00:00:14.000You're going to love her commentary on whether or not Biden will debate and so much more.
00:00:18.000Please consider supporting our program at charliekirk.com slash support, charliekirk.com/slash support.
00:00:24.000Please email us freedom at charliekirk.com with any questions you have, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:29.000And if you guys want to get involved with Turning Point USA, the nation's largest, most critical organization fighting for America, our future, liberty and freedom on high school and college campuses across the country, go to tpusa.com, tpusa.com.
00:01:07.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:47.000You have been commenting, I think, correctly, that Joe Biden has been going in the wrong direction.
00:01:52.000What do you make of the state of the race as of today?
00:01:56.000Well, I know that the big joke on Joe Biden is that he plagiarizes everything, but watching his behavior on the so-called campaign trail kind of proves that.
00:02:07.000He's continuing his lead from behind attitude and procedure, just like President Obama did on a number of issues.
00:02:16.000You know, he's visiting Kenosha now that President Trump has visited Kenosha, Wisconsin.
00:02:22.000We actively await for the Democratic governor there to tell him he should not come, as he told President Trump.
00:02:29.000You know, he outlined his vision for how he would have handled the China coronavirus, but he did everything following what President Trump has already done, pulling, especially like manufacturing a PPE out of China, getting our drugs manufactured in the United States, invoking the Defense Production Act, et cetera, et cetera.
00:02:51.000So in terms of how they're doing, they seem to be following President Trump's lead on the issues.
00:02:58.000But in terms of other things that they're doing, you know, Joe Biden today gave a press conference for the first time in weeks, took some questions.
00:03:08.000He's, you know, before the convention thought that he could win this thing by simply staying at home and speaking to people over the internet.
00:03:16.000We know that's not true now as they kind of hit the panic button and try and get him into places for short periods of time.
00:03:21.000I think they're really starting to realize that the Trump campaign has the upper hand when it comes to the grassroots campaign, the ground game, and what they actually built for the president over the last four years with the momentum of the 2016 win.
00:03:38.000And what I mean by that is the Trump campaign and the RNC have been knocking on a million doors a week.
00:03:43.000The Biden campaign has done none of that.
00:03:45.000Vice President Mike Pence has been in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania for weeks now going around talking to voters.
00:03:56.000Biden's campaign has done none of that.
00:03:58.000It's almost like they haven't learned that you can't win states by not going to them, especially when you're trying to win back voters.
00:04:05.000So, you know, everybody always cites the polling, which is tightening now, but polling is just one aspect of this bigger, you know, complex issue of the campaign.
00:04:15.000And on the grassroots effort and getting into, you know, the inboxes and at the front doors of voters, the Trump campaign is just far and beyond what anything the Biden campaign has been able to accomplish at this time.
00:04:42.000And President Trump won Wisconsin and, of course, similar in Michigan.
00:04:46.000Your Twitter has been terrific lately.
00:04:48.000And you retweeted a series of tweets calling out Governor Evers, who this was Reince Priebus' tweet, which I thought was terrific.
00:04:55.000He said, waiting for Governor Evers' statement asking Joe Biden not to come to Kenosha.
00:05:00.000Now, it's really interesting to me why Joe Biden would be going to visit a site of peaceful protests and why he now feels the need to do it.
00:05:06.000My working theory on this, Katie, is that Joe Biden and the Democrats made a very big, awful error in judgment.
00:05:13.000And I said this on our podcast recently, that Joe Biden, if all he had to do was come out and denounce the violence and the protests and what they were doing just slightly, and it very well could have been a political deathblow to Donald Trump.
00:05:25.000In fact, their gaslighting of acting as if these don't exist and just poking people in the eyes and saying, oh, they're just peaceful protests, I think it opened up an opportunity for President Trump to turn this into a political horse race, just really much tighter than it really should have been in this summer, if we're honest with ourselves, Katie.
00:05:41.000I mean, it's hard to run when the entire country is locked down and there's a virus and everyone's politicizing it and the media is against you.
00:05:48.000What is your take on how the Democrats have been handling this riots issue?
00:05:51.000I'm of the opinion it really just started to turn right around Don Lemon talking to Chris Cuomo.
00:05:57.000It's felt like a kind of a backroom conversation that became public almost on air, where he said, Chris, you know it's showing up in the polling.
00:06:04.000And it seems from that moment forward, the Democrats started to have a new posture on these riots and protests.
00:06:10.000What's your take on this and how it has benefited the president?
00:06:14.000Yeah, so the first thing is I think you're right about Don Lemon and the media giving the instructions to the Biden campaign about how they should be handling these things, which gives you another insight into where they stand.
00:06:27.000But I remember distinctly Joe Biden giving a speech in August and mentioning this and changing his tune about the violence.
00:06:36.000And it was really the first time he had given a harsher condemnation of it.
00:06:40.000Let's not forget that Kamala Harris was tweeting out links earlier in the summer to bail funds for rioters who were arrested in places like Minneapolis.
00:06:51.000And a number of their campaign staffers who still work for the campaign donated money or were bailed out by that funding.
00:06:59.000So they were actively engaged in promoting and encouraging this kind of behavior.
00:07:07.000And now all of a sudden, for political reasons, because all they care about is power, they are trying to change their tune on this.
00:07:14.000Now, I think that they could have been more strategic about it as well.
00:07:17.000Joe Biden used to be known as somebody who was tough on crime.
00:07:21.000After all, he sponsored the 1994 crime bill, which, by the way, the NAACP at the time supported.
00:07:28.000A number of black community leaders supported at the time because crime in their communities was completely out of control.
00:07:36.000Kamala Harris, of course, has a long record as a prosecutor.
00:07:39.000They could have used that to their advantage in dealing with this rioting and this violence crisis in America.
00:07:44.000But instead, they have decided that they are going to embrace the far left of their party.
00:08:10.000You had the police officer in New York City who was executed in his vehicle when he was eating lunch.
00:08:18.000And the person who killed him wrote on his Instagram page before he carried out the assassination that he was going to put a pig in a blanket.
00:08:25.000Well, Al Sharpton's group had been marching through New York City chanting pigs in a blanket, frying like bacon.
00:08:32.000And at the time, during the 2016 DNC, the DNC platform completely endorsed Black Lives Matter.
00:08:40.000So this is fully ingrained in their politics now.
00:08:45.000It is part of them and it has been for a long time.
00:08:48.000So they are unable, Joe Biden, as a quote, moderate, is unable to get away from it because this is not something new.
00:08:54.000This is something they've been embracing for years on end now.
00:08:58.000And the latest betting odds, which I love the betting markets when it comes to presidential races, front page of realclearpolitics.com.
00:09:04.000I think RealClearPolitics is one of the few websites out there that just tells you, it's just an aggregator and shows you exactly the data.
00:09:14.000It's basically the race is within the margin of error.
00:09:17.000And I do think that the president now needs to kind of go to the next chess move where Biden is now having some form of a message that probably will work with most people saying that this is Donald Trump's America.
00:09:42.000However, it's such a preventable political mistake by them.
00:09:49.000And I actually don't think that the Trump campaign should be too overly confident because the Biden campaign is adapting to this right now and they're visiting Kenosha.
00:09:56.000They're doing the right things now, the Biden campaign is.
00:09:59.000Whereas for the last couple of weeks, they just kind of decided to act as if it doesn't exist, which was a horrible political miscalculation.
00:10:05.000You're from Arizona, Katie, and you're also one of the top Second Amendment advocates in the country.
00:10:11.000I've made the argument, I love your take on this, that guns are actually going to be a winning issue for the president.
00:10:15.000In fact, I think it's one of the swing voting issues where more and more people are buying firearms legally to defend themselves against these thugs that are running the streets that have been released by governors like Gavin Newsom.
00:10:25.000Can you talk about some of these swing issues that might not be on the top of polling, but actually really motivate people that you think the Republicans or the president should focus on?
00:10:35.000Yeah, I'll start with the Second Amendment issue, and then I want to get into the economy and a different take on that issue in terms of not even swing voters, but maybe people who are Democrats who really don't appreciate all the lockdowns and the hypocritical behavior from politicians.
00:10:50.000On the Second Amendment, 2020 is going to be the most successful year on record for gun sales.
00:10:59.000And just since the beginning of the year with the Wuhan coronavirus combined with all of this civil unrest and rioting, and you add in that Democrats across the country are calling for the defunding of police and actually doing it in some places, there are 5 million new gun owners as of right now, and the year isn't even over.
00:11:22.000And if you think about, you put that into context of, you know, it's not the same thing as registering new voters, but it is similar because it's an issue that people take very personally to buy your first firearm and for the purpose of self-defense, which the vast majority of the reasons why people are buying their first gun this year is for self-defense to defend their family.
00:11:44.000It's a very personal, thoughtful, well-thought-out reason.
00:11:48.000And it is coupled with the idea that Democrats are the ones who are calling for more gun control, making it harder for you to defend your family.
00:11:56.000And at the same time, taking away your second line of defense, which is the police.
00:12:00.000So I don't know how, I don't have any data to look at to kind of transfer that to whether people will show up at the voting booth and vote for Trump or for a Republican senator, especially at a time when much of the campaign is focused on. the virus and how that's being handled.
00:12:19.000But with the unrest, that's shot up to the top of an issue of the issues in terms of people, what they're voting on.
00:12:24.000So I think you can kind of put it into that category of how people are going to vote.
00:12:30.000When you see these large crowds of people, you know, walking through the suburbs and screaming at people with megaphones in the middle of the night and their children are there, people start to think about what they would do if the police couldn't come protect them.
00:12:44.000So I don't know if it will change voter behavior, but I would say I think it takes a lot more thought to buy your first firearm if you weren't a gun owner before or this wasn't an issue for you before than it does maybe to just register to vote.
00:13:05.000But I don't think it's a good thing for Democrats and for them to have pushed gun control at their convention at a time when there is so much civil unrest, I think is a mistake.
00:13:16.000And then on the issue of the economy, you know, I've had so many non-political people tell me that they are voting for Republicans because they cannot stand these arbitrary lockdown rules that these elitist politicians don't follow themselves, but expect everyone else to follow while their businesses have been completely run into the ground.
00:13:39.000This Nancy Pelosi situation this week is a perfect example of that, of her going into a hair salon without a mask and going inside when you're not allowed to get hair services inside of a salon in California.
00:13:51.000There have been protests led by salon owners in California against Gavin Newsom, against these severe lockdown policies.
00:13:59.000And these people are not typically Republicans.
00:14:01.000They're typically liberal artist types who vote for Democrats.
00:14:08.000But I can imagine that they're rethinking who they're going to vote for when they're leading protests against Democrats who are taking away their livelihoods.
00:14:16.000And I think the Biden campaign is, it's been very, they've tried to say that this is the Trump economy and it didn't have to be this way.
00:14:24.000And yet when you asked Joe Biden what he would have done, he said that he would shut the country down again.
00:14:29.000So on one hand, you can't accuse the president of running the economy into the ground while also saying you would shut down the economy again.
00:14:38.000So, you know, I think that's where, I think on the economy, people are voting differently than a typical election just based on the situation that we're in.
00:14:46.000I think that the economy and opening up America has been a changing issue.
00:14:50.000And I think that it's much more, it's much less like a snapshot in time.
00:14:54.000It's much more like a moving film where people felt differently about this issue probably a couple months ago than they do today, where now as their capital reserves are really drying up and bankruptcy is really looming, I think that people's patience for the perpetual lockdown narrative has changed.
00:15:10.000And this is, I think, again, going back to a really, really silly and I think misguided political calculation by the Democrats where all they had to do is take a nuanced position on this, Katie.
00:15:20.000And I think they could have really pummeled the Republicans and Donald Trump on this.
00:15:24.000But instead, they took this position, Joe Biden did, he said, I'll shut down America again if that's what it's going to take.
00:15:30.000That's an incredibly unpopular position with decent and reasonable people that are going to go vote regardless of the other issues.
00:15:37.000And I agree with you on the firearms issue.
00:15:40.000I don't see how anyone can vote for Joe Biden that is a new registered vote, that is a new firearm owner, especially, as you mentioned, 5 million, incredible, which is absolutely unprecedented.
00:15:53.000I think that the president is going to be very smart in the debates, which I want to ask you about in just a second, to press the issue of Joe Biden, what guns would you take away?
00:16:03.000I think those kind of cross-examination of Joe Biden exactly how President Trump's going to win these debates, because Joe Biden is not good off the cuff.
00:16:10.000He gets very angry because I think of his impending mental cognitive decline.
00:16:14.000I think the president will be at his best as almost a cross-examining prosecutor almost in not someone who's just trying to tell the country how great his presidency is.
00:16:23.000I actually think putting Joe Biden on trial is the way that President Trump should approach these debates.
00:16:28.000Joe Biden pledged today that he is going to debate.
00:16:30.000President Trump says that they should take drug tests before, which is definitely a new wrinkle into the debate conversation.
00:16:36.000What's your take on this entire conversation around debates?
00:16:41.000Yeah, well, to your point, you know, Joe Biden, let's not forget when he was still out on the trail earlier this year.
00:16:48.000He was in Detroit at an auto plant, and a Detroit auto worker asked him the question and confronted him about the Second Amendment and saying, you know, you're going to take away my gun rights.
00:17:01.000And Joe Biden did not have a good reaction to that.
00:17:06.000And so, you know, he's not this far-left mentality that Joe Biden has tried to fit into doesn't really work in the places where he needs to win.
00:17:15.000In terms of the debates, I'm not so convinced yet that they're going to debate.
00:17:19.000I know we're two weeks out, three weeks out, but when Nancy Pelosi comes out and says that Joe Biden should not debate Donald Trump, I don't think that she would have said that if it wasn't being seriously trial balloon, that's exactly right.
00:17:34.000And so I think them not having Joe Biden debate would be a political misstep for sure, especially now that he's losing ground in the polling and kind of trying to catch up to the president, like actually doing the same things that he's been doing.
00:17:52.000But, you know, I wouldn't underestimate Joe Biden.
00:17:55.000I think there is this, you know, this caution that, you know, he gave his DNC speech and everyone was like, oh, it was so amazing.
00:18:03.000Well, that's because everyone lowered the bar so much for his ability that, you know, him being able to do the speech well was an easy, easy proposition to conduct.
00:18:14.000So just giving a basic there will be debates, but I will be watching if there are.
00:18:21.000Yeah, and so I'm sympathetic with that argument because it's really a perplexing political moment we're living through here, Katie.
00:18:27.000We'll be talking about this for the next 40 years.
00:18:29.000Like, remember when Joe Biden and Trump, and we were a question of even debating, and I think this year is going to have a lot of the do you remember sentiments from this year?
00:18:38.000Because part of it is if Joe Biden does debate, I mean, his handlers can't touch him for like 90 minutes.
00:18:43.000I mean, he is all on his own, and Donald Trump can do whatever he possibly can to trip him up in a good way, I think, and actually expose his radicalism or his mental impairments.
00:18:54.000Additionally, I think that if he doesn't debate, this is part of where I think the president needs to kind of have his next chess move.
00:19:00.000The first chess move was the riots, right?
00:19:02.000And really hyper-focusing on that and ended up being a master stroke of genius by the Trump campaign.
00:19:07.000And part of it is luck, I'm not going to lie.
00:19:09.000I mean, part of it is that the Democrats mishandled this so ridiculously.
00:19:12.000They just opened up a 10-point window for the Trump campaign.
00:19:17.000Like, okay, we'll take this opportunity.
00:19:19.000But then I think the next move is that Trump has to taunt Biden into how little he travels, how few questions he takes, and how few interviews he does.
00:19:30.000I think the idea that President Trump is always accessible to the press, always doing press conferences, always talking to folks, is always visible while Joe Biden is not visible and then is very carefully handled.
00:19:43.000I mean, the press conference this week, he had his staffers asking the reporters to state their questions rather than him stating the questions.
00:19:53.000So I think he's done fewer than five press conferences this entire year.
00:20:00.000They would say, well, we've been ahead in the polling, so that's why we don't need to overexpose ourselves.
00:20:05.000But at a time when people are starting to pay more attention after Labor Day to the race, people are really going to start comparing the two candidates.
00:20:12.000I think the president should really focus on Biden's record, on the things he has said that are not true on the fracking issue.
00:20:18.000You know, yesterday Joe Biden tried to claim that he's not going to ban fracking.
00:20:21.000He said numerous times in the primary that he absolutely would not just ban fracking, but ban all fossil fuels.
00:20:29.000So getting him on those inconsistencies and that disingenuous nature of Joe Biden being a politician while Donald Trump is not.
00:20:36.000And then also on the rioting issue, you know, I don't even think it was a political calculation from the Trump campaign or even from the president.
00:20:44.000I genuinely believe that Donald Trump, he understands what it would feel like if somebody burned down his work.
00:20:53.000He understands what it's like to lose a business.
00:20:56.000He understands how hard people work their entire lives to build a business that was just destroyed.
00:21:04.000And Democrats apparently were okay with that because they refused to condemn it.
00:21:08.000It's a personal thing that he understands because he's been in it and he knows what it takes.
00:21:15.000Whereas if you're a politician like Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, who have been in political life taxpayer funded basically your entire career, you don't have any empathy, as they would say, for people like that because you've never lived that kind of life.
00:21:31.000Like you've never owned a business or had employees who you can no longer pay now because you don't have a business or you don't understand that the insurance doesn't cover the entire bill of rebuilding your business.
00:21:43.000And then your insurance bill actually goes up and makes it more expensive for you to operate.
00:21:47.000So I think he genuinely understands those things, whereas Joe Biden does not.
00:21:56.000And pointing out that detachment from the real world and the rest of America, doing the outsider thing, again, would really help him.
00:22:08.000Yeah, I think that's a really good point because President Trump, I think, is actually at his best right now running as an outsider, as an incumbent.
00:22:14.000And the Democrats have really presented this opportunity where it's kind of Trump against the Democrat power structure in the country as him as an incumbent.
00:22:20.000That's kind of the way this race is unfolding, which is not a good race for the Democrats, by the way.
00:22:25.000The one thing that bothers them the most is actually having them explain how they control every single urban center in our country and the crime and the arson and the endless amounts of blood being spilled in places that they have a total monopoly of power on.
00:22:51.000And I know what it would mean like if your livelihood just gets burned down in front of you.
00:22:55.000Like you saw yesterday, the guy that had a Photoshop through his whole family for 109 years just got burned down, everything.
00:23:00.000And what's the recourse for that for BLM Incorporated?
00:23:03.000And so you had a tweet today, which was terrific, or might have been yesterday, where you said this political poll description is absurd.
00:23:10.000The reason Black Lives Matter is losing support is due to their behavior, not because Trump is attacking them.
00:23:14.000The political title is Trump Attack, Trump Attacks Take a Toll on Black Lives Matter support.
00:23:21.000What they're trying to do here, Katie, is the media is trying to frame it as if Trump is one of the reasons as to why BLM is doing what they're doing.
00:23:29.000have no choice but to fight back and that it's really Trump that is the agitator.
00:23:32.000That is kind of the new narrative here.
00:23:41.000And I want to make the distinction between there are, I think all Americans believe that Black lives are important and of course they matter, but they don't give into this, as you just mentioned, Black Lives Matter Incorporated notion.
00:23:56.000Based on the last three months and the social media that we have has exposed what is actually going on at these riots and these protests of the and Black Lives Matter leaders going on Fox News and saying if they don't get what they want, they're going to burn the country down.
00:24:14.000That's why Black Lives Matter and their approval rating is going down, not because President Trump is pointing them out or talking about them.
00:24:23.000Their own behavior is what is getting them to wear out their welcome with the American people.
00:24:28.000However, this goes back to what I was talking about at the beginning of your podcast, is that this has been going on for five years, right?
00:25:03.000You and I know that they talk about breaking down everything about American civil society, that they're trained Marxists running the organization.
00:25:12.000I think that the more Black Lives Matter is exposed for what it is, people can see it for what it is and they want nothing to do with it.
00:25:19.000And that doesn't mean that you don't want police to act appropriately or that you don't think that, of course, Black Lives Matter, but you're not willing to destroy the country that you live in for the sake of their Marxist agenda goals.
00:25:31.000Well, yeah, what's awful about this article at Politico is it frames BLM Incorporated.
00:25:35.000And we always call it BLM Incorporated because I never want people to be confused in attacking a phrase that is true.
00:25:40.000But when they phrase BLM Incorporated as if they're the victim, as if they're not the agitators that are the ones burning down America and wanting to destroy the Western prescribed nuclear family, one of the reasons why they have a lower approval rating is they're burning down our country.
00:25:53.000And not to mention that Republicans are actually finally speaking out against them.
00:25:56.000In early June, there was this silence where it was myself and a few others, and I believe you as well, that were unafraid to kind of call BLM Inc. what they were because we've been in this fight for a couple of years and it's nothing new.
00:26:43.000The Bloomberg group came out recently and said that Donald Trump might win on election day, but he'll lose the war, basically saying they're going to have the mail-in ballot deluge, which really horrifies me as a Trump supporter and an American that they're bragging about how they're going to use mail-in voting to corrupt the electoral process.
00:26:58.000What do you think the president has to do?
00:26:59.000What do you think his biggest barriers are to victory?
00:27:02.000And what can our listeners help do to achieve that goal?
00:27:06.000Well, I think there's a lot of things at play.
00:27:09.000I do think that the wind is at his back in terms of a vaccine, in terms of the economy getting better, of people going back and remembering that things were pretty good under him before the virus came and looking at the polling of who they hold responsible for the havoc that the virus has wreaked on America and the world.
00:27:40.000They're dumping money onto the airwaves there.
00:27:43.000As I mentioned, Mike Pence, the vice president, has been in all these battleground states over and over and over again throughout the year.
00:27:58.000They're not giving into this compromise that gets you nowhere with the mob.
00:28:06.000I think continuing to hammer Joe Biden on his hypocritical record and his changing of opinion based on what he needs to do politically, including now, by the way.
00:28:15.000He's not condemning the riots and the violence because he actually cares.
00:28:19.000He's condemning it because it's showing up and polling, which is very transparent.
00:28:24.000So, you know, the left will have things that they will throw at the president, but I feel a little confident because they've thrown so much at him that he has survived.
00:28:32.000It's kind of like, what else could they possibly throw at him?
00:28:44.000I actually don't think the president is at his best when he plays defense.
00:28:46.000I've told him that privately and I've said that publicly.
00:28:48.000But you, and I'm just going to read from Politico right here where breaking down Biden's speech, the headline is, Do I look like a radical socialist?
00:28:54.000Biden says that's how you know the president is winning.
00:28:56.000That's how you know the president is trending in the right direction when Joe Biden endlessly has to respond to Trump's attacks.
00:29:01.000The more Trump does that, and I think the president, again, he won in 2016 because he had Hillary Clinton on defense the entire time, and she had no ability to be able to get back on her feet.
00:29:10.000Well, Katie, thank you so much for being here.
00:29:13.000But one message I would say that the president should take on is: you know, he's tried to frame this campaign as America for socialism and communism.
00:29:22.000Well, he should remind everybody that the last six months has really been an experiment in socialism.
00:29:27.000The government has been telling us what to do, where we can and cannot go, when we can and cannot work.
00:29:32.000We've been writing checks to everybody to compensate them for what the government has done to them.
00:29:39.000And so reminding everybody that we've been in this experiment and that we don't want to do this again.
00:29:45.000And that if you don't want to shut the economy down again, like Joe Biden said, then he needs people to vote for him.
00:29:51.000I think that the pivot that President Trump needs to do that the Biden campaign is unprepared for is calling him lockdown Biden.
00:29:57.000I think that the lockdowns have left have lost so much favorability, especially in the Democrats' hypocrisy around them.
00:30:03.000And I'm going to say this publicly and privately to the president is come out right now with lockdown Biden because they're losing on the riots issue and they're trying to compensate for it.
00:30:10.000And then all of a sudden expose them on the lockdown issue.
00:30:13.000These are the kind of this is the president's at his best on this.
00:30:15.000I mean, there's a lot of things that he does right and this is one of them.
00:30:18.000So Katie, thank you so much for joining us.