a lot of steps.

00:11:47.000 He's jumping in November.

00:11:48.000 There will be other people who jump in.

00:11:50.000 Of course.

00:11:50.000 Does he have the upper hand?

00:11:51.000 He has 30% of the base that loves the guy and will walk through fire for him.

00:11:55.000 That gives you a really strong base.

00:11:57.000 And in a divided primary, that could be well enough to just walk right through.

00:12:00.000 That's exactly what happened in 2015, 2016.

00:12:02.000 In the 2016 campaign, it wasn't like Trump was walking away with 70% of the vote.

00:12:05.000 He wasn't.

00:12:06.000 He was winning the early primaries with 25, 30% of the vote.

00:12:09.000 It was only at the very end, when the field had basically winnowed down to two, that he started winning 50% of the vote.

00:12:13.000 But that's enough.

00:12:14.000 It doesn't matter how you win, as long as you win.

00:12:17.000 So Trump does have a solid percentage of the base locked up, for sure.

00:12:20.000 But that doesn't mean there won't be other candidates.

00:12:22.000 There will be other candidates.

00:12:23.000 And then, if he gets the nomination, Number one, we don't know whether Biden's even going to be alive by that point.

00:12:23.000 It's very early.

00:12:28.000 But number two, even if Biden is alive, it's not clear where the economy is going to be.

00:12:31.000 One thing that is clear about Donald Trump as a candidate, one, he's extremely volatile.

00:12:35.000 We all know this.

00:12:37.000 We can keep kind of breezing past this, but it happens to be the chief characteristic of the man is that he's extraordinarily volatile, which means he's unpredictable.

00:12:45.000 It has its benefits.

00:12:46.000 It also has its major and severe drawbacks in a campaign, as we saw in 2020.

00:12:50.000 In 2016, it had great benefits.

00:12:51.000 It would say stuff nobody else would say.

00:12:52.000 In 2020, it had severe drawbacks.

00:12:54.000 It would say stuff nobody else would say as president.

00:12:57.000 It also shifts the focus back to Trump.

00:12:59.000 Because if every election is a question as to who the referendum is on, right?

00:13:05.000 Who are the people actually voting for or against?

00:13:07.000 They don't vote for two candidates.

00:13:08.000 They vote against one.

00:13:10.000 So the question in 2024 will be, are you voting based on Joe Biden or are you voting based on Donald Trump?

00:13:15.000 And again, Joe Biden is a nothing.

00:13:17.000 Joe Biden is a non-entity. 0.98

00:13:18.000 Joe Biden is an empty vessel.

00:13:20.000 And that means that he has a bit of an upper hand when it comes to Donald Trump.

00:13:23.000 There's not a person, ask any person in the United States their opinion on Donald Trump and they will give it to you.

00:13:28.000 Every single person.

00:13:29.000 And people don't change their minds.

00:13:31.000 If you think that a bunch of people who voted against Donald Trump in 2020 are going to vote for him in 2024, I challenge you to name who those people are.

00:13:39.000 By the way, same thing for Democrats.

00:13:40.000 If people voted for Trump in 2020 and you think they're going to vote for you in 2024, that's also not going to happen.

00:13:44.000 But Trump has to win more votes.

00:13:46.000 Biden does not have to win more votes.

00:13:48.000 So that's sort of where things stand.

00:13:49.000 So Trump doesn't come down an escalator this time.

00:13:52.000 Instead, Trump enters the room at Mar-a-Lago and he announces that America's comeback begins right now.

00:14:01.000 You and all of those watching are the heart and soul of this incredible movement and the greatest country in the history of the world.

00:14:10.000 It's very simple.

00:14:13.000 There has never been anything like it, this great movement of ours.

00:14:20.000 Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, and my fellow citizens, America's comeback starts right now.

00:14:31.000 Okay, so I mean that I think was the best line of his speech was the very opener and that was in 9.04 p.m.

00:14:35.000 This thing continued until 10.04 p.m.

00:14:37.000 It just kept kind of going.

00:14:39.000 That was the best part of his speech.

00:14:41.000 Now, again, the speech kind of separates into a few different categories.

00:14:44.000 If we're going to go through the thing.

00:14:46.000 So first, there was the actual sort of pitch for Trump.

00:14:50.000 Things were excellent when I was president. 0.98

00:14:52.000 Things suck under Joe Biden. 0.79

00:14:55.000 He tried to spin the 2022 election as victory for him. 0.97

00:14:58.000 That, as we'll talk about, is not particularly accurate, but he has to do it, obviously.

00:15:02.000 Yes, that's kind of section one, is why I should be president.

00:15:04.000 Then he got to the Festivus section of the speech, which we'll get to in a bit.

00:15:09.000 The Festivus section is where he went into his grievances.

00:15:12.000 And honestly, the question is where the grievances are going to play.

00:15:15.000 The part about whether Donald Trump was a good president, I think that most people agree that Donald Trump did good things while he was president of the United States.

00:15:22.000 His post-presidency is another question. 0.98

00:15:23.000 I think most people agree that Joe Biden is a crappy president. 0.92

00:15:27.000 The real question is whether Trump is going to be able to channel his grievances into grievances on behalf of everybody else. 0.91

00:15:32.000 That was section two, was the Festivus section of the speech.

00:15:35.000 And then there was the State of the Union section of the speech where he just started kind of throwing out policy ideas. 0.90

00:15:40.000 So we begin with the actual core of the speech, which is, America is great under me and it sucks under Joe Biden.

00:15:45.000 And fair enough, here was Donald Trump talking about how the world was at peace when he was president. 0.88

00:15:50.000 My opponents made me out to be a warmonger.

00:15:54.000 And just a terrible person who would immediately go into war.

00:15:59.000 They said during the 2016 campaign that if he becomes president, there will never be a war within weeks.

00:16:06.000 And we will have wars like you've never seen before.

00:16:11.000 It will happen immediately.

00:16:12.000 And yet, I've gone decades, decades, without a war, the first president to do it for that long a period.

00:16:21.000 The world was at peace, America was prospering, and our country was on track for an amazing future.

00:16:31.000 Because I made big promises to the American people, and unlike other presidents, I kept my promises.

00:16:39.000 Okay, all of that is his best pitch, right?

00:16:41.000 Except for the part where there hasn't been war for decades.

00:16:43.000 I don't know what that part is about.

00:16:45.000 That's not true.

00:16:46.000 But what he's saying there, that the world was at peace, that we were set for a great economic recovery, that the economy was excellent under Donald.

00:16:52.000 I mean, all of that is true.

00:16:53.000 I wish that had been the campaign of 2020.

00:16:54.000 That would have been amazing.

00:16:56.000 If the campaign of 2020 had been, look at all these amazing things I'm doing.

00:16:56.000 Right?

00:16:58.000 Also, we're going to work hard to reopen the economy.

00:17:01.000 We've got the vaccines on track.

00:17:02.000 So guys, stick with me.

00:17:03.000 We have a plan.

00:17:04.000 And that'd been the entire campaign.

00:17:05.000 I think he would still be president of the United States right now.

00:17:08.000 So rerunning that campaign in 2024 is what he has to do.

00:17:12.000 He also went out of his way to make jokes about Joe Biden.

00:17:14.000 And listen, I appreciate a good joke about Joe Biden.

00:17:17.000 Here is Donald Trump pointing out that he's alive while Joe Biden is falling asleep at global conferences.

00:17:24.000 People are going absolutely wild and crazy, and they're not happy.

00:17:29.000 They're very, very angry.

00:17:32.000 Now we have a president who falls asleep at global conferences.

00:17:40.000 Was held in contempt by the British Parliament over Afghanistan.

00:17:46.000 They're going wild and crazy!

00:17:49.000 Okay, this is best Trump, right? 0.99

00:17:51.000 Best Trump is where he's like slapping at Joe Biden for being narcoleptic.

00:17:55.000 I will admit, very, very funny.

00:17:57.000 I enjoy that.

00:17:59.000 And then Trump got to the section where he sort of had to, I would say, recapitulate the 2022 election.

00:18:05.000 He has sort of recast it as a win for himself.

00:18:06.000 Because the problem for Trump in the 2022 election is that in the swing states, he endorsed in primaries a lot of candidates who then went on to lose.

00:18:14.000 And he didn't give them a lot of money.

00:18:15.000 And virtually all of the candidates who are in sort of the most contested areas and Trump got behind did really, really poorly.

00:18:23.000 So his record in the midterms was not good.

00:18:24.000 He has to recapitulate that as a big win for Republicans driven by him.

00:18:27.000 Now, good luck with that.

00:18:29.000 I don't think that that dog hunts.

00:18:30.000 I think most Americans, most, most Republicans are still extraordinarily disappointed about the results of last week's election because that was supposed to be a wave election.

00:18:37.000 And instead it was barely a trickle.

00:18:39.000 Republicans are going to take the house by like two seats.

00:18:41.000 That is not a good result, and they lost the Senate.

00:18:43.000 So again, Trump has to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse here, so he does his best.

00:18:50.000 Exactly one week ago, our citizens voted in the important midterm elections.

00:18:56.000 And despite a ridiculously long and unnecessary period of waiting, far longer in fact than any third world country, just a short time ago, the Republicans won back control of the House of Representatives.

00:19:12.000 And it was with a great Trump-endorsed candidate, Congressman-elect Kevin Kiley, who is a fantastic person.

00:19:21.000 Okay, and then he made his final point here, which is that Nancy Pelosi is fired, so that means it's a big win.

00:19:29.000 Okay, well, getting rid of Nancy Pelosi was sort of a given.

00:19:32.000 Let's be real about this.

00:19:32.000 The baseline was that Republicans were going to take the house.

00:19:34.000 There's almost no way for them not to take the house, and they almost blew it anyway.

00:19:37.000 Here's Trump trying to play that as victory.

00:19:39.000 Again, he has to, politically speaking.

00:19:41.000 I don't blame him for that.

00:19:42.000 It's what he has to do.

00:19:43.000 He has to.

00:19:44.000 Trump's brand is built on winning.

00:19:45.000 The problem for him is that he didn't win in 2020.

00:19:47.000 He lost two Senate seats in Georgia in 2021, and his candidates lost a bevy of races in 2022 in the greatest single first-term underperformance by an opposing party in modern American history.

00:19:57.000 So he has to somehow come up with a victory.

00:19:58.000 So what he's going to come up with is Nancy Pelosi as Speaker.

00:20:00.000 Yeah, that's a victory.

00:20:01.000 It just wasn't the baseline of what we were looking for.

00:20:03.000 And it's going to be a very hard, it's going to be a rather unworkable majority to have a majority of like two votes in the House.

00:20:09.000 But with all that said, again, he's got to do what he's got to do.

00:20:11.000 Here's Trump.

00:20:13.000 Breaking the radical Democrats grip on Congress was crucial.

00:20:18.000 So in other words, because of our great congressmen and all of our great congressmen and congresswomen We have taken over Congress.

00:20:29.000 Nancy Pelosi has been fired.

00:20:31.000 Okay, that's not because of him.

00:20:35.000 I mean, the reality is that it was a bunch of moderate Republicans in New York who put Republicans over the top in the House, and virtually all of them don't even want him to run.

00:20:43.000 So on a factual level, what he's saying is not true, that he was like the guy who put Republicans over the top.

00:20:47.000 Factually speaking, he was the guy who kind of nearly prevented Republicans from going over the top in the House and did prevent them from going over the top in the Senate.

00:20:55.000 But again, he's running for president.

00:20:56.000 So of course he's going to play this in the most positive possible light.

00:20:59.000 I just think that most Republicans are not on board for that.

00:21:02.000 We'll get some more on this in just one second.

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00:23:14.000 Okay, finally, he gets to his announcement of the candidacy.

00:23:18.000 It took him a while to get here.

00:23:20.000 So, finally, he said he was going to announce his candidacy for president, and in the process, he expanded MAGA.

00:23:24.000 He's not just going to make America great again.

00:23:26.000 He's going to go even further.

00:23:28.000 America won't just be great.

00:23:29.000 America will also be glorious.

00:23:30.000 There is the president.

00:23:33.000 In order to make America great and glorious again, I am tonight announcing my candidacy for president of the United States.

00:23:42.000 Together we will be taking on the most corrupt forces and entrenched interests imaginable.

00:23:49.000 Our country is in a Horrible state.

00:23:52.000 We're in grave trouble.

00:23:54.000 This is not a task for a politician or a conventional candidate.

00:23:58.000 This is a task for a great movement that embodies the courage, confidence and the spirit of the American people.

00:24:05.000 So there are a couple of things that he says there.

00:24:08.000 One is that apparently MAGA has now been expanded.

00:24:11.000 We're going to make America great and glorious, spectacular and gorgeous, tremendous and groovy and grand.

00:24:18.000 We will call it the MAGAGA SAGA TAGAGA movement.

00:24:22.000 MAGAGA SAGA TAGAGA movement will be- Okay, so. 0.71

00:24:31.000 Is it MAGAGA?

00:24:31.000 I think it's just MAGAGA.

00:24:32.000 I think he went off script there to make America glorious as well as great.

00:24:35.000 But he then goes out of his way to kind of subtly sideswipe all of the other candidates.

00:24:39.000 That it won't take a conventional po- You were president, dude.

00:24:42.000 Let's be real about this.

00:24:43.000 He's campaigning as an anti-establishment non-politician.

00:24:46.000 He was the president.

00:24:48.000 He's running the same campaign playbook he did in 2015.

00:24:51.000 That's not the right playbook.

00:24:52.000 Again, he has a lot to brag about.

00:24:53.000 He was the president of the United States.

00:24:55.000 The first part of his speech was the part that actually matters.

00:24:58.000 But then he's running as You're not an outsider.

00:25:02.000 You are the president of the United States.

00:25:04.000 You're the titular leader of the Republican Party, like right now.

00:25:07.000 You are the establishment in many ways.

00:25:09.000 Nobody in the kind of formal Republican Party has gone up against Trump.

00:25:13.000 And they're all afraid of him.

00:25:14.000 So this notion that he's sort of running as an outsider, I don't think that it has the same sort of appeal because he's in control of the levers.

00:25:21.000 And he has been in control of the levers since 2016 when he won the nomination.

00:25:25.000 So it's kind of a weird take.

00:25:27.000 And the notion, again, that he is separate from the conventional politicians.

00:25:31.000 Presumably what he means here is Ron Desangimonious.

00:25:33.000 Ron, the good old Ron.

00:25:35.000 By the way, I don't think that nickname is going to stick.

00:25:37.000 I think pretty soon you're going to see Trump go after his height, right?

00:25:39.000 It'll be little Ron, small Ron, short Ron.

00:25:43.000 Short round run!

00:25:44.000 That's where this is going.

00:25:46.000 We all know where it's going.

00:25:47.000 But the fact that Trump is trying to distinguish himself, that's why he launched early.

00:25:53.000 The reason he launched early, he's not in the same position that he was in 2015 when he came in like Miley Cyrus on a wrecking ball.

00:25:59.000 Right now, he is an established politician, was the President of the United States, and who has run two presidential campaigns.

00:26:07.000 And running as an outsider is a strange take that I don't think is going to play again.

00:26:12.000 Instead, it seems like what he's trying to do is suggest that it's about, quote-unquote, the movement.

00:26:17.000 So he says, it's not just a campaign, it's a quest to save the country.

00:26:22.000 Okay, again, it's a pitch, it's a pitch.

00:26:22.000 It's bigger than me.

00:26:25.000 I think it's sort of undercut by the Festivus section of the speech, but this is pitch.

00:26:30.000 We need everyone involved.

00:26:32.000 We need everyone's help.

00:26:34.000 We need to look out for one another.

00:26:37.000 We need to be friends.

00:26:39.000 And we need every patriot on board.

00:26:41.000 Because this is not just a campaign.

00:26:50.000 This is a quest to save our country.

00:26:54.000 Talking about saving our country.

00:26:59.000 Okay, so that's the pitch.

00:27:00.000 That was the original pitch, is I was a good president, Joe Biden was a bad president, we don't need a conventional politician, we need an outsider, even though I'm pretty establishment at this point.

00:27:07.000 Again, when you control the leaves of power, you're no longer the anti-establishment candidate.

00:27:11.000 You are the establishment candidate, just formally speaking.

00:27:14.000 That's the pitch.

00:27:15.000 And then we get to the Festivus section.

00:27:16.000 The Festivus section is where Trump sort of plays himself as a victim of nefarious forces.

00:27:21.000 This is the part that his crowd actually wants from him.

00:27:23.000 So the original part of the speech, that's for like everybody.

00:27:25.000 And then there's the part that's just for sort of the Trump crowd, the people who love Trump.

00:27:29.000 Because Trump's entire pitch has been, I take bullets for you.

00:27:32.000 And so this is the part where he is both great MAGA warrior or MAGAGA SAGA TAGA warrior, but also the most victimized man in America.

00:27:39.000 And again, there's truth to the idea that people despise him on the left and have used nefarious means in order to take him down.

00:27:45.000 This is certainly true during his presidency.

00:27:48.000 This is the dirty secret of the campaign, is that the more fire he draws, the stronger Trump becomes.

00:27:53.000 This has always been true of Trump.

00:27:55.000 Trump is like Doomsday in DC Comics.

00:27:57.000 The more energy you expend attacking him, the more he grows.

00:28:01.000 Which is why, again, if you're a rival of Donald Trump, the best thing that you can do is not engage.

00:28:05.000 You should stay far, far away.

00:28:07.000 You should let him sort of punch himself out.

00:28:08.000 George Foreman sticking against Muhammad Ali style, just strategically speaking.

00:28:12.000 So this is the thing that I think a lot of people love about him, is the fact that he is actually the complaints.

00:28:18.000 Like all the things the left hates about him the most, which is that he's constantly complaining about how he's victimized and all this.

00:28:23.000 People on the right feel as though they have been victimized by the left.

00:28:26.000 They feel as though they've been targeted by the government.

00:28:28.000 They feel as though the cultural forces are arrayed against them.

00:28:31.000 And so when he complains about this stuff, they feel solidarity with Trump.

00:28:33.000 People see this as a weakness of Trump.

00:28:35.000 It actually isn't a weakness of Trump.

00:28:36.000 It's a strength of Trump, at least with his base.

00:28:38.000 Now, do I think that runs broad spectrum?

00:28:40.000 I don't think the American people are truly invested in candidates who treat themselves as victims.

00:28:45.000 I think that's off-putting to the American people.

00:28:47.000 But to the base, Many of whom understand that the forces of culture and the forces of government and the forces of academia and the forces of federal law enforcement, like there are a lot of things.

00:28:58.000 The educational system are arrayed against their interests.

00:29:01.000 Him complaining about it actually isn't a bug, it's a feature.

00:29:03.000 So he did a lot of that last night.

00:29:05.000 Trump, near the very beginning of the speech actually, implied that China had stolen the 2020 election, which is a new theory I hadn't heard before.

00:29:12.000 No president had ever sought or received one dollar for our country from China until I came along and we were getting hundreds of billions of dollars.

00:29:24.000 Many people think that because of this, China played a very active role in the 2020 election.

00:29:31.000 Just saying.

00:29:33.000 Election.

00:29:34.000 OK, so there's there's a new theory of interference in the 2020.

00:29:38.000 First, it was that the votes were faked.

00:29:40.000 Including the raid of a very beautiful house that sits right here.

00:29:44.000 The raid of Mar-a-Lago, think of it.

00:29:45.000 And I say, why didn't you raid Bush's place?

00:29:46.000 in 2020. OK, fine. And then he goes on to talk about the raid on Mar-a-Lago. And this is like well into the speech. This is 50 minutes into the speech. A lot of people are already asleep at this point. But here here's Trump, including the raid of a very beautiful house that sits right here. The raid of Mar-a-Lago. Think of it.

00:30:05.000 And I say, why didn't you raid Bush's place? Why didn't you raid Clinton? Thirty two thousand emails.

00:30:11.000 Why didn't you raid Clinton's place?

00:30:13.000 Why didn't you do Obama, who took a lot of things with him?

00:30:19.000 Well, I mean, not to get technical, but the reason is because the National Archives approached Trump about 27 times and asked him for the documents and he didn't turn them over.

00:30:26.000 Again, do I think that means that the FBI should have gone into his house searching for these crucial, vital documents?

00:30:31.000 No.

00:30:32.000 Do I think that Trump should be prosecuted over this nonsense?

00:30:35.000 No.

00:30:36.000 I think it's very difficult to hold that standard about the mishandling of classified information when Hillary Clinton had it on an internet server, which James Comey admitted could have been hacked and probably was hacked by foreign adversaries, while Trump had printed out documents in a box in the back room.

00:30:49.000 Now the FBI is admitting that he did it not because he was going to sell it to the Russians or the Chinese, but because he just likes documents.

00:30:49.000 My one boy.

00:30:54.000 And Trump was like, I like that document.

00:30:56.000 It has Kim Jong-un's signature on it.

00:30:58.000 I will keep it forever.

00:30:59.000 Like that.

00:31:00.000 That's not a good reason to prosecute Donald Trump.

00:31:02.000 So I get it.

00:31:03.000 I get it.

00:31:04.000 He continued along these lines.

00:31:05.000 He suggested that his son Eric was being put upon in the manner of Al Capone, which is a strange comparison because Al Capone was an actual criminal.

00:31:13.000 I assume Eric is not.

00:31:16.000 My one boy stand up, Eric.

00:31:29.000 I think he got more subpoenas than any man in the history of our country.

00:31:33.000 So unfair.

00:31:35.000 Al Capone, you all heard of the great gangster?

00:31:38.000 Al Capone got far less.

00:31:41.000 Billy the Kid got almost none.

00:31:44.000 Jesse James, no.

00:31:46.000 Eric Trump got more subpoenas.

00:31:48.000 He's a PhD in subpoenas.

00:31:50.000 They come from Congress.

00:31:54.000 I will say, I love Trump's frames of reference.

00:31:56.000 They're great.

00:31:56.000 I mean, like, his criminal frame of reference ends about 1950.

00:31:59.000 Like, all the criminals he's naming are, like, Billy the Kid, who I believe was killed in the 1890s.

00:32:07.000 Jesse James.

00:32:08.000 I don't know if he was watching the assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford, but what exactly happened here?

00:32:13.000 Al Capone is just watching the end.

00:32:14.000 I was watching The Untouchables.

00:32:16.000 Al Capone, very victimized man.

00:32:18.000 All he wanted was to give the people a little bit of...

00:32:23.000 It's entertaining.

00:32:24.000 It is definitely.

00:32:25.000 And then Trump got to the sort of State of the Union section.

00:32:25.000 OK.

00:32:28.000 It's a very, very long speech.

00:32:30.000 This is the part.

00:32:31.000 The question is, when he dropped the bomb and he's going to run again, does that have impact?

00:32:35.000 The length of the speech weighs against that.

00:32:37.000 He got into the State of the Union section of the speech by talking about all the magical things that he wants.

00:32:43.000 Some are good.

00:32:44.000 Some are strange.

00:32:45.000 He said, for example, he wants to abolish all the Biden COVID mandates.

00:32:48.000 Good.

00:32:49.000 I mean, yes, that would be good.

00:32:50.000 I assume that will be a predicate for literally any Republican campaign, but okay.

00:32:55.000 As commander-in-chief, I will get Biden's radical left ideology out of our military.

00:33:01.000 And I did.

00:33:03.000 I did.

00:33:03.000 And in the first day, they put it back.

00:33:05.000 They signed an executive order and they put it back.

00:33:07.000 It was gone.

00:33:09.000 We will abolish every Biden COVID mandate and rehire every patriot who was fired from our military with an apology and full back pay.

00:33:21.000 Okay, I mean, that's good.

00:33:22.000 I wish you hadn't put Anthony Fauci in charge of the entire country's COVID policy.

00:33:25.000 That would have been better.

00:33:26.000 You were president during the beginning of COVID, and I think a lot of people are going to remember that.

00:33:30.000 He also pledged to plant a flag on the surface of Mars.

00:33:34.000 I like when presidents make promises that they don't actually have any way to achieve.

00:33:43.000 It's like when Joe Biden's like, I'm gonna cure cancer, all we need to do, if we take a fire hose of money, and we shoot it at cancer, a man dressed in a cancer outfit, we shoot him with a fire hose of money, like a shotgun, bang, bang, twice in the air, with a fire hose of money, and cancer will go away, we'll cure it, by some ball, cancer.

00:34:04.000 That's not actually how you solve scientific problems.

00:34:06.000 But here's President Trump pledging that he's gonna put a flag on the surface of Mars.

00:34:11.000 We'll explore new universes!

00:34:13.000 Space is the final frontier!

00:34:16.000 We will defend life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

00:34:21.000 We will expand the frontiers of human knowledge and extend the horizons of human achievement.

00:34:28.000 And we will plant our beautiful American flag very soon on the surface of Mars, which I got started.

00:34:38.000 We will there's we will seek out new life, new civilizations.

00:34:42.000 We will boldly go where no man.

00:34:44.000 I mean, honestly, I'm kind of into it.

00:34:48.000 I like Space Force.

00:34:49.000 I'm into Space Force.

00:34:51.000 He also said he wants congressional term limits.

00:34:52.000 And this is really funny because a lot of people on the right are like, that's amazing!

00:34:55.000 I would also love congressional term limits.

00:34:57.000 Yeah, try getting it through a Democratic Senate.

00:34:59.000 Also, why is that Senate Democratic right now?

00:35:01.000 You think the Democratic Senator is going to vote for term limits?

00:35:03.000 How do you think that's going to go exactly?

00:35:06.000 To further drain the swamp, I will push for a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on members of Congress.

00:35:14.000 It's time.

00:35:15.000 It's true.

00:35:16.000 And I will ask for a permanent ban on taxpayer funding of campaigns.

00:35:28.000 A lifetime ban on lobbying by former members of Congress and cabinet members.

00:35:33.000 Yeah.

00:35:34.000 Bye.

00:35:36.000 OK, I mean, fine.

00:35:37.000 All right.

00:35:38.000 You got a Democratic Senate.

00:35:40.000 But all this is fine again.

00:35:42.000 So here is the final verdict on this.

00:35:45.000 It's fine.

00:35:46.000 He's allowed to run again.

00:35:47.000 Do I think that it has all of the electricity of 2015?

00:35:49.000 Not even close.

00:35:50.000 Do I think the presentation was lackluster?

00:35:52.000 I do.

00:35:53.000 Do I think it took way too long?

00:35:54.000 Yes.

00:35:56.000 Does he have the upper hand in the primaries?

00:35:57.000 Of course.

00:35:57.000 He's the former president of the United States, the built-in base of 30%.

00:36:00.000 So yes.

00:36:01.000 Is he going to recapture the excitement of the base?

00:36:04.000 After the debacle of 2020, 2021, and 2022, I have doubts.

00:36:07.000 The door is very much open on the nomination in 2024, and anybody who's trying to close that door is going to have a real hard time of it this early, when literally no one else is in the race or is going to get in the race for another eight months.

00:36:19.000 So it's something Trump had to do.

00:36:20.000 I don't know that he had to do it this early.

00:36:21.000 I think it's actually poor strategy to do it this early.

00:36:23.000 I think he would've been better off sitting it out.

00:36:25.000 Because then you force everybody else to basically make the calculation.

00:36:28.000 Do I want to get in and get clocked by this guy?

00:36:29.000 He hasn't even jumped in yet.

00:36:31.000 Now everybody gets to sit out and watch this thing play for eight months and see how, I mean, maybe Trump does amazing and he's consolidating the base and 75% of Republicans are into him.

00:36:39.000 Or maybe he exhausts everybody.

00:36:41.000 And the polls keep coming out showing independents don't like him.

00:36:44.000 And it becomes clear to people that he's not going to win re-election.

00:36:48.000 There's a lot of time and time is not Donald Trump's friend here.

00:36:51.000 Time is Donald Trump's enemy.

00:36:53.000 Launching this early is, I think, a strategic error by the former president.

00:36:57.000 Now, it doesn't mean, again, it doesn't mean he can't win.

00:36:59.000 He certainly can.

00:37:00.000 He's a very powerful figure.

00:37:02.000 He's a unique figure in American politics.

00:37:04.000 The easiest way for him to win is something that the media are doing literally right now.

00:37:07.000 We'll get into that in one second.

00:37:09.000 Well, folks, here at The Daily Wire, we're doing everything we can to loosen the left's grip on culture.

00:37:13.000 We have been fighting them on every available front.

00:37:16.000 What Is A Woman, the most successful documentary of the last 10 years, probably, fighting back against the radical gender ideology.

00:37:23.000 Our investigations in Loudoun County leading to the Democratic gubernatorial candidate losing.

00:37:28.000 We fought back against OSHA.

00:37:29.000 We actually sued the Biden administration to prevent the OSHA vaccine mandate from going forward.

00:37:33.000 All this is a lot of work.

00:37:34.000 There's still a long way to go, but you can help in two simple steps.

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00:37:38.000 Just stop that.

00:37:38.000 Two, start shaving with Jeremy's.

00:37:40.000 We are building alternatives.

00:37:41.000 The left is betting you won't use those alternatives.

00:37:43.000 Prove them wrong.

00:37:44.000 Go to jeremysrazors.com and get your Founders Series shave kit today.

00:37:47.000 That's jeremysrazors.com today.

00:37:50.000 Okay, so.

00:37:51.000 The easiest path for Donald Trump to regain the nomination and then the presidency is, as I say, for people to attack him with alacrity.

00:37:57.000 Just go after him.

00:37:59.000 Particularly the left.

00:38:00.000 The left or anybody who's seen as sort of establishment Republican.

00:38:05.000 National Review put out a piece today titled No.

00:38:08.000 That was literally the name of the piece, just No.

00:38:10.000 That's exactly what Trump wants.

00:38:12.000 I mean, strategically speaking, what Trump wants is an opposition to run against.

00:38:15.000 He needs it.

00:38:15.000 He needs the pressure.

00:38:17.000 The worst thing for Trump is he jumps in, cannonball in the pool, and no one else in the pool, and they're all like, okay, I guess someone jumped in the pool.

00:38:25.000 If that's what happens to Trump, then he hasn't generated the attention he needs.

00:38:29.000 Trump thrives on opposition.

00:38:31.000 He loves it.

00:38:32.000 He's a street fighter, he's a pugilist, and this is what he needs, this is what he wants.

00:38:37.000 He's oppositional.

00:38:39.000 That is his attitude toward life, it is his attitude toward politics.

00:38:41.000 If there's nothing for him to push against, that's a problem for him.

00:38:44.000 The media actually want him nominated because they think that he's very beatable.

00:38:48.000 And so they are eager.

00:38:49.000 I mean, first of all, they make tons of money off Donald Trump.

00:38:52.000 The Washington Post, the New York Times.

00:38:54.000 I mean, Washington Post literally put up a slogan, Democracy Dies in Darkness, after the 2016 election because they basically had declared themselves enemies of Donald Trump.

00:39:03.000 The New York Times blew up in terms of subscriber numbers when Donald Trump was president, and then it sort of flatlined after he wasn't president anymore.

00:39:10.000 CNN's ratings were so much better when Trump was president.

00:39:13.000 MSNBC was doing amazing when Trump was president.

00:39:16.000 In other words, the entire media infrastructure desperately wants Trump for two reasons.

00:39:19.000 One, they love the guy.

00:39:22.000 Their people despise Trump, and they want to talk about how much they despise Trump.

00:39:25.000 It makes them feel morally superior.

00:39:27.000 Two, so there's the money reason.

00:39:29.000 Two, they think Trump's going to lose.

00:39:31.000 They think he's going to lose because his approval ratings right now are 44% and in head-to-head matchups against Biden, he loses.

00:39:36.000 And so they think, okay, well, he underperformed in 2020 and 2021 and 2022.

00:39:40.000 Let's do it again.

00:39:41.000 Let's rerun this playbook.

00:39:43.000 Why do you think that Joe Biden was sending out fundraising emails literally in the middle of Trump's speech?

00:39:48.000 He literally was sending fundraising emails in the middle of the speech because he knows that he can raise tremendous money from Democrats simply by uttering Trump's name.

00:39:56.000 It's why Democrats ran against Trump in this election cycle.

00:39:58.000 They didn't run against Kevin McCarthy.

00:40:00.000 They didn't run against pretty much anybody else.

00:40:02.000 It was all Trump and quote-unquote the Trump candidates.

00:40:05.000 It was the mega-mega, saga-jaga Republicans. 0.82

00:40:07.000 The ultra-mega, super-duper, pooper-scooper Republicans.

00:40:10.000 And that's why Biden did that.

00:40:12.000 He sent out an email last night.

00:40:13.000 Tonight, Donald Trump announced he's running again.

00:40:14.000 I'm going to let you in on a secret.

00:40:16.000 He will fail.

00:40:17.000 In a moment, I'm going to tell you why.

00:40:18.000 But people like you stepping up will be a big part of how it's done.

00:40:21.000 Blue groups last night raised an enormous sum of cash.

00:40:25.000 They did great.

00:40:26.000 So they want Trump.

00:40:28.000 And so this allows them to play their favorite game, which is we will call Trump names.

00:40:32.000 Trump will then thrive on that because they know, the media know, whatever they say, Republicans will do the opposite.

00:40:38.000 Good, bad, or indifferent.

00:40:39.000 If Democrats declare that Donald Trump is the worst person in the world, Republicans will immediately reject the media and say, no, no, no, he's the greatest.

00:40:46.000 And it works like all the time.

00:40:47.000 Sometimes it works to their benefit, right?

00:40:49.000 Sometimes it works to the benefit of Republicans.

00:40:50.000 Media labeled Ron DeSantis the enemy of the people in 2020.

00:40:54.000 And now Ron DeSantis won Florida by 20 points.

00:40:56.000 Sometimes it's the media saying, Marjorie Taylor Greene is the danger to the Republican.

00:40:59.000 Suddenly Marjorie Taylor Greene is like doing photo ops with Trump because the base is like, well, if the left takes Marjorie Taylor Greene, she must be the greatest.

00:41:05.000 Not just like a Republican, the best Republican.

00:41:08.000 And so this is the game they're playing with Trump.

00:41:10.000 It's actually what he wants, which is why you are seeing the media do it in part.

00:41:14.000 And they get to win all and this is winning for the media involves making money and also achieving your political results.

00:41:20.000 And again, they may be cruising for a bruising.

00:41:22.000 They may get Trump nominated and then lose to him as they did in 2016.

00:41:25.000 Or maybe maybe they do what they actually did in a bunch of Republican primaries.

00:41:29.000 Democrats, remember, spent millions of dollars to put Trump backed candidates over the top in places like New Hampshire, specifically because they thought they were weak and they were right.

00:41:38.000 It was a great return on investment.

00:41:39.000 Where Democrats were able to get more MAGA candidates nominated in states during the 2022 election, those people generally lost.

00:41:47.000 It was really cynical and really ugly, and they did it.

00:41:49.000 And they're doing the same thing with Trump himself now.

00:41:50.000 This is why NPR runs headlines like this.

00:41:53.000 Donald Trump, who tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and inspired a deadly riot at the Capitol in a desperate attempt to keep himself in power, has filed to run for president again in 2024.

00:42:01.000 Why do you think NPR is running that headline?

00:42:04.000 Is that an objective headline?

00:42:06.000 Or is NPR attempting to tweak Trump?

00:42:08.000 And tweak his supporters? 0.97

00:42:10.000 So they're all like, you know what, screw you, I like the guy. 0.99

00:42:12.000 Washington Post, same thing. 0.85

00:42:14.000 Trump, who as president fomented an insurrection, says he is running again.

00:42:18.000 You think the Washington Post is doing that because they are following objective journalism?

00:42:21.000 I mean, I could just as easily run a headline about Joe Biden.

00:42:24.000 Joe Biden, about whom there are serious mental health questions, age questions, and corruption questions, and who has been credibly accused of forcible sexual assault.

00:42:34.000 Runs for president again.

00:42:35.000 I can do that too.

00:42:36.000 Anyone can play that game.

00:42:37.000 It's not hard to play that game.

00:42:38.000 The question is why they're playing the game.

00:42:39.000 And the answer is, one, they make tons of money off it.

00:42:42.000 And two, they achieve their political goals.

00:42:43.000 They please their base by attacking Trump.

00:42:45.000 Their base loves it.

00:42:46.000 And also, they cause Republicans to fall into the backing Trump category in opposition.

00:42:52.000 That's the game.

00:42:53.000 And that's the goal.

00:42:54.000 Alrighty, guys.

00:42:55.000 The rest of the show is continuing right now.

00:42:56.000 You're not going to want to miss it.

00:42:57.000 We'll be getting into the media's attacks on Trump and what they are hoping to accomplish.

00:43:00.000 Plus, Matt Walsh stops by to talk about his marriage conversation with Joe Rogan.

The Ben Shapiro Show - November 16, 2022

Trump’s In | Ep. 1612

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