Time Magazine names Donald Trump its Person of the Year, and Megyn and her co-hosts discuss why they think he deserves the honor. Plus, the latest on the Trump cabinet nomination process, and whether Santa Claus is a bully.
00:03:04.960Well, I was sort of pleased that Time magazine still prints a printed issue.
00:03:09.240You know, it's only like when you see an actual noteworthy person like Donald Trump being man of the year that you know that they actually still print the magazine.
00:04:31.560Um, so he does make a fair amount of news in the interview that, you know, he gave them an interview in connection with the, um, with the selection.
00:04:41.460And one of the things he says is they get into how he decided on his abortion stance to leave it to the states.
00:04:47.900And apparently this is what they report.
00:04:49.620He was in the private cabin of his plane flying on April 2nd to a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, when he picked up a document that Susie Wiles, campaign manager, now chief of staff, had placed atop a stack of papers.
00:05:02.340How a national abortion ban will cost Trump the election.
00:05:05.500Trump raised his eyebrows, quote, kind of a nasty title, huh?
00:05:08.540He said before he considered the memo, Trump had been on the verge of supporting a 16 week federal abortion ban.
00:05:15.940Think about that, how that could have changed this election.
00:05:19.380Conway, Kellyanne Conway is another advisor, had showed him polling, indicating that barring the procedure after 16 weeks was more popular.
00:05:32.580But Trump's speech writer and policy advisor, Vince Haley, had raised an objection on a late March conference call, according to three people present.
00:05:41.820Quote, does he know that the 16 week ban will be stricter than existing law in a lot of the states?
00:06:01.640Within a few minutes, he was dictating his remarks to Haley.
00:06:05.160I do believe you guys were on this show right after he did that, right?
00:06:09.980We had a debate about his stance on abortion, how it had disappointed some of the more established conservatives in the party, but defended it here as smart politics.
00:06:21.580Given the state of the electorate, the mood of the country on this issue, it is amazing how Trump got a couple of data points.
00:06:28.800You know, everything for him is transactional.
00:06:38.720Yeah, well, I mean, it goes to show a couple of things.
00:06:40.980One is that he was getting good advice on this campaign all the way through.
00:06:45.000I mean, they ran a really good campaign.
00:06:46.800And all you can ever ask for any candidate that's running an office of that level is to get a myriad of viewpoints and paint the full picture before a decision is made.
00:06:56.120Sounds like in this case, that's exactly what he got on a very contentious issue.
00:07:00.080It's also where he landed is consistent with where the American people have been for 50 years, right?
00:07:06.640I mean, you've had this Roe v. Wade decision that had this big sort of federal overlap over all the states legalizing abortion, preventing any sort of restrictions there within the states.
00:07:18.320And then when that was overturned, it was kicked back to everything the pro-life movement had argued for those 40 years, that it should go back to states and localities and people should make these decisions on their own.
00:07:28.560There shouldn't be this one sided federal government that flips back and forth every four years, depending upon who wins elections, outlawing something as significant as abortion in here.
00:07:38.400So I think he landed, honestly, in the only place that you could land on a really contentious issue like this in the context of the two years after Dobbs and the first presidential election since.
00:07:49.660It saved him, given how much she highlighted that issue and how big it became, even with Trump saying, I'm not going to touch it.
00:07:58.440It was a huge campaign issue. Imagine if he had been pushing a 16 week ban.
00:08:03.060I mean, it really could have changed the course of this election.
00:08:05.780Here's another couple nuggets. Pretty interesting.
00:08:08.260How advisors got him to stop bashing early voting.
00:09:16.940In his core, he seemed to believe fraud happens if you mail in your vote or if you vote before Election Day.
00:09:22.360And what they report is that it took a visit from Rob Gleeson, former chair of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, to frame the matter in terms that made Trump agree.
00:09:34.940This is brilliant because this is how you have to talk to Trump, you know, to sort of get through to him the way his mind works.
00:09:39.820Sir, your people are so excited to vote for you that they want to vote as soon as they can, Gleeson told him during an April meeting at Mar-a-Lago, according to two top Trump officials familiar.
00:09:52.700They don't want to wait, but you got to tell him it's OK.
00:10:37.440And there was some confusion about whether that people should be voting early, whether they shouldn't be voting early.
00:10:42.460When Trump announced that he was for it, it not only cleared up the confusion, but what he built and what they built at the RNC to turn out the vote was monumental.
00:10:53.960And in Pennsylvania, what a contrast between how President Trump listened to a guy from Pennsylvania who was telling him how to win the state and Kamala Harris, who refused to even put the governor of Pennsylvania on her ticket.
00:11:21.720He knew that he had to do something different to change the outcome this time and not have it taken from him the way Democrats did in 2020.
00:11:29.700Yeah, I will say I had a little bit of experience with this because I remember, you know, I had the opportunity to have a lot of visits with President Trump in his first term.
00:11:38.380And towards the end, when states were changing all of their voting rules to try to accommodate COVID, and as we've since found out, many of them totally irresponsibly and without proper controls and anything else, he was watching all that in real time.
00:11:54.820And so his reaction to early voting, like it is a whole bunch of issues.
00:12:00.280One of the reasons why I think he's going to be a really good president the second four years, it's based on a life experience.
00:12:05.220It wasn't – he didn't spend a life watching politics and watching turnout mechanisms and being an operative.
00:12:11.200He knew what he experienced in 2020 when people were changing all kinds of early voting rules that obviously benefited Democrats a great deal, and he knew he opposed that.
00:12:20.380And so I think you recontextualize that now to a whole bunch of states that actually put in safeguards and had competent elections, California notwithstanding, Arizona you can make some questions about, although they got to the right spot.
00:12:36.280Ultimately, once those are in place, you can make a very logical case, and this is not something he had an ideological opposition to in the sense of his own election.
00:12:44.920He just knew how it worked out the first time.
00:12:46.700Well, and if you look back to previous elections before Donald Trump, the Republican Party won elections in states like Arizona on the backbone of their turnout operation, which was absentee by mail and early vote in person.
00:13:00.100And so getting back to that, of course, was a huge advantage in 2020 because Trump said only vote on Election Day.
00:14:25.800But all these people who just wandered in there and many of whom were welcomed by security and then walked around the Capitol for a short time and then left.
00:15:04.800Well, I think, you know, Joe Biden expressed it very well.
00:15:07.920There are concerns that the Justice Department did to politicize actions and go out, you know, political enemies.
00:15:13.420So under that advisement from Joe Biden, I think Trump is well within his bounds to act if he believes the same way Joe Biden really did break the seal.
00:15:22.040You know, I mean, I think this would be a lot more controversial if not for Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and how he's used and how he framed it.
00:15:30.780He framed it as though his son was the target of a political prosecution without mentioning, you know, 47 indictments against his political opponent or all the J6ers or everything else.
00:15:40.560But it opened up this discussion in a way where you could see a very reasonable way of handling all of that.
00:15:46.960I will say, like, I agree with you, Megan, the violent offenders here, people that, you know, had a sinister intent on J6 and they were hitting cops with flagpoles.
00:15:57.020I don't think that's what we're talking about here.
00:15:59.440And so, you know, who sort of like throw up their hands and oh, my gosh, I can't believe it.
00:16:05.320And that's coming from somebody who had an awful lot of friends who were in that building, who had doors barricaded with desks in front of it, with people trying to break it down.
00:16:13.980Like it was very personal for a lot of us who knew people that were in that situation.
00:17:07.860About how the media has been kind of quiet lately about Trump.
00:17:11.680And he was asking, do you think in America they're going to give him a chance at a second term that's not marred by constant demonization of Trump?
00:17:22.560No, they're quiet because Trump's been relatively quiet.
00:17:25.800And I do think Trump's in a better mood and he's a little bit calmer and a little wiser and speaking in a way that's more magnanimous and unifying.
00:17:36.160You guys are in this mix as much as I am, the political mix.
00:17:39.180And you guys and I both know the J-6 pardons are going to be hugely controversial, even though Hunter Biden.
00:17:46.500And then we're going to get to immigration and we're going to get to deportation of families, children.
00:17:54.040That was another thing he said, immigration plans.
00:17:56.440He will order U.S. law enforcement agencies and potentially the military to embark on a massive deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from this country.
00:18:06.420Now, I know the American public supports it, but the media doesn't and the media is not going to want to see it.
00:18:12.160And they need to fill their papers and their broadcasts with news every day.
00:18:16.120And that news is not going to be Trump's doing a good thing.
00:18:20.780So the other thing he said in this, before I give it to you guys, is he doesn't plan to restore the policy of separating children from their families.
00:18:28.900But he says, I don't believe we'll have to because we'll send the whole family back.
00:18:34.180And then adds and says, I would much rather deport them together.
00:18:37.820And then finally says, look, with respect to the general prohibition against using the military to enact deportations or to, you know, against civilians.
00:18:48.380He says he will use the military to round up and deport these illegal migrants.
00:18:52.720He says it does not stop using the military if you're dealing with an invasion of this country.
00:18:58.620And then there is another report we've seen this before, that his advisers are planning to build more detention centers to hold the migrants until they can be deported.
00:19:07.940So you're going to have the media will call them camps.
00:19:10.900It'll be treated like a concentration camp.
00:19:12.800We'll have video of AOC down there in her white outfit again, looking at the children crying and you're going to show the J6 prisoners getting out while the children are somehow in camps.
00:19:26.640And the narrative will start and everything will deteriorate back down to its normal, terrible status.
00:19:33.400I mean, I think you said a few very critical things.
00:19:36.720Number one, the vast majority of Americans agree with this action, that the law should be followed.
00:19:41.440If you enter the country illegally, you've broken the law and the law says you have to go back.
00:19:46.340And I think there's already been a precedent of how the media is going to be completely biased in this very subject.
00:19:52.640When we saw images of, oh, my gosh, they've put children in cages, and then it's revealed that actually that photo was shot under the Obama administration.
00:20:00.400You know, you saw the pod roast out about it.
00:20:02.560They didn't realize they were working for the guy who did that.
00:20:05.080So the media has no problem lying and trying to color Trump as being some kind of a dictator going after innocent people.
00:20:11.860Trump is doing what the American people asked, which is returning these people who entered the country illegally.
00:20:16.340Right. You said at the top, Megan, you know, they got to fill their newspapers with something.
00:20:20.080Wouldn't it be great if the headline at the top of The New York Times says Trump doing what voters elected him to do?
00:20:26.940The vast majority of Americans agree with the policy of deportation, which would be factual and accurate.
00:20:33.060But you're right. I mean, it is going to cost him some political capital after all of these stories and the talk of, you know, these camps and all this sort of stuff.
00:20:43.020And they just got to hold strong and know the voters are behind them.
00:20:46.000Right. And what the media is going to completely blow past are the thousands and thousands of fighting age men from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan who somehow ended up in Mexico and walked over our southern border.
00:20:58.280There are terrorists in this country that absolutely have to be removed.
00:21:03.240I mean, we're talking like there are some estimates that there are more fighting age men who have come into this country illegally over the last four years than we have currently serving in our armed forces today.
00:21:15.840That is a major emergency for our country. And what President Trump is going to do is protect us from the dangers of the Biden administration.
00:21:24.700It is it's terrifying thinking of who thinking the fact that we don't even know who's here because the Biden administration has lost count.
00:21:33.400Not to mention there are over a million people who have already been adjudicated as here improperly and scheduled for deportation.
00:21:41.480They blow right past that. They blow right past the fact that Barack Obama deported three million people when he was president.
00:21:49.440Right. And nobody asked him the cost or the feasibility of that program.
00:21:53.780No, no, that that was OK because it was Barack Obama.
00:21:56.760If Donald Trump wants to do it, it'll be Adolf Hitler.
00:21:58.640But let me tell you, let me tell you something. Rachel Maddow, just take one when we could take pretty much anybody over on MSNBC.
00:22:06.640Her ratings are down. I mean, I'm going to get you the exact numbers by half.
00:22:14.720She's down over 50 percent in the demo in the overall number.
00:22:18.680You know, the overall audience, she's down 43 percent in total audience.
00:22:22.740She was averaging two point four million. Now she's down by a million to one point four.
00:22:26.960Like she could spare it. And this is their highest rated show in the key demo, the advertising demo of twenty five to fifty four.
00:22:34.060She has shed fifty six percent of her audience.
00:22:39.160She is averaging one hundred and three thousand in the demo.
00:23:03.580It's so good. But this is you just made the point, Megan, that I was just about to make, which is the one key difference that's happened since twenty seventeen.
00:23:11.220And when the media unleashed a four year campaign to basically try to undermine everything that President Trump was trying to accomplish was that the media still had a little bit of credibility.
00:23:20.820It has fallen about thirty five, forty percent since that moment in time where people get that information.
00:23:27.160I mean, look, sitting on this show right now, we're a perfect example of that.
00:23:30.120I mean, the Megyn Kelly show has got a hell of a lot more people in demo than MSNBC has ever had in demo.
00:23:37.040You know, and so, yes, they're falling. Yes, they're going away.
00:23:42.400What they are clinging to is this last partisan remain of this very hardened group that the vast majority of people can't identify with at all.
00:23:50.720And they're going to seek their information elsewhere.
00:23:53.080Legacy legacy media sources are going to be shrill.
00:24:42.580But as soon as Trump, I've been through this on cable news many times, as soon as he is sworn in and starts doing things, it's going to be they're going to come back.
00:24:52.120They're going to come back to MSNBC and CNN if those channels do what they are in the business of doing, which is bashing Republicans and Trump in particular.
00:25:01.840There is no business model for them in going more fair and open minded to Trump.
00:25:08.300So they will get those numbers up from loss of half of our audience by doing the one trick that these ponies know how to do, which is bash Donald Trump.
00:25:16.820And Trump, his magnanimous tone will change.
00:25:19.700And we won't be back necessarily to double impeachments and criminal prosecution threats and so on.
00:25:25.980But we will be back to very divided, hateful media coverage of Trump.
00:25:30.280So this honeymoon period is going to be super short.
00:25:34.020And I guess he should enjoy it while he can.
00:25:37.320I guess my only point on that, Megan, is that it's now consolidated a left, right?
00:25:41.920Your CNNs of the world, your MSNBCs, your Washington Post, your New York Times, even your Associated Press, for crying out loud.
00:25:47.640It's now a consolidated leftist audience.
00:25:50.000And where you get into trouble politically for a new president when you're entering into contentious issues is when you start bleeding into the center right or into your base of concern.
00:26:00.080That is a concern for, you know, 100 years of politics, or at least since the advent of television with network news.
00:26:07.500It's not really that big of a concern right now that you're going to start losing those center right voters because they don't live there anymore.
00:26:18.480You're entirely right that they're going to consolidate the left.
00:26:21.120They're going to make it entirely impossible for him to have fair conversation.
00:26:25.000But I think his ability to withstand that is much greater than it was eight years ago.
00:26:31.260I also think it would be very important.
00:26:33.560It's incumbent upon independent, reliable sources of information like ourselves and your show as well, Megan, that we highlight when these actions are taking place that here's the issue.
00:26:43.600The Biden-Harris regime created this broken system where they would say, show up to court, and then people would go missing.
00:26:50.320I think during that entire time, independent information sources should highlight the fact that here's the problem.
00:26:57.160These people who were under this Joe Biden system of being handed a slip of paper show up to court and don't show up.
00:27:02.940That's why this action is having to be taken.
00:27:05.180We're dealing with the problem that Joe Biden created.
00:27:07.400You think the on-your-honor system wasn't a great way to enforce the law?
00:29:23.500And I mean, them having such a hard time with it is really one of the greatest developments.
00:29:28.320And it reminds me of a line that the great coach from the Buffalo Bills, Marv Levy, used to say, if it's too hard for them, it's just right for us.
00:29:51.700Like, maybe don't say the laptop can't be verified when it can.
00:29:55.500And then when your own organization verifies it, come out and do a mea culpa and admit that you embarrassed yourself.
00:30:01.760Maybe don't stealth edit the presidential candidate on the Democrats side.
00:30:07.480Interview with 60 minutes, your flagship program that you're an anchor of without telling us.
00:30:12.780And then when it becomes a controversy, refuse to release the transcript because you're more interested in running cover for the Dems than you are in honest reporting.
00:30:22.180Maybe don't host a vice presidential debate where you fact check only one side.
00:30:27.520And then when your fact check gets fact checked by the vice presidential candidate on the Republican side, you cut his mic.
00:30:33.900Just a few thoughts off the top of my head on what you can do about it.
00:30:38.920And I love that clip because I think it gets to the heart of the matter in this whole segment and sort of back to Holmes' point.
00:30:44.420It's really not about audience, whether they have half the audience they used to have or they get all that audience back by ginning up all the hatred of Donald Trump after he's sworn in.
00:30:52.980Ultimately, the question is, are they going to have any credibility?
00:30:55.780Is anything that they say actually going to matter, no matter how many people are actually listening or watching?
00:31:01.060And I think it's going to be a lot less.
00:31:02.760And I think the demonstration of that is this election, right?
01:05:19.200Look, if, if Kimberly Guilfoyle really wants to be confirmed to this job, she needs to start her opening statement by thanking George Tunis for building the program that she's standing on his shoulder.
01:05:38.480That he basically built, which she is now kind of earned.
01:06:06.720Uh, uh, there are, uh, there are a lot of things that we'll be getting to, uh, uh, there are a lot of markets that will continue to open up.
01:16:51.920A spokesperson for the Morris County Sheriff's Office described the drones as similar to small cars.
01:16:57.340They've said that they look like SUVs.
01:16:59.200A police chief for the town of Evesham in New Jersey, I don't know it, but they say most of this is happening in Ocean County by the shore, in New Jersey, said witnesses have called the drones as large as an SUV with blinking lights on them.
01:17:13.860Here's a compilation of eyewitnesses capturing the objects on camera and describing what they saw.