The Matt Walsh Show - Friendly Fire： So Republicans Lost... Now What？

00:00:00.760 My rec league goalie says he plays for the love of the game.

00:00:04.600 You gave up six goals last week, Steve.

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00:00:30.000 I thought that it was going to be, you know, like a punch in the face.

00:00:33.300 And actually, it was like being kicked directly in the crotch repeatedly by a robot.

00:00:39.180 Yeah.

00:00:40.060 Yeah.

00:00:41.920 You, Drew.

00:00:42.880 No, I think, you know, I always feel that hope is a better strategy than despair.

00:00:47.620 So I thought I left open the possibility that things might go well or might go less badly

00:00:51.640 than I thought.

00:00:52.600 This is worse than my worst expectations.

00:00:56.080 I thought we were going to get a 50, you know, this is going to be bad.

00:00:58.720 We laugh so we don't cry.

00:00:59.740 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:01:00.360 It was not bad, wasn't it?

00:01:01.120 But also, oh.

00:01:02.260 I, yeah, it was, I was expecting it to be bad.

00:01:06.020 I'm always expecting everything to be bad.

00:01:07.740 And I usually am right.

00:01:08.520 So that's one way to ensure that you're usually right

00:01:11.160 is just to expect everything to not be good

00:01:13.720 because it usually isn't.

00:01:15.300 But I didn't think, I mean, look,

00:01:17.320 Texas flipping entirely blue

00:01:19.080 was not something that I thought was going to happen.

00:01:22.020 Yeah, Kansas.

00:01:22.740 So it was even worse than I thought.

00:01:24.860 And listen, if there's any consolation in all this,

00:01:28.080 And I think you get a little desperate searching for consolation in these moments.

00:01:33.400 So this is, and this is consolation that cuts both ways.

00:01:36.700 However, things change quickly.

00:01:40.260 We do know that.

00:01:41.920 And so, I mean, you look at 2024.

00:01:46.820 I mean, we were in this, we were here.

00:01:49.280 And the jubilation that we all felt and that many people in the country felt 2024.

00:01:56.320 and you look at how quickly just this thing just fell off of a cliff, collapsed.

00:02:07.240 So what that tells you is that it could happen the other way.

00:02:11.420 I mean, this moment, this blue tsunami,

00:02:14.560 and it feels like the Democrats have taken a stranglehold on the country

00:02:19.000 and they have Texas and they have everything.

00:02:22.440 I mean, it's possible that in 2028, we're going to look back on 2026

00:02:25.240 and be like, that feels like it was 200 years ago now.

00:02:27.240 Yes, it always looks darkest just before it goes pitch black.

00:02:31.400 This is Friendly Fire.

00:02:34.520 Friends like these, who needs enemies?

00:02:37.600 Friends like these, who needs enemies?

00:02:41.340 You know, I think we have to go back, though.

00:02:43.280 This is a huge transitional moment,

00:02:45.340 and it's going to last another 10 years at least.

00:02:47.600 This is the moment, first of all, my generation is dying.

00:02:50.620 I'm afraid they might take me with them,

00:02:52.900 but hopefully they'll leave me behind.

00:02:54.740 Who knows?

00:02:55.240 But I think, you know, there's going to be realignment.

00:02:58.340 In moments like this, radicals show up on both sides.

00:03:01.100 I hate to make the comparison because I don't think we're in that situation.

00:03:04.960 But this is what happened in the 30s in Europe.

00:03:07.000 You know, when there's this opening in the middle, the socialists rise on one side and the fascists rise on the other side.

00:03:14.680 In our country, they're both the same people.

00:03:17.260 But still, you know, that's the thing that happens.

00:03:19.820 And usually the center reforms.

00:03:21.020 And how it reforms is it reforms around an individual.

00:03:24.120 An individual comes along.

00:03:25.640 The people are not going to give you a vision.

00:03:27.700 The people cannot give you a vision.

00:03:29.600 Leaders give you a vision.

00:03:31.160 You know, the leaders can only lead the people where they'll go, but it's the leaders who provide the vision.

00:03:37.200 Trump's vision was too chaotic, too, you know, centered on himself, but it was urgently important.

00:03:43.000 He was God sent.

00:03:44.840 And as we know, God sends the weirdest people when he wants to help out.

00:03:49.160 But, I mean, he broke.

00:03:51.240 We talked about the border that he fixed.

00:03:53.640 We've talked about other things that he did.

00:03:54.960 But the main thing he did, and if he did nothing else, he would still be an important man in a good way,

00:04:01.420 is he broke the stranglehold on speech.

00:04:03.900 And he did it with our help.

00:04:05.400 You know, he did it with the help of the new media.

00:04:07.060 But he broke the stranglehold on speech.

00:04:08.620 And that means that a lot of people are saying things that they couldn't say before.

00:04:12.600 So you have people making jokes about retards again.

00:04:15.500 I think that's a good thing.

00:04:16.640 I don't think it's a bad thing.

00:04:17.480 I think we should always be joking about everything.

00:04:19.460 But you also have people saying, hey, socialism might be a good idea.

00:04:22.600 And, you know, you have these 20-year-olds who don't know crap from Shinola.

00:04:27.780 You know, they're sitting around going like, yeah, socialism might be a good idea.

00:04:31.660 You know?

00:04:32.080 And so we're going to go through this stuff.

00:04:33.540 It's going to go back and forth.

00:04:35.200 But you hope that the center reforms around somebody that we can tolerate who loves America.

00:04:40.060 I think that the biggest thing that's happening, and I think this is, you know, across all parties right now,

00:04:44.820 is that President Trump was and remains and has always been a gigantic middle finger to whatever it is people were pissed off at.

00:04:52.400 in 2016, it was just, we don't like Hillary Clinton. We don't like Barack Obama. We don't

00:04:56.020 like what's going on. Here's a giant middle finger. He had no policies to speak of in 2016.

00:04:59.880 I mean, he was literally on pretty much every side of every issue. And then he sort of formed

00:05:03.740 a series of policies almost by happenstance and because of the people surrounding him and largely

00:05:07.880 because of oppositionality to Democrats coming after him and him reacting to that. And then

00:05:12.920 from 2020 to 2024, you got the backlash against Trump, one, as the empire strikes back. And then

00:05:18.720 you got sort of the return of the Jedi moment here, but you know, the story just, it never

00:05:22.400 ends that way. And so it was a rejection of the rejection of the rejection. And at no point has

00:05:26.940 anyone in the last, I would say, you know, maybe 30 years in American politics provided a sort of

00:05:32.200 cohesive version of what our politics ought to look like, how we ought to approach politics.

00:05:38.940 It feels like a grab bag of policies built around a personality. And you're right. People follow

00:05:42.600 the great sadness of my life. It truly is the sadness of my life is the recognition as I came

00:05:47.260 into my 40s, that people don't follow policy. They follow people. It's a very, very sad thing.

00:05:52.460 They don't follow ideas. They follow humans. And that's a difficult thing to reconcile with what

00:05:57.080 we do every day where we're talking about policy and ideas. But that's why I think it's easy to

00:06:01.060 overread an election like this and read it in a wide variety of ways. People like me, where I was

00:06:05.940 supportive of the initial Iran war, even though I was not supportive of the MOU and the delay in

00:06:10.440 the Iran war after April, I'm going to say, well, it was the tariffs. And people who hated the Iran

00:06:13.820 and we're going to say it was the, the terrorists were great, it was the Iran war.

00:06:16.180 And in reality, it was like all the things and none of the things in a certain sense.

00:06:19.360 It was all the things.

00:06:20.140 And it was the perception that President Trump is disconnected from the American public in

00:06:23.120 a way that he was not in 2015, 2016, and that he is, and that he's sort of lost touch with

00:06:29.200 the public that wanted to give him the ability to do the things.

00:06:31.800 And that's why, you know, what I think is that it's not so easily corrected, because

00:06:36.780 I don't think it's a matter of just you pull this lever, you change this policy, and suddenly

00:06:39.680 your popularity springs back into being.

00:06:43.100 I'm struggling to think of a time when a president dipped into the 30s and then rose back up into the 50s.

00:06:49.080 Certainly, this has not happened in the last half century.

00:06:51.520 And so what does that mean?

00:06:52.300 It means what we're really talking about here, which is what comes next?

00:06:55.180 And that's the open question is really sort of what comes next.

00:06:57.680 And part of what's going to define that is how crazy the Democrats go.

00:07:00.940 If there was one silver lining here, it's that the Democratic victory was so overwhelming and so large that I'm not sure they can talk themselves into moderation.

00:07:08.120 I think they're going to go for a break.

00:07:09.180 I'll make a prediction on what comes next.

00:07:11.300 I don't think that Trump is done as the leader of the GOP.

00:07:15.020 No.

00:07:15.180 I think he remains the leader.

00:07:16.580 I think he'll remain the leader through 2028 and even after.

00:07:20.580 I think that he can plausibly at least say, I wasn't on the ballot, and so don't blame me.

00:07:26.740 Blame these other guys.

00:07:28.020 And you can say, well, he was campaigning for them, and well, it was your policies.

00:07:31.620 I think he will credibly be able to say that.

00:07:34.540 So I think he's the figure.

00:07:36.160 He still sucks all the oxygen out of the room.

00:07:40.340 I think there was this, in those early days, in the kind of inchoate, crazy days of 2016,

00:07:48.180 everyone said people just voted for Trump for his personality, not for his policies.

00:07:52.120 But he did differ from the GOP.

00:07:54.400 When the whole GOP was ideologically free trade, he was proposing protectionism.

00:08:00.180 When the whole GOP was in favor of legal migration, he was calling for immigration restriction

00:08:05.760 and calling migrants, you know, rapists and murderers, and that resonated.

00:08:09.080 So I still, I do think he offered this policy alternative in a way that was more coherent than people give him credit for.

00:08:17.220 So I think he continues to hold that.

00:08:21.200 I just wonder if there's a structural problem now.

00:08:23.540 You see it in the UK, too.

00:08:24.900 How many prime ministers does the UK have?

00:08:26.560 That's like something.

00:08:27.480 Like a billion in the last 20 years.

00:08:29.660 You think in the United States, we had a Democrat House of Representatives for 40 years.

00:08:34.360 Now, it seems to switch back and forth all the time.

00:08:36.880 We had Ronald Reagan win two terms, followed by a third term for George H.W. Bush.

00:08:41.540 Now we go from the end of Obama to Trump for a term, then Biden for a term, then Trump for a term.

00:08:48.120 And who knows? Right now it's not looking very good for the Republican in 28.

00:08:50.820 I wonder if there's just this deeper structural issue where we're not getting what we want.

00:08:55.120 What we want is cohesive societies that are high trust with economic flourishing that we got used to at the end of the 20th century.

00:09:01.660 And that just isn't happening anymore anywhere in the Anglosphere, really anywhere in the West.

00:09:05.660 And I just wonder if political instability is the inevitable consequence for the foreseeable future.

00:09:11.140 I think, first of all, Trump, by default, will remain the leader of the Republican Party for now.

00:09:18.320 But if that remains the case into 2020 and beyond, as you said, then the Republican Party has no future.

00:09:24.960 You know, the leader of the Republican Party cannot be, in the future, an 80-year-old, lame-duck, unpopular president.

00:09:32.420 it. It just can't be. So the process now has to be finding who the new leader is going to be.

00:09:37.420 And as I said in the other show, I mean, even if we had performed well during the midterms,

00:09:44.580 that would still be the case. But as to people follow ideas and not people,

00:09:49.400 I think the answer is kind of both. I think people follow people who have ideas they believe in,

00:09:56.320 but the ideas are part of it. It's not just the person. And so Trump in 2016,

00:10:01.080 people were rallying around. Yeah, there was the personality, there was Trump himself,

00:10:07.020 the blustery personality and all of that. He was funny and all these things and he could speak

00:10:12.300 extemporaneously and the rallies were really entertaining. But he did have very simple,

00:10:17.240 understandable, intuitive ideas, drain the swamp, build the wall. Those are probably the two big

00:10:23.540 ideas people rallied behind. And so it was this guy with these simple, understandable,

00:10:28.580 kind of eloquent in their simplicity,

00:10:31.520 good ideas that people were rallying around.

00:10:34.180 And I think-

00:10:34.600 I totally agree with that.

00:10:35.920 But I think that the problem

00:10:36.960 is trying to abstract Trump.

00:10:39.140 So you're right.

00:10:39.740 It's a combination of the person,

00:10:41.300 but the person is a combination

00:10:42.140 with their own ideas,

00:10:43.140 which is why Trump is sort of a one of one.

00:10:45.460 And any attempt to either abstract

00:10:46.720 a philosophy from him

00:10:47.840 and then map it onto another candidate

00:10:49.400 is likely to fail.

00:10:52.240 And so that's going to be the question

00:10:53.920 for the next person who is the leader

00:10:55.560 of the Republican Party

00:10:56.900 or of a conservative movement.

00:10:58.580 Not only what policies are Americans likely to believe, but who is the person who best reflects that in his own personage?

00:11:04.640 Trump was, because he was a throbbing middle finger, the ones that tended to reflect were the things you weren't allowed to say, right?

00:11:09.980 Don't open the borders wide and just let tons of people in here.

00:11:12.600 That's bad.

00:11:13.120 You shouldn't do that.

00:11:14.380 Or maybe we shouldn't trans the kids.

00:11:16.200 All those things where you would say sort of the obvious thing that was transgressive, that united with Trump as a human.

00:11:21.860 And I don't know if there's anyone in the Republican Party who's sort of capable of capturing that in the same way.

00:11:26.940 And so I think that what you're getting is a bunch of kind of nerds in the back room trying to recreate fake Trump from a bunch of, like, spare parts.

00:11:33.380 And I just don't know that that's going to work.

00:11:35.120 But, you know, there's an expression in England, the cometh the hour cometh the man.

00:11:38.660 And I think, you know, it's really Tolstoyan.

00:11:41.780 It's really about Leo Tolstoy.

00:11:43.320 You know, like Tolstoy said that men do nothing.

00:11:46.880 It's the age that raises the man.

00:11:49.340 That's not true.

00:11:50.320 There's a way that both things happen at once.

00:11:53.320 A Napoleon comes along when a Napoleon is called for.

00:11:56.660 You know, and I used to tell Andrew Breitbart, he used to say I would be nobody if the Internet hadn't been invented.

00:12:01.860 And I'd say Fred Astaire would be nobody if the American musical hadn't hit that point when he was dancing.

00:12:06.780 And so I think that that's the thing you're looking for.

00:12:08.980 You can never see it coming.

00:12:10.380 Nobody saw Trump coming.

00:12:11.560 Nobody saw him coming.

00:12:12.800 And, you know, the one thing I disagree with you about, though, Trump has been saying a lot of the things he's saying now for 50 years.

00:12:20.020 I mean, you know, that we're getting bad deals.

00:12:21.860 We need to make better deals.

00:12:23.000 We need to get rid of NAFTA.

00:12:24.560 I'm not disagreeing with that.

00:12:25.740 The only point that I've made about his policies is that when you try to, say, look at tonight, which was a disaster area, and you say, okay, let's look at the things that made him unpopular.

00:12:35.200 Everybody is now going to pick and choose the thing they like.

00:12:37.420 Of course.

00:12:38.420 It wasn't that.

00:12:39.400 It wasn't that.

00:12:39.980 I agree with that part.

00:12:40.820 I personally don't like this thing.

00:12:42.940 It must have been that thing that made it happen.

00:12:44.780 And that's why I say, like, in the end, the way that voters think about things is I just don't like this.

00:12:49.920 Like, all of this.

00:12:51.200 Like, I just don't like all of this.

00:12:52.340 And so sitting there and sort of, you know, pulling strand out by strand and being like, OK, I'm going to pull out this piece of the Jenga tower and I'm going to put this piece back in.

00:12:59.200 That's not the way that actual politics works, which is something that Trump always understood.

00:13:03.820 Right. Like that is something that Trump understood maybe better than any politician in my lifetime is that you can't that politics is not the art of stacking Jenga blocks.

00:13:10.540 It's the art of just being all of the things at once.

00:13:12.940 Yeah. You know, I do wonder because we've talked about the Iran war, obviously, a lot tonight.

00:13:16.680 I, one part we haven't touched on, yes, okay, the Iran war raised oil prices and diesel prices,

00:13:22.040 and it has all these downstream effects, but there, there's this kind of semiotic aspect to

00:13:27.120 it, which is, I wonder if voters saw in the very fact of the Iran war, uh, an image of the Iraq

00:13:33.540 war, which America, America's political trauma, like to what, to what degree did that just flip

00:13:39.120 something? And Afghanistan, and Afghanistan, you know, you forget like 20 years in Afghanistan,

00:13:42.940 and then it ends in this disaster.

00:13:45.740 I mean, when I went over to Afghanistan,

00:13:47.820 I came back and said, this is terrible.

00:13:49.960 We've got to get out of here.

00:13:50.900 There's no country here to save and all this.

00:13:52.940 The Iraq war was overstepping,

00:13:55.180 even though I thought many good things

00:13:57.080 actually came out of that, weirdly enough.

00:13:59.160 But I still thought, you know,

00:14:00.680 we got hit really badly and it was traumatic.

00:14:03.780 And I think we overreacted.

00:14:05.200 I think we thought we could do more.

00:14:06.900 You know, the W idea that we were going to go over

00:14:09.940 and turn, you know, the Middle East into flowering democracies was just absurd, you know, and we were

00:14:17.480 so upset and we were so angry with what had happened, you know, I guess it made sense to

00:14:21.760 follow that, but these are the sorts of things that do have to turn back. If America first

00:14:25.660 means isolationism, you can forget it, you can forget it. We're an empire, we're never going

00:14:30.760 to be isolationists ever again, that's not happening ever again until we're not an empire

00:14:34.100 anymore. And I think, so you've got to forget that. But really, we need strategic alliances

00:14:39.640 where people do the things we need them to do. We need to be a new kind of empire. We've never

00:14:46.540 wanted to conquer people. We've never taken over their countries. But we need to at least know

00:14:50.780 that they will go out and fight for the things that we care about. And one of the things that

00:14:54.740 is truly dangerous right now is I think we're losing Europe. I think Europe is dead. And I

00:14:59.640 I think really it's just being devoured

00:15:01.800 by the creatures that come and devour the dead.

00:15:05.520 But then we have to know who is gonna stand for us

00:15:08.280 against Russia in Europe, against China in the China seas,

00:15:12.540 and against Iran in the Middle East.

00:15:15.960 I think all of that's true.

00:15:16.960 I also think that there's a fundamental disconnect

00:15:19.260 in the American mind as to what we think is possible in war,

00:15:22.780 how it's fought, and how you win.

00:15:24.320 And so in the same way, I think this is also happening,

00:15:27.160 This is sort of your question about systems

00:15:29.260 and the fact that we keep bouncing party to party.

00:15:31.300 The case I've been making for a long time

00:15:32.940 on the show and elsewhere

00:15:33.820 is that the reason we're bouncing party to party

00:15:35.820 is because you've got a bunch of politicians

00:15:37.020 who are running their mouth about

00:15:38.020 and delivering promises that no human can keep

00:15:42.040 in the system that is built to not keep those promises.

00:15:44.280 Right.

00:15:44.540 Meaning we created a system of checks and balances

00:15:46.400 to prevent specifically harsh, fast-moving action.

00:15:50.800 I'll go even further, though,

00:15:52.460 because this is a very important point.

00:15:54.680 The politicians are promising

00:15:55.940 they're going to fix the migration problem.

00:15:57.740 But you can't fix the migration problem

00:15:59.180 when you have a welfare state

00:16:00.240 with zillions of dollars of entitlements

00:16:02.240 and a below-replacement.

00:16:03.620 Correct, this is what's happening in France.

00:16:05.000 Yeah, so you just can't have all the things at once.

00:16:07.220 And so I feel like the same thing happens

00:16:08.600 with regard to the Iran war.

00:16:10.460 And I thought that President Trump

00:16:11.720 had a fundamental different understanding

00:16:14.380 because of his opposition to the Iraq war,

00:16:16.260 which is, as you say, a major factor

00:16:18.120 in why he won in 2016,

00:16:19.320 which was at the time a very taboo position,

00:16:21.300 was that this is why when he went in

00:16:23.860 and we did in Iran,

00:16:25.680 And he said, like, I'm going to move fast, I'm going to break things, and then I'm going to get out,

00:16:28.180 which is essentially what he did with Midnight Hammer the year before.

00:16:31.040 I was figuring that it was going to be a campaign that was much along those lines.

00:16:34.420 And I think that, you know, the reality is that if you're trying to deliver an outcome,

00:16:38.240 like, say, for example, the toppling of regime, which was always, I think, the sort of sotto voce thing

00:16:43.180 you're not supposed to say that we were trying to do, but we weren't really trying to do,

00:16:45.960 but we were kind of trying to do.

00:16:47.060 Like, if you're going to do that, then you have to be actually respectful of the way that certain events come about

00:16:52.260 and what your actual goal is.

00:16:53.300 And if you don't do that, the American people are not wrong to be disappointed in you for not achieving all of that.

00:16:58.920 And so, you know, to me, that's the mistake of the—like, if you're going to do it, win.

00:17:02.520 Move fast and win.

00:17:03.760 By the way, I apply that critique to literally every ally of the United States as well.

00:17:08.220 This is my critique, actually, of Netanyahu and Israel, is if you're going to go, go hard, go fast, and win.

00:17:12.220 And don't take two years to drag it out.

00:17:13.660 But, you know, the same thing is true with regard to this.

00:17:16.520 So there's a question on the consequences here, our pals at Kalshiev.

00:17:19.800 will Trump be impeached and removed from office?

00:17:24.520 31% yes.

00:17:26.100 To me-

00:17:27.000 Yes to the first part, no to the second.

00:17:28.340 Yeah, so I mean, that seems like easy money.

00:17:30.960 The only way that you could possibly

00:17:33.060 see something like that happening

00:17:34.140 is if they really have a major corruption scandal

00:17:36.840 and you get a bunch of Republicans

00:17:37.980 who are now scared to death

00:17:39.360 that they're about to lose their seats in a swing state.

00:17:41.900 But who are you going to get?

00:17:42.880 Yes, there aren't that many swing states.

00:17:44.260 Right, and if Susan Collins goes down,

00:17:46.680 I don't know if we've had an update on-

00:17:47.620 Murkowski, so you could probably pick up Murkowski.

00:17:49.320 Yes.

00:17:49.520 Now he had 56.

00:17:50.700 You know, Cornyn, had Cornyn held on in Texas,

00:17:53.080 you could see him being swayed on something like that.

00:17:55.140 But he's out.

00:17:55.960 You know, a lot of these guys are out.

00:17:57.360 Yeah, Johnson's not going to do it.

00:17:58.640 No chance.

00:17:59.320 Yeah, so I just think.

00:18:00.820 Not to mention, they removed Trump.

00:18:02.320 They're putting Vance in office.

00:18:03.440 Yeah.

00:18:03.900 They're giving the presidency to Vance.

00:18:05.380 Yeah, right.

00:18:06.280 I don't think they'd be thrilled about that.

00:18:08.180 Other one from Kalshi.

00:18:09.580 Will Trump resign during this term?

00:18:11.760 No.

00:18:12.480 27% chance.

00:18:13.600 That feels like easy money.

00:18:15.300 Yeah, no.

00:18:16.000 Let's find that production market and take the under on that.

00:18:18.240 No way.

00:18:18.820 So we've got Decision Desk HQ has called the Minnesota race for Peggy Flanagan, the Democrat, defeating Michelle Tafoya.

00:18:28.300 So just a reminder for people who forget Peggy Flanagan, she was the one who wore the T-shirt threatening transgender terrorism against all normal people.

00:18:39.180 We are talking about actual Antifa levels of now elected.

00:18:44.460 Yeah.

00:18:45.140 Again, I think that the biggest thing here

00:18:46.880 is that Democrats will undoubtedly overreach.

00:18:49.020 And so all of the pessimism of today

00:18:50.480 is based on the fact that tonight was just horseshit.

00:18:54.000 It was just terrible.

00:18:54.900 Yeah.

00:18:55.160 But like I've been,

00:18:57.140 we've all been around long enough

00:18:58.320 to remember several,

00:18:59.380 as you said earlier, Matt,

00:19:00.480 to remember several cycles of this.

00:19:01.540 I remember in 2004,

00:19:02.680 I thought Republicans would never lose again.

00:19:04.440 And by 2006, Nancy Pelosi was speaker.

00:19:06.440 And then I remember that Barack Obama in 2012 wins.

00:19:10.320 Yeah.

00:19:10.580 And by 2016, Donald Trump is president.

00:19:12.100 And so, like, it feels like we're never going to win again.

00:19:14.720 And that's not true.

00:19:15.580 We will win again.

00:19:16.640 It's just going to take the Democrats completely going off the reservation.

00:19:19.220 Well, here's the problem with that.

00:19:20.720 The problem, and it's true, they'll definitely overstep.

00:19:24.600 The hope, then, is that they will face a political consequence for it.

00:19:29.300 But I'm not sure if that's true because the really dark reality here is that, look, what have Democrats and what has the left done for the last year?

00:19:38.120 I mean, they have been more extreme than we've ever seen them.

00:19:42.460 They have been openly celebrating the death of one particular conservative, Charlie Kirk.

00:19:49.780 The murder.

00:19:50.700 The murder, yes.

00:19:52.480 The murder of Charlie Kirk and calling for the deaths of many more conservatives.

00:19:58.200 And they've been doing that.

00:19:59.820 And apparently there is, so far, no political consequence for that whatsoever.

00:20:04.940 They've been awarded with this.

00:20:06.940 I think we're missing, though, I do think we're missing this bigger movement.

00:20:10.420 The West is moving to the right.

00:20:12.580 The West is moving to the right.

00:20:14.980 Could have fooled me tonight.

00:20:16.340 Yeah, I get it.

00:20:17.440 But they're not voting.

00:20:18.780 I don't believe that they are voting for leftist policies.

00:20:21.620 I believe they're voting against what we have in this moment.

00:20:24.560 And if you look at, you know, Glenn Beck was the guy who brought it up, what happened in Poland.

00:20:30.900 You know, the reason that happened in Poland, what happened in France, I haven't heard anybody else say this,

00:20:36.620 but I know it's true, that what happened in France was a reaction to the visit of Pope Leo.

00:20:41.400 He came and 800,000 people said mass in the symbol of the revolution, the Place de la Concorde.

00:20:48.280 And the left moved in on these minor demonstrations and turned them into a riot

00:20:53.060 because they saw that there is a movement moving to the right, moving toward religion, moving toward tradition.

00:20:59.600 And I think that that's what's happening in Poland.

00:21:02.280 This was basically a coup in Poland, which is not like Guatemala.

00:21:05.700 It's like Poland.

00:21:06.620 And they know, they know that the people are moving to the right.

00:21:10.280 They're doing everything they can to shut down the AFD in Germany,

00:21:13.860 to shut down any, to Marine Le Pen in France.

00:21:17.340 Is that happening here in the United States?

00:21:19.520 What's that?

00:21:19.900 It's about to.

00:21:20.580 Is the United States moving to the right?

00:21:22.400 Yes, yes.

00:21:23.840 What's your, I mean, what are the indicators of that?

00:21:25.920 It's moving to the right in terms of the populist right.

00:21:30.100 The populist right.

00:21:31.080 I was talking.

00:21:32.060 But what are the indicators that we're moving to the right?

00:21:34.560 Because.

00:21:34.840 The indicators I see is everything's pointing to the left.

00:21:38.260 No, I don't.

00:21:38.720 Not everything, but mostly.

00:21:39.200 I think this is an interregnum,

00:21:40.580 and I think the best historical analog right now

00:21:44.700 is the recent history of Great Britain.

00:21:46.740 So I think that what you watched in Great Britain

00:21:48.380 was the conservatives were in power for a long time,

00:21:51.420 and then they got sclerotic

00:21:52.420 and not particularly good at their jobs,

00:21:54.060 and then labor, radical labor, wiped them out,

00:21:57.540 wiped them out, and within a year,

00:21:59.780 labor was radically unpopular,

00:22:01.420 and now the conservatives and Nigel Farage

00:22:02.940 are on the rise again.

00:22:03.600 And I think that that is very likely to happen here.

00:22:05.660 The real reason why Democrats won tonight is because they don't have power.

00:22:09.700 That's the reason they won tonight, because none of their policies are being implemented.

00:22:13.980 Right now, whoever is in power gets shellacked.

00:22:16.580 If people are pissed off, they punish the party in power.

00:22:18.820 And so this couldn't have happened, I think, in a non-midterm election.

00:22:21.440 In fact, it didn't happen in a non-midterm election.

00:22:23.120 That was two years ago.

00:22:23.960 But a midterm election is always a referendum on the party in power.

00:22:27.140 And because this is a referendum on the Republicans and people are pissed off, you get this.

00:22:30.500 And maybe that referendum lasts on for another couple of years and sweeps into Democratic term number one for somebody in 28.

00:22:38.420 But I have no faith.

00:22:39.660 Like right now, if I had to put money on 28, I'd put money on the Democrats.

00:22:43.140 If I had to put money on 32, I'm not sure that I'd put money on the Democrats.

00:22:48.280 And it won't be worth anything at that point.

00:22:50.520 What you said before is really important.

00:22:53.600 What people were voting for in Britain again and again was stop bringing in the immigrants.

00:22:58.060 They can't stop bringing in the immigrants because they need them to support the welfare state.

00:23:01.860 Nobody wants to give up the welfare state.

00:23:03.660 So what we need is a vision of what we do with the welfare state.

00:23:06.860 And I think I was talking again to Henry Olson, who, by the way, really needs to be talked to more.

00:23:11.760 I think we should hire him, frankly, but he's a brilliant guy.

00:23:15.560 And one of the things he invented Donald Trump before there was Donald Trump,

00:23:18.920 he said that the Republicans have forgotten that Ronald Reagan was a man of the people,

00:23:23.120 that he was a man who actually supported a welfare state that would keep people from falling through

00:23:29.180 the cracks. And I asked him, so what does that look like now? And he said, well, it looks like

00:23:33.520 reforming the welfare state so it takes care of the truly needy and lets the rich take care of

00:23:38.100 themselves. I mean, I'm collecting Social Security. I deserve it. I paid into it. But that's not the

00:23:44.280 way it should work. I mean, I don't need Social Security. And I love it because it's just somebody

00:23:48.800 sending me money, but, you know, that's not right. We need to reform. We need to stop talking about

00:23:54.820 this ideal world where we get rid of the welfare state because it's not going to happen. We need

00:23:59.240 to reform it. I spoke to a billionaire about 10 years ago, and he was complaining about this same

00:24:03.520 problem. He said, every single month, the government sends me a check for $700 because

00:24:10.340 I'm a parent. He had younger kids. He was, you know, he was an active guy. He sends me a check

00:24:17.060 for $700. I'm a billionaire. I spend $700 a month on tennis shoes. I do not need the government to

00:24:23.240 send me $700. Now, of course, the left never wanted the entitlements to be means tested

00:24:27.760 because then it would make it a welfare program and then it would be easier to cut

00:24:30.960 rather than one that we've all paid into. So yes, look, all of these things are going to be on the

00:24:35.440 table. President Trump just spoke to Fox News, said, first line, a part of it was Iran. So this

00:24:41.940 is Trump acknowledging, to my knowledge, for the first time that Iran would play a role.

00:24:46.240 Well, he said he didn't care that it was going to do this, but he said it was going to do it, yeah.

00:24:49.340 A part of it was Iran, he says.

00:24:51.120 I don't think it was the war.

00:24:52.800 So he says a part of it was Iran.

00:24:54.440 Next sentence.

00:24:55.340 I don't think it was the war.

00:24:56.900 I think it was the gas prices, meaning the consequences of the war.

00:25:00.520 I can work with them on a lot of things, the Democrats, or the Iranians.

00:25:04.480 What's the difference?

00:25:05.540 Immigration is a big deal.

00:25:07.400 This is President Trump saying about the Democrats.

00:25:09.420 A lot of Democrats have called me in the last 20 minutes, actually.

00:25:13.120 I've already spoken to certain leaders in the Democrat Party.

00:25:15.580 We will work with the Democrats.

00:25:17.440 I will consider doing whatever is good and appropriate for the country.

00:25:22.320 Interesting.

00:25:22.900 He always makes this overture.

00:25:24.120 So he made this overture after he won in 2016 that he would actually work with the Democrats.

00:25:29.960 And they proceeded to slap him directly in the face.

00:25:31.360 Yes, yes.

00:25:32.140 Like idiots, by the way.

00:25:33.080 But it was great for us.

00:25:34.860 No, they've learned nothing.

00:25:36.340 And their base demands that they not learn anything.

00:25:39.260 And so it'll get bad again.

00:25:41.420 By the way, that analysis is not wrong.

00:25:42.960 I mean, like, the truth is when he says it's the war in Iran, but it's not the war in Iran, it's the gas prices.

00:25:47.920 He's correct.

00:25:48.640 I mean, if the gas prices were at $2.50, no one would give a crap, right?

00:25:51.400 I mean, like, that's the reality.

00:25:52.700 Just be a thing happening far away that we don't really care very much about.

00:25:55.380 And it is a big deal in rural areas, the gas prices.

00:25:58.420 And that's where our strength is.

00:26:00.300 Of course.

00:26:01.220 And so, you know, again, when you look for the really true, this would be like a normal evening,

00:26:06.700 except for the fact that a bunch of truly red states that should not be in play now have to be considered in play.

00:26:12.240 And the map for Democrats in 2028 becomes a very, very wide map, right?

00:26:16.840 That's the problem is that for the Republicans, they basically had to run an inside straight in the last several elections, right?

00:26:21.740 You got to win Arizona, Georgia.

00:26:23.040 We all know the map.

00:26:23.920 They'd win Wisconsin and Michigan and two of the three, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania.

00:26:28.460 That's a very narrow map.

00:26:29.760 And there weren't a lot of other states that were opening up.

00:26:31.520 Now, Democrats have about 8,000 ways that they can win in 2020.

00:26:36.440 If Texas is open, if if if North Carolina is solidly Democrat, if Ohio is open again and Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania are all open, Democrats have combos there that are just extraordinary.

00:26:48.960 They have like an extraordinary number of combos there.

00:26:51.180 And that's that's the real danger for whoever decides to run for the.

00:26:55.080 And then this is. Listen, I don't envy J.D. his position.

00:26:57.880 I really don't. I mean, I was just going to ask, what is your advice now for any of the guys, whatever it is, four or five guys?

00:27:03.960 I mean, so I think that there are certain guys where it's like they're only going to be able to get the nomination if they run this time, right?

00:27:09.760 And there you're thinking about Governor DeSantis in Florida who already ran once.

00:27:12.820 If he waits another four years, then he's been out of office for too long and it's not really relevant.

00:27:17.200 So Ron is going to run.

00:27:19.060 The vice president, I just don't see – I think that there is a not unintelligent play where he says, listen, you know, this is – I've got a young – he makes an excuse.

00:27:27.460 I've got a young family.

00:27:28.500 And he's so young.

00:27:29.340 I'm bringing up little kids.

00:27:29.940 He's a kid.

00:27:31.020 He's a year older than I – you're younger than I.

00:27:33.220 I mean, he's a baby, he's a kid.

00:27:35.860 And so he could easily, you know,

00:27:38.080 again, we have the Cal sheet numbers here

00:27:39.600 saying that JD's the favorite at 30%,

00:27:41.660 Rubio at 23% and DeSantis at 12%.

00:27:43.420 You should absolutely short sell Rubio.

00:27:45.280 Like Marco is not gonna run.

00:27:46.440 He's not gonna run.

00:27:46.880 He's not gonna run.

00:27:47.700 Why do you say that?

00:27:48.960 Because number one, 2028 is likely a poison chalice.

00:27:53.720 Number two, if he runs against JD and JD runs

00:27:56.780 and he loses to JD, he's toast.

00:27:59.120 Yeah, he won't.

00:27:59.440 Number three, if JD wins the nomination,

00:28:01.020 you could still pick him as his VP.

00:28:02.360 J.D. could lose and he would still be the heir apparent.

00:28:04.500 Number four, if J.D. runs, loses, and doesn't pick him, he could still be the heir apparent.

00:28:08.500 So if you're Rubio, every math ends with, I'm not going to run.

00:28:11.920 And so, you know, but if you're J.D., that's a very hard call because you look at that map.

00:28:17.120 You say, I'm running on the back of a president whose endorsement makes me the guy.

00:28:21.420 But the only way I become the guy is with his endorsement, and he has a 32% approval rating.

00:28:27.000 And he's got a bunch of policies I don't necessarily agree with that I'm going to have to quasi-own but also quasi-separate from.

00:28:31.780 And the minute I separate from him, President Trump is going to bop me on the head with a stick.

00:28:35.960 That is a rough road.

00:28:37.560 And so my, you know, I don't have, I wish I had an easy solution for the vice president, but I just don't.

00:28:42.760 And the issue is we can sit here all day and say, well, actually, here's the reason why J.D. should wait for four years or eight years.

00:28:49.860 But, you know, the thing is.

00:28:51.300 He's this close to the president.

00:28:52.400 If I were the vice president, I'm running.

00:28:56.040 Of course.

00:28:56.680 You can't give it up.

00:28:57.440 Now or never for him.

00:28:58.340 Yeah.

00:28:58.800 Look, he's young.

00:28:59.720 He's very talented.

00:29:00.520 He's very intelligent.

00:29:01.780 His rise in politics is astounding, actually.

00:29:05.340 And so I don't know that it's now or never, but it's kind of now.

00:29:10.420 You know, I mean, it is.

00:29:11.220 He is the vice president.

00:29:12.340 I think the president actually just spoke to the Wall Street Journal, but they took the quote away from me.

00:29:16.340 There it is.

00:29:16.980 President Trump just spoke with the Wall Street Journal.

00:29:19.120 And hold on.

00:29:19.960 Stop scrolling so much.

00:29:21.160 I want to read the report.

00:29:22.080 He says, the president said he had no plans to make personnel changes inside his administration.

00:29:27.580 and the express support for Defense Secretary Bedeck, Seth,

00:29:30.780 who has led the war effort.

00:29:33.040 I think he's terrific, actually, President Trump said.

00:29:35.680 It's just the way the ball bounces.

00:29:36.900 Sometimes Trump said of Tuesday night's primary results,

00:29:39.260 or sorry, the midterm results.

00:29:40.600 So far, everything he's saying is true.

00:29:42.220 Yes, there's-

00:29:43.160 Can you toss me the lighter?

00:29:43.800 It would be, this is an important issue,

00:29:46.440 is getting you that lighter.

00:29:48.360 I mean, it's just the way the ball bounces sometimes.

00:29:51.460 It's not, the ball's not supposed to bounce in this direction.

00:29:55.680 The ball's not supposed to bounce and make Texas blue.

00:29:58.260 But to Trump's point, I think this is a good point.

00:30:00.980 You cannot blame Pete Hegsak because you don't like the Iran war.

00:30:04.360 I mean, I actually think it would be wrong of him to fire Pete Hegsak.

00:30:06.700 I mean, I agree.

00:30:07.520 Pete Hegsak works for him.

00:30:09.060 I mean, and there is a case to be made that let's assume for a second,

00:30:12.920 since the Iran war is obviously the big subject that everybody is talking about tonight,

00:30:15.920 I think, again, that the big underplayed subject will be the tariffs,

00:30:18.720 which dramatically increased prices across the board,

00:30:21.500 and everyone pretends don't exist, even though they are wildly unpopular.

00:30:24.980 But we'll put that aside because nobody wants to talk about that.

00:30:27.380 They were largely struck down, so it became kind of a dead issue.

00:30:30.500 Yeah, but it didn't really.

00:30:32.100 The exit polls show 64% of Americans didn't like the tariffs and 63% said it affected their business.

00:30:37.160 So not great.

00:30:38.520 But let's talk about the Iran War since it's more interesting and people like talking about it.

00:30:41.620 Though the tariffs did kind of affect Mayflower cigars, too.

00:30:43.900 We were able to eat the prices and maintain burrito prices for the consumers.

00:30:49.420 They're a problem for people, for sure.

00:30:50.860 But with regards to the Iran war, the question, let's say you're JD or let's say you're the president, is what you do now.

00:30:57.440 Because nobody has a time machine.

00:30:58.480 We can do recriminations all day long, and it's fine.

00:31:00.400 I mean, like it's totally deserved.

00:31:01.680 And, you know, like what happened, happened.

00:31:03.200 And we can now analyze where we are now.

00:31:05.260 Maybe we, you know, maybe we reverse the recriminations if things go well over the course of the next two days or something.

00:31:11.500 But if you're the president or you're the vice president, you have to start from the presumption that the Iranians are not going to sign any sort of deal because they clearly are not.

00:31:19.940 I mean, they clearly are not interested

00:31:21.260 in signing some sort of deal.

00:31:22.160 And so then the question becomes,

00:31:23.100 how do you get to a quasi-successful conclusion

00:31:25.540 as fast as humanly possible?

00:31:26.960 Yeah.

00:31:27.380 Right, that really is what it is.

00:31:28.940 And because the faster, the better, obviously,

00:31:31.080 and the more successful, the better,

00:31:32.100 because Americans don't like losing wars.

00:31:33.980 I know this is something that we tend to forget.

00:31:36.120 And again, a lot of people who are sort of

00:31:37.720 in the America first movement, so to speak,

00:31:39.600 will say that, you know, just ending the war is sufficient.

00:31:42.240 Just ending a war is not sufficient.

00:31:43.660 If you end it and you lose,

00:31:45.080 you become Joe Biden with Afghanistan.

00:31:46.960 It doesn't actually, like ending it,

00:31:48.280 you don't get credit for ending it.

00:31:49.940 Just get credit for winning.

00:31:51.700 General Patton during World War II

00:31:53.560 gave this great speech to the Third Army

00:31:55.220 where he says, America never can

00:31:57.360 and never has lost a war.

00:31:59.400 And the funny thing is,

00:32:00.920 immediately after he said that,

00:32:02.720 immediately after that war,

00:32:04.440 with the exception of Desert Storm,

00:32:06.300 we lost like every war that we've engaged in.

00:32:08.720 I mean, imperial wars are like that, unfortunately.

00:32:11.560 But you have to remember,

00:32:12.540 even ending World War II took atom bombs.

00:32:16.160 And we're not dropping atom bombs on Iran.

00:32:19.120 That's not happening.

00:32:19.940 And I think the idea-

00:32:23.060 Well, the definition of loss in a war changed

00:32:25.720 or when a war changed,

00:32:26.780 because no one will surrender anymore.

00:32:28.580 Right.

00:32:28.840 Meaning, like, there are no regimes

00:32:30.080 who are willing to get on the deck of an aircraft carrier

00:32:32.000 and just be like, okay, you know what?

00:32:33.500 I'm giving up the ghost right here.

00:32:34.580 Because we're not fighting nations in the Middle East.

00:32:37.160 We're fighting, like, weird movements.

00:32:39.300 Tribal constellations.

00:32:40.720 Yeah, yeah.

00:32:40.940 For sure, that's true.

00:32:41.900 And the truth is that, you know,

00:32:43.780 in Korea, basically,

00:32:45.460 we won to the extent that there is a South Korea.

00:32:48.400 Yeah, right.

00:32:48.880 I mean, you can't call that a loss in the sense that they're actually a nation called South Korea.

00:32:52.160 It was a tie.

00:32:53.380 It was a draw.

00:32:54.260 It wasn't a tie for the South Koreans.

00:32:55.440 It was a win for the South Koreans.

00:32:56.260 It was a loss for the Norcs.

00:32:58.140 But, you know, the reality is that the thing that we got out of World War II,

00:33:05.020 in the same way that we have a unique and weird view of how the 1950s worked,

00:33:07.940 we're like, oh, that should be the normal.

00:33:09.120 And actually, that's very, very abnormal.

00:33:10.940 Exactly.

00:33:11.440 People look at World War II like, oh, that's how a war should end.

00:33:14.380 And let me explain.

00:33:15.160 Almost no wars in human history have ended the way World War II ended with the full-scale surrender of your opposition, and they just give up the ghost, and you actually just sort of manage their transition into the next thing.

00:33:25.680 That is not what happened at the end of World War I.

00:33:27.560 There was an armistice at the end of World War I, and then total hell broke loose in all of the various countries ranging from Germany to Russia.

00:33:33.520 There was World War II at the end of World War I.

00:33:35.360 Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:33:36.580 And before that, there was a war in 1870 between the French and the Germans.

00:33:41.120 And before that, there was a gigantic war at the beginning of that century with Napoleon running rampant across the continent.

00:33:46.600 And so I think that we have models in our head of how things should work that are based on absolute outliers.

00:33:52.440 That's true of World War II.

00:33:53.720 It's true of the 1950s economy, which is not real.

00:33:56.960 It is not a real economy because in order for that to happen, we have to destroy the rest of Earth.

00:34:01.400 We have to destroy the rest of Earth.

00:34:02.700 We have to have an isolated economy where the union worker gets paid a day's wage at $90 bajillion.

00:34:08.460 But there is a question about imperial America that really troubles me.

00:34:15.040 I mean, in the old days, you went and you fought a war with the country, and then you installed the people you wanted to run it.

00:34:20.600 This is correct.

00:34:21.080 We never do this.

00:34:22.060 This is correct.

00:34:22.620 And that's one of the wonderful things about us.

00:34:24.580 I think it's a beautiful thing that the only thing we left in Europe, we are dead.

00:34:28.620 You know, that's what we left there.

00:34:30.760 But at some point, we're now dealing with a Europe that is really not Europe.

00:34:35.900 You know, I mean, the speech that Vance made and the speech that Rubio followed it with were right.

00:34:41.800 You know, they're not I mean, they're arresting more people for speaking in the UK than they are in Russia.

00:34:46.980 And I think that that's like how do we how do we deal with that?

00:34:51.500 These are these this is our mother country.

00:34:53.320 It's still our greatest Anglosphere ally, but it's not a recognizable country in terms of its values.

00:34:59.920 So, I mean, we are we stand alone at this moment.

00:35:03.380 and we have to look to Asia

00:35:05.920 and we have to look to,

00:35:07.440 we have to keep the territory of Europe.

00:35:09.840 Really, Poland and Hungary

00:35:12.540 and all of those Eastern countries

00:35:15.300 are the only people who are aligned

00:35:16.880 with our values at all.

00:35:17.920 And look what's happened there.

00:35:18.960 Yeah, exactly.

00:35:19.620 I mean, obviously Hungary fell last year

00:35:21.500 and so it's kind of bleak.

00:35:23.440 And he's arresting his enemies too.

00:35:26.820 Of course.

00:35:27.760 Totally as predictive.

00:35:28.920 As predictive.

00:35:29.260 I knew it was.

00:35:29.780 You know what?

00:35:30.340 You're absolutely right.

00:35:31.380 You said it at the time.

00:35:32.320 I hate to say I told you so, but all to say, it's a rather bleak picture for the West.

00:35:39.180 And now, you know, it's come here in a very acute form.

00:35:42.480 But again, I also don't think that anyone on either side has made a robust argument for Americanism as an argument, as a fully fleshed out argument.

00:35:55.300 President Trump makes an extraordinary emotional appeal to Americanism, right?

00:35:58.920 Just the love for flag, the love for country, just the kind of root patriotism.

00:36:02.440 That for sure.

00:36:03.860 But what are the actual values that make America, America?

00:36:06.780 President Trump can't do a paragraph on that.

00:36:08.140 I agree.

00:36:08.960 And you've seen it.

00:36:10.620 You're one of the best spokesmen for it.

00:36:13.140 And everybody hates you.

00:36:15.600 Except for me, I like it.

00:36:16.820 Note to self, do not issue paragraphs.

00:36:19.400 But I think there's a reason for that.

00:36:21.420 And the reason for that is the minute you try to define a thing, you create controversy.

00:36:24.880 And until the American people are willing to get serious

00:36:27.080 about defining the things

00:36:28.600 that they actually are willing to do and want,

00:36:31.020 they're not going to get those things

00:36:32.140 and they're going to be perennially disappointed.

00:36:33.740 If you refuse to define what you want from a war,

00:36:35.940 you're not going to get it.

00:36:36.800 And if you refuse to define what sacrifices

00:36:38.420 you're willing to undergo,

00:36:40.000 you're not going to be able to make those sacrifices.

00:36:41.660 And if you're not willing to acknowledge

00:36:43.020 what economic system you wish to live under

00:36:45.420 and whether it is good or not,

00:36:47.060 then you're not going to get it.

00:36:48.100 If you want to say that you want to cut spending,

00:36:49.660 but you also want an endless welfare state

00:36:51.260 where we just pour gushers of money at you

00:36:53.340 And then we fund that by bringing a bunch of illegal immigrants to work at low rent wages.

00:36:57.280 But isn't that the issue?

00:36:59.400 You know, when it comes to even the idea of Americanism as an ideology, that creates a big problem.

00:37:05.340 Because the big anxiety that we felt throughout not only the Anglosphere but Western Europe as well, well, all of Europe actually, is mass migration.

00:37:15.000 That the actual, like, people of our country have just changed radically.

00:37:19.060 And we don't have kids anymore, which ties into the welfare problem.

00:37:21.820 And so I would say, look, I want to preserve the American nation.

00:37:25.180 You know, I love my country.

00:37:26.440 I love our way of life.

00:37:27.620 Not just the values, though I like those too, but I like hot dogs on the 4th of July.

00:37:31.820 I like fireworks.

00:37:34.060 I don't know.

00:37:34.540 That's important.

00:37:35.420 The ineffable kind of stuff that we just do.

00:37:38.260 And because of mass migration, that is changing in our country and elsewhere.

00:37:42.440 People have a deep anxiety about that.

00:37:44.060 And they're right to have that anxiety.

00:37:46.100 So then you try to distill the nation down to a set of ideas or some ideology.

00:37:51.800 But the problem is, one, I don't think nations can be reduced to that.

00:37:54.760 And two, our opponents aren't signing on board.

00:37:58.260 So even that doesn't quite work.

00:37:59.660 That's the key thing.

00:38:00.460 I'm sure you know Hilaire Belloc's theory that Rome didn't fall.

00:38:06.660 It simply became the Catholic Church.

00:38:08.620 And the Germans came in, and everybody said, oh, no, the Germans are here.

00:38:11.400 But the Germans wanted to be Romans.

00:38:12.820 We're letting in people who don't want to be Americans, which is just a real big mistake.

00:38:16.340 But I think the huge problem here that we're just ignoring is a lot of Americans just don't want to be Americans.

00:38:20.280 Yes.

00:38:20.940 I mean, it's not just the problem of immigration.

00:38:22.500 This is the problem of we've educated several generations of people not to believe in America and to hate America.

00:38:26.180 But because nobody in authority, nobody in power is doing what you just said.

00:38:33.220 Nobody is defining what it is America is, that socialism is antithetical to.

00:38:38.140 By the way, this is what the founders meant in the Declaration of Independence when they said we hold these truths to be self-evident.

00:38:44.300 They were not saying that the truths were themselves self-evident.

00:38:47.920 They're saying we hold these truths to be self-evident,

00:38:50.060 meaning this is not up for debate.

00:38:52.140 This right here is the stuff that's not up for debate.

00:38:54.120 And if you don't agree, you should get out.

00:38:56.020 You don't belong here.

00:38:57.520 And so, yes, obviously, a nation is the people that live in it.

00:39:02.720 But that's not enough.

00:39:04.220 And it's also not the idea.

00:39:05.520 I'll agree.

00:39:06.100 The ideas aren't enough.

00:39:06.860 It has to be combined with the people who are willing to live by those ideas

00:39:09.960 and join in the tradition and all those things.

00:39:12.880 But the ideas are the fundamental because people change.

00:39:17.340 People, their kids turn into socialists.

00:39:20.680 They can be good Americans and their kids turn into little jackass socialists

00:39:23.880 who vote for Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and James Tallarico in Texas.

00:39:27.760 Gen Z voted plus 48 for Democrats in this cycle.

00:39:31.060 The vast majority of the people who voted in that cycle, I promise you, are children of Americans.

00:39:36.960 And so what we've got right now, the Republican Party needs to,

00:39:41.220 someone needs to articulate what exactly are the principles that are supposed to bind us

00:39:46.840 and do so in muscular fashion

00:39:48.200 and without the kind of like,

00:39:49.840 what if we just soft sell

00:39:50.800 what the Democrats are selling

00:39:51.680 but a little bit less?

00:39:52.800 Yes, that's the problem.

00:39:54.080 That is exactly the problem.

00:39:54.800 Well, you know, there's also our

00:39:55.820 Boris Johnson version.

00:39:57.200 We define things negatively all the time

00:39:58.780 is what we're against.

00:39:59.440 We know what the conservatives are against,

00:40:01.040 but they never really come out

00:40:02.240 and say what they're against.

00:40:02.540 You know, our intrepid Brekka from Michigan,

00:40:06.420 she was reporting in Michigan

00:40:07.520 at Abdul's campaign headquarters.

00:40:09.900 She's interviewed a Muslim couple

00:40:11.740 on the street today

00:40:12.580 and you can check it out

00:40:14.240 on our social media channels.

00:40:15.840 And they said,

00:40:16.300 who'd you vote for?

00:40:16.840 we vote for Abdul al-Sayed. Okay, and what do you make of his view that men can become women

00:40:21.920 and women can become men? The Muslims said, what do you talk about? That men can be men?

00:40:27.420 No, no, no. He supports transgenderism. He said, no, no, it cannot. No, he does not. He cannot

00:40:32.040 believe that. He's Muslim. He cannot believe that. And it was this beautiful video. I mean,

00:40:36.680 so hilarious, but though dark. And you say, well, you know what? It's going to be very easy

00:40:42.140 to blame Muslims in Dearborn or whatever

00:40:44.600 for Abdul al-Sayed,

00:40:46.580 that you can actually,

00:40:47.980 because his deepest base is like college-educated whites.

00:40:50.760 Yeah, of course.

00:40:51.760 By the way, it's both,

00:40:53.500 and also the Dearborn Muslim is totally right.

00:40:55.440 Abdul al-Sayed does not believe in transing the children.

00:40:57.100 Yeah, that's true.

00:40:57.520 He's a religious Muslim who is lying

00:40:59.020 to make common cause with people

00:41:00.240 who want to trans the kids to destroy the civilization.

00:41:02.300 Well, this is the other thing.

00:41:03.340 They're both right, in other words.

00:41:04.660 People want to be a leftist

00:41:05.560 who's pretending to be a religious Muslim.

00:41:07.260 Yeah, and actually...

00:41:08.280 For him, he's a religious Muslim.

00:41:09.640 If he's a Muslim pretending to be a leftist

00:41:11.380 or a leftist pretending to be a Muslim.

00:41:12.780 I actually don't know which is worse.

00:41:14.300 We do, unfortunately, have more bad news.

00:41:16.180 Some more calls to report.

00:41:17.320 CNN has called the main Senate race

00:41:19.820 as I feared and predicted

00:41:22.380 for Democrat Troy Jackson,

00:41:25.460 who has defeated Susan Collins.

00:41:27.180 Wow.

00:41:27.460 Susan Collins, an amazing political survivor.

00:41:30.160 We all got irritated with a lot of her votes

00:41:32.280 because she was playing a game.

00:41:34.020 Brett Kavanaugh would not be on the Supreme Court

00:41:35.320 if there were not.

00:41:35.680 Yes, no, no, no.

00:41:36.540 I'm like a Susan Collins enjoyer and defender.

00:41:39.240 She played a game very, very well.

00:41:41.380 And even she, a total pro, like the varsity superstar athlete of play in politics, went down to Troy Jackson, who has two kids with his cousin.

00:41:51.640 NBC News also calls Pennsylvania's first district for Democrat Bob Harvey defeating Republican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick.

00:42:00.220 I don't like Brian Fitzpatrick, but he was a huge squish and everything.

00:42:04.240 It seems hard to dismiss this as a sort of fleeting, well, this is just how midterms go.

00:42:13.000 It feels like something far more significant than that.

00:42:16.020 And maybe it won't be.

00:42:17.120 But, I mean, as you pointed out, you know, there's a generational problem here.

00:42:23.020 Gen Z is falling to the siren song of socialism.

00:42:30.260 And so how does that play out in the long term?

00:42:32.780 I'd like to think, as I said at the beginning, you know, things change quickly.

00:42:36.340 And so, you know, Trump was the most popular thing in the world in 2024, and now look at it, and maybe it'll swing back the other way, pendulum swing.

00:42:44.100 But the far more pessimistic view is that what we are seeing is the beginning of a generational shift that is only just beginning.

00:42:56.280 And you hardly even want to consider what that means.

00:43:00.220 But the reason I'm hopeful is simply because of things I've seen.

00:43:06.760 Direction is all important.

00:43:08.980 The way the country is going is all important.

00:43:11.760 Reagan turned the country around.

00:43:15.280 He didn't actually succeed at a lot of what he wanted to do.

00:43:18.380 But he gave us 25 years of prosperity.

00:43:20.740 That entire Clinton administration was just riding the wave of Reagan's prosperity.

00:43:25.620 And in New York, I lived in New York when I had to run to get a cab to go to work so I wasn't killed.

00:43:33.420 That's how bad the crime was.

00:43:34.740 And I'm not even exaggerating about that.

00:43:36.160 I couldn't go out for a pack of cigarettes without worrying that I was not going to come home.

00:43:40.920 And Giuliani turned it around simply by coming into office.

00:43:45.460 It started.

00:43:46.560 And that's just the beginning.

00:43:48.660 But the way the country is going means everything.

00:43:50.920 If the country is going left, leftism doesn't work.

00:43:53.480 It's the only thing we have going for us is that leftism doesn't work.

00:43:57.400 And so I think that if someone came into office who was a free trade person, who was a capitalist, who was a freedom person, things would turn around.

00:44:07.220 You know, all those guys who were in the bonfire of the vanities in that Tom Wolfe book who went into the stock market and started making a billion dollars, five years before that, they were long-haired hippies at Woodstock.

00:44:17.460 Same people.

00:44:18.340 Same people.

00:44:18.800 So things really do turn around, and they turn around because of prosperity and peace.

00:44:23.480 You know, that's what that's what I also think that, you know, they turn around in some cases faster than you would think.

00:44:29.900 Yes. Nixon gets impeached in 75 or it was about to be.

00:44:34.200 And he's out of office and you have Gerald Ford and then he loses to Jimmy Carter.

00:44:37.640 It feels like the end of the world for Republicans. And four years later, they're so bad.

00:44:40.160 You get Reagan, who is effectively three terms plus Clinton.

00:44:44.020 CNN is also releasing some of their exit polling shows Democrats winning young white men by 17 points tonight.

00:44:50.860 Trump won young white men by 28 points just two years ago.

00:44:56.520 Also from the exit poll.

00:44:57.700 It's true that the Iran war is the economy.

00:45:00.040 Yeah.

00:45:00.440 I think that shift with white men is astounding, I think, male,

00:45:06.000 because God forbid you ever specifically support white men as a group.

00:45:11.720 And if you're not willing to speak to white men and acknowledge them specifically as a group,

00:45:17.700 the way that politicians on both sides have no problem talking to specifically any other group,

00:45:25.320 women, black people, anyone else, Asians, whatever.

00:45:28.560 But with white men, they don't want to do that.

00:45:30.580 But think about this.

00:45:30.960 So I defended Sarah on that ad because the policy was good,

00:45:34.840 and she felt that it was expedient to scapegoat white men,

00:45:38.960 that that was the only way to sell it politically, even to white people.

00:45:42.480 And so I defended her tactically on it, and I think she's doing a good job.

00:45:46.980 However, there's this Pew Research survey that came out that shows you this problem.

00:45:54.000 Every racial group has majority racial identity.

00:45:58.360 So if you look at black people, those who say that race is a very or at least somewhat important part of their identity, it's over 70%.

00:46:07.720 If you look at Hispanics and Asians, it's over 50%.

00:46:11.000 For white people, it's 15%.

00:46:13.300 Now, those numbers are a little out of date now.

00:46:15.140 I think they're eight or nine years old, maybe older.

00:46:18.240 Probably white racial consciousness has increased

00:46:21.180 as the inevitable consequence

00:46:23.220 of the racial identity politics of every other group.

00:46:25.880 So to your point, Matt,

00:46:26.840 it remains to this day taboo

00:46:29.620 to speak to the young white men

00:46:32.300 who just totally flipped over to the Democrat side,

00:46:35.940 to speak to them as an identity group.

00:46:37.880 Do you think that will change as a result of the midterms?

00:46:40.620 I don't think that that will change

00:46:42.920 as the result of the midterms.

00:46:44.040 I think that there's another factor there,

00:46:45.580 which is that there's a downside risk to speaking

00:46:49.780 because that poll, no matter how much it's moved,

00:46:53.200 would still, I would assume,

00:46:54.740 show a minority of white people

00:46:56.200 not identifying as white identitarian.

00:46:59.800 So even on just a raw political,

00:47:01.540 put aside the morality of all groups identifying

00:47:03.180 on the basis of ethnic identity

00:47:04.880 as opposed to religious identity

00:47:06.460 or ideological identity or political

00:47:07.960 or anything like that.

00:47:09.000 Put that aside.

00:47:09.880 Just in raw political terms,

00:47:11.800 what you do by doing the white identitarian

00:47:13.980 is the Beau French thing.

00:47:15.660 You just alienate everybody else.

00:47:17.220 Including white people.

00:47:18.100 Including most white people.

00:47:19.320 So that turns out to be a mistake.

00:47:21.260 That's not what's happening here.

00:47:22.680 I think what happened with young white men

00:47:24.680 is that there was a misread by Republicans

00:47:28.120 that because they voted for Trump

00:47:29.960 and they shifted from kind of Bernie Sanders land

00:47:32.240 to Trump land, like the Joe Rogan, Theo Vaughn guys,

00:47:35.720 and they moved into Trump's camp,

00:47:38.200 that these were now like a core part

00:47:40.260 of the constituency that would not go away.

00:47:42.140 And I've been saying for a while,

00:47:43.240 That's not true.

00:47:44.360 Like, there's a variable group of people.

00:47:47.900 White people overall voted for Trump, and they voted for Republicans in this election.

00:47:51.420 The exit poll shows the only racial group that voted in favor of Republicans in this

00:47:54.600 election cycle, which was dire.

00:47:56.640 Young white men are incredibly variable.

00:47:59.560 They are incredibly reactive to whatever is sort of the transgressive narrative of the

00:48:04.320 day.

00:48:05.260 And so, I mean, Joe Rogan was basically endorsing James Tallarico in the middle of the race.

00:48:09.540 Treating Joe Rogan as though he's sort of a fellow traveler on the right

00:48:12.160 and just an erstwhile Republican voter is a category error.

00:48:15.340 And the same thing is true for Theo Vaughn,

00:48:16.800 who's been doing the same thing with Democratic candidates.

00:48:18.600 So again, those votes were very much up for grabs.

00:48:21.000 By the way, again, you do have stats in that exit poll.

00:48:24.280 Points from my memory, even though it's late at night.

00:48:25.900 I did say cost of living was the number one issue with the bullet at 89%.

00:48:28.800 That was right.

00:48:29.640 58% of those voters voted Democrat.

00:48:32.260 So again, Iran is part of that too, but it's not the whole thing.

00:48:34.340 Iran is part of that, but interest rates are part of that.

00:48:36.520 And, you know, the dysfunction in the housing market, which President Trump has talked about and invade against for quite a while, that's very important, too.

00:48:43.580 The other issue on the white people voting Republican, the only racial group that did, white people voted Republican, whatever, 52-48.

00:48:51.340 51-47.

00:48:52.160 51-40, yeah, okay, 51-47.

00:48:54.920 The other racial groups voted Democrat in a much more decisive way.

00:49:00.140 Oh, it's 88-9 for black people.

00:49:01.960 But the one that shifted, and this is where Republicans, again, if you're going to do what Trump wanted to do, which was build a multiracial coalition of blue-collar and working-class people, right?

00:49:15.040 This was the Henry Olsen goal.

00:49:16.780 If you're going to do that, I'm sorry, but you can't put out Studio Ghibli of ICE officers handcuffing fat Hispanic ladies out to the bus.

00:49:27.280 You can't.

00:49:27.960 Like, that's just bad politics.

00:49:30.020 You may want those people,

00:49:32.300 meaning like that lady was a criminal in real life.

00:49:34.680 But optics matter in politics.

00:49:36.920 Trump should know this better than anybody

00:49:38.020 because he actually is optically intelligent.

00:49:40.180 But the fact that the ICE operations,

00:49:43.320 and this is why Greg Blumeney was terrible at his job

00:49:45.440 and Tom Homan is good at his job, right?

00:49:47.320 Like you do the thing quietly without bothering people.

00:49:51.360 That's the way you actually do policy.

00:49:53.100 You do things quietly without bothering people.

00:49:54.680 And when you just yell from the rooftops

00:49:56.180 that you're being mean to people,

00:49:57.180 It turns out that people who are Hispanic go, oh, God, that's not what I meant.

00:50:04.300 It would be nice, though.

00:50:05.400 You know the famous line about Churchill that he mobilized the English language and sent it to war?

00:50:09.860 It would be nice if we could elect somebody who could speak.

00:50:12.540 You know, it's not a small thing.

00:50:14.600 No, I've long defended Trump as having actual poetic diction in the Barfieldian sense.

00:50:19.960 He does have poetic diction, but he doesn't have political diction.

00:50:23.320 Something happened with Trump.

00:50:24.540 I don't know what it is exactly, but it seems like in this term, he totally lost touch with

00:50:32.200 the base completely in a way that, I mean, like you were saying earlier that it seemed

00:50:39.740 like with Trump in 2016 that he kind of would figure out the policies as he went.

00:50:44.300 And there was a little bit, it's also true what Drew said, that many of the things he

00:50:48.780 talked about, he'd been talking about for decades.

00:50:50.680 I think what actually happened was this dialogue he was in with the base

00:50:53.660 where he would say something that was a little bit wild and kind of out there.

00:50:59.600 And then the base, through Twitter, would come out and say,

00:51:03.420 well, I think what he really means is this.

00:51:04.980 And then he would read that and go, yeah, I meant that.

00:51:07.240 And so there was this back and forth.

00:51:08.800 And through that dialogue, he actually constructed a really good set of policies.

00:51:16.420 And in 2024, it's been completely severed.

00:51:20.500 And I thought, and I brought this up on the other show, that to me, the giant red flag

00:51:26.900 that something major had changed was with Epstein, because no matter how we feel about

00:51:30.820 Epstein, that was really important with the base.

00:51:33.320 By the way, I agree with you on that.

00:51:34.380 I agree with you, too.

00:51:35.740 It was the first time, Epstein was the first time when Trump seemed to be totally, wildly,

00:51:43.420 in a baffling way out of step with his own base.

00:51:48.100 And it seemed like he didn't even know it.

00:51:50.160 Yeah.

00:51:50.560 And so I don't know what that is exactly.

00:51:52.200 Maybe a lot of it is truth social

00:51:54.060 rather than just being on Twitter.

00:51:55.420 I mean, I think that might be part of it.

00:51:56.040 I think a large part of it was he convinced himself

00:51:58.640 because he has a unique capacity

00:51:59.720 to convince himself of things,

00:52:01.100 which is why he's authentic.

00:52:02.140 He believes the thing he's saying in the moment.

00:52:04.200 When he says 2024 was a great historic victory

00:52:06.600 that has never been paralleled

00:52:07.660 and every Republican is still with me,

00:52:09.400 he actually believes that thing.

00:52:11.000 And so when he said, the vast majority of Republicans are still with me after the whole Epstein thing, which was true, statistically it was true, but you're right, the rollout was out of touch, and he didn't bother to kind of go out, and there were people in the administration, including apparently Dan Bongino, telling him, like, you need to go out and, like, explain exactly what it is.

00:52:28.740 You know, I was just about to bring Dan up because.

00:52:30.780 Hold on, before we get into Dan, we do have a few more updates.

00:52:33.700 On the bright side, there's a bright side.

00:52:36.260 Oh, good.

00:52:36.620 There's a bright side before we go to bed.

00:52:38.340 The AP calls the Louisiana Senate race.

00:52:40.660 We saved Louisiana, great.

00:52:43.080 We saved Louisiana.

00:52:44.080 The Republican wins Louisiana by two points currently.

00:52:47.320 Oh, my God.

00:52:48.140 Currently by two.

00:52:48.780 But, okay, so Republicans win Louisiana.

00:52:50.580 Back to bad news.

00:52:51.300 No, not as good.

00:52:52.220 It's actually not bad.

00:52:52.680 Democrats are currently leading by a solid margin at this point.

00:52:56.620 All four contested Texas Supreme Court.

00:52:59.860 Wipe out in Texas.

00:53:00.880 Wipe out.

00:53:01.880 But Dan Bongino, I think, is a real straight arrow guy as far as I can tell.

00:53:06.020 I agree. Yeah.

00:53:06.200 And he left the administration.

00:53:08.180 And the minute that happened, I thought, what did he see that he could not bear?

00:53:12.740 There was something he saw that he couldn't bear.

00:53:14.880 And he's been loyal enough not to come out really.

00:53:17.600 Well, go ahead.

00:53:18.140 I mean, I won't speak on behalf of Dan, but I kind of think that you don't have to read the tea leaves very well

00:53:23.480 to understand that there was significant conflict inside the administration

00:53:26.240 about the level of transparency that was being provided around the investigation.

00:53:30.660 And, you know, Pam Bondi did a horrible job.

00:53:36.040 I mean, she did a horrible job.

00:53:37.140 I mean, like, everyone knows she did a horrible job.

00:53:39.140 And so there was this disconnect.

00:53:40.580 It kept emerging.

00:53:41.920 Listen, the first time it truly emerged for me was, you know, Liberation Day.

00:53:45.980 I think I will maintain, and the polls show, was a disaster.

00:53:49.500 It was a terrible, terrible idea.

00:53:51.280 It was the most—I know that everybody is rolling their eyes.

00:53:53.400 Yeah, no, I don't know that it was—

00:53:54.980 It could have been a bad—I just don't think that really—

00:53:58.000 It is when the streams crossed.

00:53:59.300 You can look on—it is that day.

00:54:01.260 You can look where he went from net approval positive to net approval negative,

00:54:04.640 and then he never stopped.

00:54:05.760 And when you walk out and you start tariffing penguins, because it's just stuff that you can do, like if you wanted to do tariffs, again, I'm not arguing against all tariffs.

00:54:16.260 I'm saying that you can't declare trade war on the entire world in the middle of affordability, inflation spiral, and then claim that your top priority is quashing inflation.

00:54:26.140 But I think it was a structural thing that Matt was getting at that was really true, this dialogue that Trump was in with his base.

00:54:33.300 that I was at a cigar night in Virginia.

00:54:37.580 You know, they have this,

00:54:38.400 the Republicans gather once a month for the cigar night.

00:54:41.260 And my friend Sebastian Gorka was there

00:54:43.600 and somebody said to him, you know,

00:54:45.800 what went wrong basically with Trump one?

00:54:48.600 And Sebastian then spoke for an unbroken 45 minutes

00:54:51.340 about how the Republican Party

00:54:54.080 set about peopling the administration

00:54:57.200 with people who hated Trump

00:54:58.700 and were working against him.

00:55:00.240 And that when he and others sat down and thought,

00:55:02.360 well, who can we enlist who will join us?

00:55:05.360 And actually, they came up with like five names

00:55:07.920 and they had nobody else.

00:55:09.760 Trump solved that problem during those four years

00:55:11.840 and surrounded himself with people who agreed with him

00:55:15.560 and who were pretty good, I think.

00:55:18.180 You know, I mean, you say what you will about P-Tex.

00:55:19.980 He brought the military back

00:55:22.660 so that people were actually enlisted.

00:55:24.560 No, I will say this.

00:55:25.940 I think that some of the staff-

00:55:26.940 But it cut him off.

00:55:27.480 Just to finish the thought,

00:55:28.540 it cut him off from that dialogue.

00:55:30.440 He was surrounded with people, with yes men, but also supporters.

00:55:34.160 But it cut him off from that dialogue with the people who could disagree with him and also move him.

00:55:38.340 I certainly think that it is true that he created a bubble around himself in this White House.

00:55:41.980 And I think that there's no one in the – it went from let's talk with the president about what should be done.

00:55:47.060 And maybe in most cases, obviously, we're going to always defer to him.

00:55:50.240 He's the president.

00:55:50.880 But we'll push back.

00:55:52.400 And it went to how do we effectuate the thing that he says he wants to do right now?

00:55:56.620 Right.

00:55:56.900 And how is – and let's race to do it.

00:55:58.340 Let's like – let's run to do it.

00:56:00.000 And so the sort of, you know, by the end of the administration, I'll just take it as an example, William Barr versus Pam Bondi.

00:56:05.780 There is no question that William Barr, who was the attorney general, was a far superior attorney general to Pam Bondi.

00:56:11.540 William Barr was great.

00:56:12.680 OK, and William Barr was doing many of the things that Trump wanted.

00:56:15.200 But he would also say, like, you know, Mr. President, this is a bad idea.

00:56:18.240 You probably just shouldn't do this thing.

00:56:19.800 And he was abiding by the law in doing that.

00:56:21.760 And Pam Bondi was kind of running around like chicken with her head cut off to just effectuate the will of the president.

00:56:25.560 You do need people.

00:56:26.600 I mean, this is true in everybody's life.

00:56:27.920 Forget about politics.

00:56:28.500 Like, you need people in your life who you trust and want the best for you, but who are

00:56:32.180 also capable of saying to you, you know, this one is not a win.

00:56:35.300 Well, you know, it's curious in this administration, in the second Trump administration, I'm basing

00:56:40.000 this just on reporting, but a lot of the reporting comes out and says, especially on the Iran

00:56:44.480 war, that you had figures who were urging caution in Iran.

00:56:48.000 Probably the most prominent is J.D.

00:56:49.580 Vance.

00:56:49.980 So it's helpful when the guy who is providing some, you know, alternative views is in a

00:56:55.540 position where he can't get fired and he's, you know, elected by the American people. He's in a

00:56:58.880 good state. But there were other figures in the administration, too. There was some reporting

00:57:03.160 about John Ratcliffe and Marco Rubio and other people pushing back on some of these ideas. So

00:57:07.540 you do have some of that disagreement, but probably the rest of the staffing of the

00:57:12.500 administration, you have less. They're so thinly staffed. Also, they are just unbelievably thinly.

00:57:17.540 And if you go below the top level, there's almost no one. Right. And at the top,

00:57:21.060 They're very, very good people.

00:57:22.440 Two more updates for tonight.

00:57:24.100 The votes are coming in from Alaska,

00:57:26.980 showing a very tight race with only 21%.

00:57:29.460 Reporting so far, Democrat Mary Peltola

00:57:33.400 is leading with 54% over Dan Sullivan at 45%.

00:57:37.840 Which Dan Sullivan?

00:57:40.120 There are two of them.

00:57:41.360 Yeah, right.

00:57:42.680 On the bright side, CBS is now calling

00:57:45.320 the Tennessee-

00:57:45.760 Thank God for you, Michael.

00:57:47.080 We finally take that cabot all night.

00:57:50.440 Cabots.

00:57:51.060 He's like, well, you know, the Tennessee governor.

00:57:52.860 I said, buddy, if Marsha Blackburn's not the next governor,

00:57:56.400 like, we gotta move.

00:57:57.620 I don't know.

00:57:58.180 There's no place to move, down to Florida.

00:57:59.680 Right, that's right.

00:58:00.900 You guys are gonna be in your own country.

00:58:02.620 So, all right, so that's good news.

00:58:04.320 Isn't that much closer than you thought, though?

00:58:06.040 Yes, 45-43.

00:58:07.200 Oh, my God, it's so much closer.

00:58:08.000 Where do we have, I can't see the-

00:58:09.280 45-43, which is insane.

00:58:10.980 Wow.

00:58:11.460 That's totally insane.

00:58:12.420 Yes.

00:58:12.900 By the way, it's insane.

00:58:14.240 Byron Donalds won by two points against David Jolly.

00:58:16.980 Yeah.

00:58:17.620 Ashley Moody won against a psychotic Democratic Socialist of America candidate named Angie Nixon in that Senate race by two points.

00:58:24.460 Yeah.

00:58:24.680 Just nuts.

00:58:25.360 No, this is a tsunami.

00:58:27.160 There's no question about it.

00:58:28.000 It's as bad as, you know, it's as bad as it can be.

00:58:30.760 Okay.

00:58:31.300 Does anyone want to say anything happy before we go home?

00:58:33.660 No.

00:58:34.240 It's the end of the night.

00:58:35.080 Yeah.

00:58:35.420 I'm happy about that.

00:58:36.260 I enjoyed your cigar.

00:58:37.620 Thank you.

00:58:38.100 Thank you there.

00:58:38.880 One silver lining.

00:58:40.060 Wonderful to be with all of you.

00:58:42.260 Who was it who earlier said, I guess it was Glenn Beck, who said, you know, God is sovereign over history.

00:58:46.560 He's not up for re-election.

00:58:47.620 He knows the hairs of our head, you know.

00:58:48.760 A sparrow doesn't fall with that as knowledge.

00:58:50.660 So that is the consolation and the comfort we take for tonight,

00:58:53.760 and probably the only one.

00:58:55.400 Thank you for watching Friendly Fire and our election night coverage.

00:58:58.220 We'll see you tomorrow.

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00:59:13.480 and can cash out at any time before the game ends.

00:59:15.740 Sean's getting his steps

00:59:17.280 but I'm getting paid

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The Matt Walsh Show - November 04, 2026

Friendly Fire： So Republicans Lost... Now What？

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