The Michael Knowles Show - November 04, 2026


Ep. 2096 - Full Election RECAP And What Happens Next

Ep. 2095 - Voting Machines Mysteriously Go Down On Election Day Ep. 2097 - JD Vance's Post-Election Comments Go Viral

Episode Stats


Length

49 minutes

Words per minute

179.73

Word count

8,850

Sentence count

661

Harmful content

Misogyny

15

sentences flagged

Toxicity

22

sentences flagged

Hate speech

31

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:00:35.920 to $500,000 at cardiff.co slash Knowles. Republicans get clobbered in the midterms.
00:00:42.720 Many of us predicted that they would. I often say I hate to say I told you so when I actually
00:00:48.120 love to say I told you so. But in this case, I truly profoundly hate to say I told you so.
00:00:52.800 Most of us knew the Republicans would lose. No one predicted that they would lose by quite this
00:00:59.300 much. Abdul wins Michigan. Tallarico wins Texas. The Democrat is currently leading in a too close
00:01:07.800 to call Senate race in Mississippi. And yet, amid all of the lamentations and wailing and gnashing
00:01:15.320 of teeth, there are, in fact, two silver linings for Republicans that almost no one is talking
00:01:21.360 about, one in the form of the ballot propositions that won last night, and the other in the form of
00:01:27.040 a brief trip down midterm memory lane. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
00:01:32.240 welcome back to the show another one of those predictions i made and i was certainly not the
00:01:53.740 only one making them probably many of you intuited this as well is that the democrats
00:01:58.600 assuming they won Capitol Hill, would spend the next two years just subpoenaing and investigating
00:02:04.760 and persecuting everyone within a 100,000 mile blast radius of Trump. The incoming chairman of
00:02:09.240 the House Oversight Committee, Representative Robert Garcia, had a two-word response to the
00:02:13.860 election results. Lawyer up. So looks like that prediction came true as well. Here are the facts
00:02:20.680 as we have them. Don't forget, we're kind of a banana republic now, so we don't get all of our
00:02:25.140 election results on election night, even in massive, massive blowout elections. What we have
00:02:31.480 so far is Democrats certainly taking the House by a huge margin, 228 to 139. Again, there are a lot
00:02:38.640 of House races that have been too close to call that have not been announced yet, but Democrats
00:02:42.480 certainly have a majority in the House and in the Senate. Right now, it's 54 to 44. We will see
00:02:48.340 how the other races turn out. Really, really bad Democrats winning. Forget for a second about
00:02:54.720 Abdul El Syed in Tallarica. We've spent a lot of time talking about them. People like Peggy
00:02:59.700 Flanagan. Peggy Flanagan, who's running in Minnesota. Peggy Flanagan is probably most 1.00
00:03:06.200 famous for wearing a transgender terrorism t-shirt. She posed for a photograph wearing a shirt that 1.00
00:03:12.440 said, protect trans kids with a knife because there have been so many terror attacks perpetrated 0.98
00:03:18.940 by trans-identifying people. And rather than calling this out and trying to give these people 1.00
00:03:23.580 mental health. She says, no, I'm on their side. I'm on the side of the trans terrorists. So
00:03:27.680 she wins in Minnesota. This is brutal. We have the exit polling. The biggest shifts here,
00:03:32.580 white women. White women swung Democrat by 11 points. And this is something that conservatives 1.00
00:03:40.560 should take to heart because one of the safest sort of jokes that you can make as a conservative 1.00
00:03:47.200 is that liberal white women are the craziest people out there. They're awful, affluent white 1.00
00:03:53.160 female liberals they're karens which is a racial slur it's a racial and sexual slur and we all 1.00
00:03:57.840 make these jokes but i have cautioned for years now at this point i say hey don't just go after 0.98
00:04:02.640 the white liberal women that's a cop-out that's easy you want to do that because you know there's 0.97
00:04:06.980 no social cost to that if you make fun of black women there's a cost to that if you make fun 1.00
00:04:11.660 of other races that there's a cost to that but for white people it's just a free pass so you 1.00
00:04:17.240 have conservatives who go after them. The white liberal women do deserve it, but they do it, 1.00
00:04:23.080 I think, because it's safe. Well, okay, we've turned off those white liberal women. Not only 1.00
00:04:27.180 do they favor Democrats, they've now shifted in the last two years 11 points. White non-college 0.99
00:04:32.800 educated voters shifted Democrat 14 points. Black men, President Trump did very well relative to
00:04:40.300 other Republicans with black men. They shifted back Democrat without Trump on the ballot by 16
00:04:45.540 points. Hispanics, Trump made huge inroads with Hispanics. Going back to 2016, Hispanics
00:04:50.840 generally really liked Trump. They've now shifted Democrat by 28 points, but we haven't gotten to
00:04:56.560 the worst shifts yet. Young voters, who so many of the genius pundits told us, oh, they don't
00:05:02.320 really matter. They don't really turn out that much. Okay, well, 18 to 29-year-old voters shifted
00:05:06.480 Democrat, 32 points. How about men, ages 18 to 29, shifted Democrat, 38 points? In part, that is
00:05:17.460 because those men liked Trump. They don't necessarily like other Republicans as much.
00:05:23.380 In part, it's because they don't like some of the things that Trump has been doing.
00:05:26.500 In part, we would be remiss not to point out the organizer who was speaking most powerfully to that
00:05:33.760 group of people was our friend Charlie Kirk, and he was murdered. And the assassinations work,
00:05:43.100 that's why people do them. And so the left largely celebrated when Charlie was assassinated,
00:05:49.920 took credit for Charlie's assassination, had previously for years called for the assassination
00:05:54.040 of Charlie and other conservatives. They finally pulled one off, never really repented of it,
00:05:59.680 and they got what they wanted electorally. Now, there are a lot of factors. People are
00:06:03.440 going to be pointing their fingers at all sorts of things and all of their own hobby horses.
00:06:07.080 I think it's a relatively simple election when it comes down to issues. But just before we get
00:06:13.700 into the silver linings, we have to point out just how brutal this was. I almost can't take
00:06:20.120 credit for getting this right. I was on Nigel Farage's show in the UK earlier in the day
00:06:26.120 yesterday. And I go on and Nigel, who is terrific, Nigel was looking on the bright side and he gives
00:06:33.260 this whole monologue. He said, you know, I actually don't think it's going to be so bad
00:06:35.880 for Trump and the Republicans. I think the polls are going to be off and conventional wisdom's
00:06:39.040 wrong. And he said, but Michael disagrees with me. Let's bring him on. I said, Nigel,
00:06:42.540 I know it's later in the UK. Are you already in the pub? Have you already been drinking?
00:06:46.140 And he started laughing. I said, I don't know. I think this is going to be brutal
00:06:49.300 for a couple of reasons. One, just structurally, the Republicans had basically nowhere to go but
00:06:56.360 down. The party that is in the White House loses the first midterm election that has been playing
00:07:01.720 out for over half a century now. So that was already baked in. It's not just that Republicans
00:07:06.420 controlled the White House. They controlled the White House, the House, the Senate, and the Supreme
00:07:09.140 Court. So that dynamic of a pendulum shifting back was already going to be far more pronounced.
00:07:14.740 And then you have an unpopular war that lasted too long, that came at a brutal time, and that
00:07:22.280 had the downstream consequences of affecting the issue people most care about in these kinds of
00:07:26.020 elections, which is the economy, specifically oil prices, which when they spike, raise the price of
00:07:32.120 everything. On top of the trauma, the kind of immediate recollection of the war in Iraq,
00:07:42.500 which was disastrous for the Republicans. So however you want to slice it, if you want to say
00:07:47.160 it was just economic issues, it was just gas prices, it was just inflation, it was this or that,
00:07:52.320 All of that is basically traced back to this one, the single issue, which is the Iran war.
00:07:58.620 I think that's it.
00:07:59.620 I think you just have the structure of the midterms baked into that as the fact that
00:08:04.360 Trump is not on the ballot.
00:08:05.480 Trump connects with voters much better than other Republicans do.
00:08:08.180 But you have the structure of it, and you have the unpopular war.
00:08:12.520 That basically explains all of it.
00:08:14.960 But I want to provide a little context because everyone is just doom and gloom and lamentations
00:08:19.440 and whining and complaining.
00:08:20.580 And fair enough.
00:08:21.260 it was a brutal election, but I do want to be fair here. And I don't just want to look on the
00:08:26.860 bright side because otherwise it's depressing. I want to look on the bright side because that
00:08:30.860 is realistic. And I think I have a little credibility here, folks, because as I have
00:08:35.760 mentioned, I was one of the people who was predicting that it was going to be brutal for
00:08:40.040 the Republicans. And I thought, yeah, I didn't think we'd have to be fighting our way out of
00:08:44.460 Mississippi, but I did think that certainly the Democrats were going to take the House,
00:08:47.740 and I thought they were going to take the Senate. And I did think the war was going to 0.95
00:08:50.380 drive a lot of discontent. So I was, we were joking about it on the show last night, but
00:08:55.160 I was uncharacteristically doomer about the midterms. Of the Daily Wire, I may have been
00:09:01.240 the most black-pilled person, which is so rare because I'm usually fairly chipper about these
00:09:05.020 things. So anyway, all of that is prefaced to say, I think I have some credibility here 0.61
00:09:08.860 to look on the bright side. And there were a few silver linings that no one's talking about.
00:09:13.040 The first one for the Republicans is, this was not the worst midterm loss ever for a party in
00:09:20.840 power. That's how it's being reported. They're saying this is historic. It's never happened
00:09:24.880 before. A profound once in a lifetime rebuke of the president and blah, blah, blah. That isn't
00:09:32.740 true. Not only was this not the worst midterm loss ever in American history, this isn't the
00:09:37.660 worst midterm loss in my lifetime. The worst midterm loss in my lifetime was 1994. Bill Clinton
00:09:45.140 gets elected in 1992. Two years later, you have this historic Republican wave led by Newt Gingrich
00:09:51.860 that ended Democrat domination of the House of Representatives for 40 years. Not two years,
00:09:57.860 four years, six years, eight years. Democrats had controlled the House for 40 years. Gingrich
00:10:01.680 comes in and takes, what was it, 54 seats? 54 seats in 1994. Right now, it's unclear how many
00:10:10.400 seats the Democrats are going to gain because there are a lot of toss-ups and because we can't
00:10:14.040 conduct elections efficiently anymore. But let's say the Democrats gain at the very, very lowest
00:10:19.280 end, what, 25 or 30, could go as high as 40 seats. That's still not 1994. The Republican loss,
00:10:27.480 the troubles for President Trump still don't really compare to the Democrat loss in 94 and
00:10:33.440 the effect on President Bill Clinton. How about the Senate? Right now, looks like Democrats gained
00:10:39.100 seven seats in the Senate. Again, there's some things to be sorted out. 1994, the Republicans
00:10:43.480 gained eight seats. So it was comparable. It was actually a little worse for the Democrats in 1994
00:10:49.900 when the Republicans picked it up. So the reason I point to 1994 is you say, okay, well, there was
00:10:55.940 a bad midterm 30 years ago too, but that's not consolation for the Republicans. Well,
00:11:00.560 actually it is because after the brutal drubbing, brutal drubbing that Bill Clinton took in the
00:11:07.940 1994 midterms, he went on to have a successful presidency. He went on to win a second term,
00:11:15.920 actually, two years later. He went on to be hailed as a great president. I think that's overstated
00:11:23.560 because he was inheriting the Reagan economy and this post-Cold War peace dividend and a once in
00:11:30.900 a century economic boom because of the internet. But whatever you want to think about it, whatever
00:11:35.960 you want to talk about the motivations and the causes, it is simply the case that after a more
00:11:41.080 brutal midterm drubbing, Bill Clinton went on to have a successful presidency. So everyone,
00:11:49.520 I think a lot of people who have hated Trump for 10 years or 12 years, I think what they're
00:11:54.840 going to try to do is take this midterm and say, well, Trump is totally dead. And even beyond Trump
00:11:59.420 being totally dead, the issues that Trump was talking about are dead in the water. Immigration
00:12:04.120 restriction, re-industrialization, critiques of free trade, so on and so forth. They're going to 0.99
00:12:12.600 say, well, that's all over and we need to go back to the way things were before Trump. I think people
00:12:15.900 are going to conveniently be trying to do that. It is far from decided that President Trump is
00:12:21.300 a lame duck president at this point. President Trump is this Napoleonic figure. He just, he came 0.94
00:12:26.620 in on basically his first shot, took over the GOP, dominated American politics now for going on a
00:12:32.340 dozen years. And I don't see any world in which Trump loses that grip on the Republican party,
00:12:37.860 even after the midterm drubbing. And I don't think it's just because I like Trump or I see
00:12:42.760 virtues in Trump that some other people perhaps miss. But I just think even in recent historical
00:12:47.360 precedent, that's not what happened with Bill Clinton. Now, some things will have to change.
00:12:52.080 I think Trump is going to have to get the lessons of this midterm. And I think he is getting them.
00:12:55.780 He's giving some statements that we'll get to in just a moment. But that's the first silver
00:12:59.680 lining is just the history of it. It was always going to be brutal for Republicans. And on top
00:13:05.520 of that, you have this unpopular war. So you have to put that into context. Now, the second silver
00:13:11.120 lining for the Republicans here. It's not the Senate. It's not the House. It's not the governor's
00:13:15.580 races. The governor's races went horribly as well. I got to give credit to Mr. Davies. He made this
00:13:20.640 point. We lost not only the Texas Senate seat, we lost the Texas governor's race. So Governor Abbott,
00:13:29.160 who's a good candidate, I don't really want to hear talk about candidate quality and Ken Paxton
00:13:34.620 was a bad candidate or this Republican or that Republican. It's not just the rougher candidates
00:13:40.620 who struggled or lost. It was the really good Republican candidates, the ones that pass all
00:13:45.080 the checks for all the elites who say we have good candidate quality. It's guys like Greg Abbott.
00:13:49.700 It's guys like Byron Donalds in Florida. Byron Donalds is a very attractive candidate.
00:13:53.300 It's all of these Republican House members, Anna Paulina Luna barely winning her seat, 0.80
00:13:57.640 Anna Paulina Luna attractive in multiple ways, but that's a good candidate.
00:14:01.760 And so you can't just point to candidate quality. I think you have to point to issues and the main
00:14:05.360 issues, the Iran war and all of the downstream effects of it and the historical circumstances.
00:14:09.480 But then let's get down to some of the other issues beyond the economy, beyond foreign policy issues that hamper the economy.
00:14:18.880 Have voters really dramatically shifted 18 points, 20 points, 38 points on the other issues that have defined our politics on abortion, on immigration, on voter ID, on transgenderism, probably the biggest social cultural issue?
00:14:38.900 Well, we actually have an answer for that
00:14:40.300 because there were ballot propositions
00:14:41.500 in all of these states,
00:14:42.340 and there is some good news for Republicans there.
00:14:44.100 We'll get to that in a second.
00:14:45.080 Then we'll get to President Trump's statements.
00:14:46.640 Then we will get to the timeline
00:14:48.460 on which we will all be sent to the gulags.
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00:16:17.020 The ballot initiatives are still coming in.
00:16:19.300 So this is just the latest updates on them.
00:16:23.820 Let's jump right down into social policy.
00:16:26.320 There were votes in Washington, Colorado, Nebraska, and Arizona on the transgender issue.
00:16:34.240 one of the very top issues just two years ago in the 2024 elections. Should men be allowed to play
00:16:40.680 in women's sports? Should men be allowed to go into girls' locker rooms? An issue that mattered, 1.00
00:16:45.580 not because anyone cares about women's sports, really, but because that's a referendum on what 1.00
00:16:52.020 we think about human nature. That's why the transgender issue actually is one of the most 0.96
00:16:55.960 important issues, because if we cannot decide on the difference between a man and a woman, 0.99
00:17:00.620 we're totally cooked. We're not going to figure anything out. Our country's over.
00:17:04.580 If a political party doesn't know that a man is different than a woman, they can't do anything. 0.99
00:17:11.000 You can't trust them on tax policy or anything else. So let's get down to what those ballot 0.98
00:17:15.360 props look like. The voters who go out, a lot of liberal voters, sided with reality
00:17:21.580 on the trans propositions. Right now we have results coming in. I don't think it's still
00:17:27.900 totally decided, 75% of votes in, 60% of votes in, in Colorado, in Washington on the trans sports
00:17:35.720 issue. But I think in all of those states, including Arizona and Nebraska, voters are
00:17:41.080 going to say, no, we don't want this transgender nonsense. In other words, they haven't changed 1.00
00:17:44.720 their opinions on one of those core issues. What about another social issue, abortion?
00:17:48.500 Horrible result last night in Virginia, where now abortion up until the moment of birth,
00:17:54.680 or beyond, I guess, in the case of Virginia,
00:17:56.780 thanks to the former governor, Ralph Northam.
00:17:59.540 Abortion is just totally legal in Virginia
00:18:02.960 as a hardcore matter of law, 0.59
00:18:05.360 and it will be practiced without any limitations.
00:18:08.260 That's brutal.
00:18:09.540 Again, this also was predicted
00:18:10.980 because you had the governor, Abigail Spanberger.
00:18:14.420 She runs as a moderate Democrat in the election last year.
00:18:17.460 She wins.
00:18:18.080 She immediately proposes the most radically leftist agenda.
00:18:20.460 We knew the Democrats, rather,
00:18:22.000 were going to have that playbook in the 2026 midterms.
00:18:24.680 and they made good on that.
00:18:26.620 There was a ballot referendum
00:18:27.460 and Virginia votes to legalize abortion.
00:18:32.280 But it's a mixed bag on abortion.
00:18:34.160 Republicans were at least able to step in the tide
00:18:35.760 a little bit on some of the radicalism there.
00:18:37.660 So what's the takeaway?
00:18:38.760 The takeaway is Americans remain divided on abortion.
00:18:43.280 Issues like voter ID.
00:18:45.720 California shot down voter ID in a ballot referendum.
00:18:49.040 Okay, we knew that was gonna happen,
00:18:50.600 but voter ID still remains a very popular issue
00:18:53.220 around the rest of the country.
00:18:54.680 You had a ballot initiative in North Carolina, which, again, Republicans got obliterated in, but it amends the state constitution to require all voters, including those who vote by mail, to present photo identification.
00:19:09.960 With 95% plus of the votes in, you get 60% of the electorate there saying, yeah, of course we want voter ID.
00:19:17.780 So it's a mixed bag on some of those issues.
00:19:22.160 On and on and on.
00:19:23.140 Some of the most radical measures seem to have failed.
00:19:26.780 In California, the billionaire wealth tax, a one-time so-called 5% tax on individuals to steal their wealth.
00:19:34.300 Now, of course, a one-time wealth tax is never a one-time wealth tax.
00:19:37.080 They're just going to keep going back to that well.
00:19:38.540 It's just robbery.
00:19:40.340 I'm not saying feel bad for the billionaires necessarily, but the problem is it's going to have downstream effects on you.
00:19:44.540 It's going to kill business, and they're going to come for your property too.
00:19:46.660 That gets shot down even in California.
00:19:48.460 So on the actual issues, the country has not polarized too radically.
00:19:56.700 It was just the electeds.
00:20:00.540 Trump was not on the ballot.
00:20:02.340 He said, vote as if I were on the ballot, but you can't because he is not.
00:20:06.820 And so one lesson we've learned over the last dozen years is Republicans do better when
00:20:11.620 Trump is on the ballot than when he's not.
00:20:13.300 He was not on the ballot.
00:20:15.080 The Republican Party, especially in a Congress that for both parties now can't really produce
00:20:19.840 much of anything at all. That is a structural issue in Congress. It reminds me of the prime
00:20:24.040 minister issue in the UK. The UK's had, what, 11 prime ministers over the last 20 years,
00:20:27.700 and they've had it because voters vote for one party, and then they can't get the job done,
00:20:32.700 and then they vote for the other party, and the other party can't get the job done. And the reason
00:20:35.660 the parties can't get the job done is in part because of the incoherent demands of the people. 0.86
00:20:39.820 The people want to deport the migrants, but the people also want to maintain their welfare
00:20:43.680 programs, but the people aren't having any babies. Guess what? You got to give on one of those. It's
00:20:48.480 not possible. And so you get these pendulum swings back and forth. I think you see a similar dynamic
00:20:52.980 playing out here. It was largely a punishment of Congress itself, which means the pendulum could
00:21:00.200 swing back the other way. All eyes are going to be on what happens in Iran right now. As President
00:21:07.020 Trump understands, he's got to finish the war in Iran, and he can either do that through a peace
00:21:11.000 deal, or you can do that with a lot of bombs or potentially even ground troops. And tensions will
00:21:15.480 run very, very high on how to resolve that. But there is no question at this point that the war
00:21:19.180 has got to wrap up. So then the question is, who is to blame? Speaking of the Iran war,
00:21:24.800 who or what is to blame? President Trump has given a bunch of statements, both last night
00:21:29.480 and this morning. He's weighing in on what this means. We will get to Trump's finger pointing in
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00:23:23.860 Okay, President Trump, right off the bat, says on Truth Social,
00:23:29.300 I wasn't on the ballot, and if I was, we would have won in a landslide.
00:23:33.500 Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump.
00:23:37.700 Perhaps a little hyperbole, as we New Yorkers want to engage in here,
00:23:42.120 but I think the core part of this issue is right.
00:23:45.120 I think Republicans would have done better with Trump on the ballot.
00:23:47.820 There are going to be a lot of people, especially those who have never really liked Trump,
00:23:51.020 who are going to say, no, no, no, it's all Trump's fault.
00:23:52.840 We had these really good candidates running for Congress and Senate,
00:23:55.460 and it's all just Trump's fault.
00:23:56.700 Trump dragged them all down.
00:23:57.620 I think just if you can't test it, it's a counterfactual. But I think if you were able
00:24:03.260 to A-B test it, I think an election with presidential turnout and enthusiasm, even
00:24:08.800 with whatever hits Trump has taken, if Trump's on the ballot, I think the Republicans do better.
00:24:13.040 And I don't really see a strong argument otherwise. Then President Trump spoke to the New York Times.
00:24:19.100 He said he was, quote, absolutely willing to accept those results. So there are no claims
00:24:23.300 of voter fraud. There were shenanigans in my old district. This is another weird prediction,
00:24:27.220 because I said the race I was most closely watching
00:24:29.320 was New York 17,
00:24:31.200 mostly because I know that district.
00:24:32.660 I've worked multiple campaigns in that district.
00:24:34.360 And that was the district in the country
00:24:36.100 where the ballot machines didn't work.
00:24:37.960 So they've stuffed all the ballots into orange bags.
00:24:40.600 Even so, the Republican there,
00:24:42.580 who's a moderate Republican, he lost.
00:24:44.580 And the reason I was watching that race
00:24:45.900 was because it's a swing district.
00:24:47.800 Well, guess what?
00:24:48.440 When you're trying to duke it out
00:24:49.600 to keep a Republican in power in Mississippi,
00:24:52.060 the swing district is not going to go your way.
00:24:54.620 So Trump says, yeah, yeah,
00:24:55.500 I'm willing to accept the results.
00:24:57.220 uh, quote, we'll, you know, look forward to working with them. We'll probably work something
00:25:01.760 out. So Trump is demonstrating here that I think something that is very important, which is
00:25:05.600 he's keeping his cool. Do not kind of like Bill Clinton kept his cool in 1994.
00:25:11.860 Don't nobody gains anything by freaking out at the highest level at the religious level.
00:25:18.100 We know that God is sovereign over history. I don't, I don't say this as some weak consolation.
00:25:23.440 and I say this as the ultimate consolation,
00:25:25.320 this is the sort of thing that you need to remind yourself of
00:25:27.660 when you suffer an election loss,
00:25:29.160 when something bad happens at work,
00:25:30.520 when you suffer a personal tragedy.
00:25:31.860 You do have to remember,
00:25:33.080 God knows the hairs on your head before you're born,
00:25:35.560 and a sparrow doesn't fall from the sky without his knowing it.
00:25:38.080 That's real.
00:25:38.840 That's not just like a Hallmark card trying to make you feel better.
00:25:41.980 That is like a fact of the world.
00:25:43.460 And so the Christian understanding of what happens
00:25:46.420 when there are bad political results
00:25:48.380 is that sometimes God is punishing us.
00:25:50.640 Sometimes God is testing us.
00:25:52.100 but we don't put our faith in man and princess.
00:25:55.360 We put our faith ultimately in God.
00:25:56.800 And so Trump says, okay, well, then there it goes.
00:25:59.360 Not going to spend my time crying about it.
00:26:00.940 I guess we'll just have to figure out a way
00:26:02.080 to work with the Democrats.
00:26:03.880 He gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal
00:26:05.420 and he said, yeah, the Iran war was a piece of this.
00:26:09.520 He said, the Iran war, that's actually a direct quote.
00:26:12.420 He says the Iran war was, quote,
00:26:14.180 a piece of it, of the losses. 0.98
00:26:17.100 Though he says he has no regrets.
00:26:18.420 He said, quote, I did the right thing.
00:26:19.960 I would have done it again.
00:26:21.940 So President Trump is not viewing his actions in Iran as some kind of betrayal.
00:26:26.320 And I think it's very important.
00:26:28.140 A lot of people were pitching the Iran war as a betrayal of Trump's principles or of MAGA.
00:26:33.260 And you can't say that.
00:26:34.340 You can say, as I did, that the Iran war was imprudent.
00:26:38.860 Again, I think I have a little bit of credibility on this issue because I was in the minority in certain quarters.
00:26:44.740 Before, during, and after the bombs dropping in the Iran war, I said I wouldn't have done it.
00:26:50.320 not because the Iranians don't deserve it, not because it's a betrayal of MAGA. President Trump
00:26:54.980 has been very tough on Iran since the 1970s. President Trump, you'll recall, in the first
00:26:58.820 term did provocatively kill the top Iranian general, even beyond Iran, just elsewhere in
00:27:04.020 the Middle East. Trump is dropping the Moab. Trump is not some peacenik, okay? Trump just wants to,
00:27:10.280 he recognizes countries and certainly global empires need to conduct wars sometimes, but he
00:27:15.320 wanted to do it in a more efficient way. I think that's why he got hit is because of the prudence
00:27:19.960 factor, the efficiency with which the war was carried out. The Iranians knew they had a lot 0.99
00:27:23.600 of leverage, and they really pushed those pain points, especially on gas and diesel prices, 0.99
00:27:27.840 right before the midterm elections. And the Republicans couldn't stop it. So he says,
00:27:32.420 look, I remain committed. I think I did the right thing. You can disagree with the prudence of going
00:27:38.960 into Iran at this time, in this way, for this purpose. You can do that. I did that too. But
00:27:44.960 what you cannot do is accuse President Trump of betraying his principles. He's been pretty open
00:27:49.220 about this from the beginning. And he's sticking by it. He says, quote, I think we will work with
00:27:54.380 the Democrats. We will get along very well with them. If we don't, we'll be very tough on them.
00:27:58.440 They'll be very tough on us. So he's not delusional about this. A lot of people thought
00:28:02.500 Trump was going to be totally delusional about the results, deny that they mattered, not accept
00:28:06.800 a loss. He is accepting it. And it's just, this is another one where I think people really
00:28:11.300 underestimate Trump. They don't know how to interpret New Yorkese. They don't know how to
00:28:17.060 they don't know how to interpret some of Trump's jokes and hyperbole, but he's accepting this.
00:28:21.340 He's saying, no, no, no. We'll be tough on them in as much as we can be, but they're going to be
00:28:25.320 very tough on us. And so I'd like to work with them, but I don't really have any illusions that
00:28:29.700 that's going to be easy. And yeah, I do think the Iran war was a big driver of this. And yeah, yeah, 0.53
00:28:34.560 yeah. President Trump is acknowledging all the things that even his most vociferous critics
00:28:39.780 were saying before the midterms. And he's saying, look, I have reasons for doing it and I stand by
00:28:45.180 of my decisions. That's a serious grappling with what happened, and he's not denying reality.
00:28:49.420 Then to Fox News and to other outlets, President Trump congratulated the Democrats. He said they
00:28:54.340 did a good job, and he said, I don't view it as a hit on me. Republicans have had the greatest
00:28:59.920 two years of any presidency. Here you have more of the kind of typical confidence in hyperbole.
00:29:05.260 He said that the shortfalls are basically because he was not on the ballot. Okay.
00:29:09.660 Okay. Historical circumstances and the Iran war. This is something that the people who were
00:29:16.240 predicting this result were saying were going to be the drivers of it. This is something that
00:29:21.100 Trump himself, who obviously was campaigning in this indefatigable way for four weeks before
00:29:25.220 the midterms, this is something that he's acknowledging too. Seems pretty straightforward.
00:29:29.680 So what happens now? Well, we're already hearing from the Democrats who are measuring the drapes
00:29:34.240 in their brand new big offices on Capitol Hill.
00:29:37.520 The incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee,
00:29:41.020 this is Representative Robert Garcia,
00:29:44.080 he had a message that was two words, lawyer up.
00:29:48.540 This was a prediction a number of us made,
00:29:51.560 which is the way that the Republicans were campaigning
00:29:54.300 is they said, you can't vote for the Democrats
00:29:56.340 because if they win the House or the House and the Senate, 0.66
00:29:59.160 they're gonna trans your kids. 0.98
00:30:01.180 They're gonna flood the country with illegal aliens. 1.00
00:30:04.240 they're going to, gosh, I don't know, they're going to pack the Supreme Court. They're going to 0.99
00:30:12.160 do every horrible thing that you would predict. But that's not true because Trump still has the
00:30:17.100 veto as president. So they're actually not going to do any of those things. They're going to do
00:30:20.680 one thing. Two things. They're going to stop any potential legislation that Trump is going to try
00:30:26.460 to get through. But Congress doesn't work and hasn't worked for many years. So Trump doesn't
00:30:30.880 govern through legislation. It's basically impossible to do that in these circumstances.
00:30:34.860 He governs through executive order. They can't do anything about that.
00:30:37.680 The main thing they're going to do is subpoena everybody within a 100,000 mile blast radius
00:30:42.720 of Trump. In fact, you had Alyssa Slotkin, the congressman, the senator, a Democrat senator
00:30:50.120 from Michigan, who warned about this and was promising this. She said, when we have power
00:30:55.920 again. We're going to persecute not just Trump, not just his cabinet, every Republican who is
00:31:02.620 even possibly going to support this administration down to teenagers. Do we have the clip?
00:31:08.420 So that's what I'm saying. I want to look at these signature cases and not just focus on the
00:31:13.500 president, but on the people who enabled him. I want young people coming out of school to say,
00:31:18.840 should I go work for the Trump administration? Like, that sounds fun. I might get an opportunity.
00:31:22.580 I want them to be like, Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don't want.
00:31:29.200 And so let me avoid participating in that.
00:31:32.220 I want that deterrence message.
00:31:34.380 I want to scare teenagers who are civically minded.
00:31:39.080 Yes, teenagers who want to get involved in their government and fight for what they believe in with the mainstream, one of the two mainstream political parties.
00:31:48.240 yeah, I want to scare them into silence because I will ruin their lives. If an 18-year-old kid
00:31:56.600 shows up and decides to support his government and his country, I'm going to ruin his life.
00:32:02.540 And I want them all to know that. All the kids need to be scared of us. And that's what they're
00:32:07.980 promising. That's what Democrat Robert Garcia is promising. So they're pretty hampered on Capitol
00:32:14.020 Hill, but they can cause a lot of damage in that one narrow path. The other point that Mr. Davies
00:32:18.820 made, it was a very good point this morning. It's the first very good point I think he's ever made,
00:32:23.140 certainly that I've ever heard, but it was a powerful point and I hadn't heard anybody else
00:32:27.180 make it. One of the real killer issues, I mentioned earlier that Greg Abbott, the governor in Texas,
00:32:36.520 multi-term governor in Texas, went down to a Democrat. If we have a Democrat governor in Texas,
00:32:41.820 that means that that southern border is very likely going to be kind of open again.
00:32:47.680 Now, the federal government controls the southern border, that's true,
00:32:50.400 but it's very helpful when you have partners in the state, especially a state like Texas,
00:32:57.640 to help you enforce immigration law. If all of a sudden you have a governor of Texas
00:33:02.580 who wants infinity migration, totally open borders, and amnesty for all the illegals,
00:33:07.240 tens of millions of illegals. All of a sudden, that border enforcement, which Trump was able
00:33:12.400 to do in 30 seconds when he took office, Joe Biden said, you can't enforce the border. It's
00:33:16.260 impossible. Kamala Harris was the borders are. No, we can't. We want to enforce it,
00:33:20.380 but we can't enforce it. Trump says, yes, you can. Oh, we need new laws. Remember Joe Biden
00:33:24.180 tried to pass a new law. He said, we can't enforce the border without a new law. And Trump
00:33:27.960 and the Republicans won't let us pass this new law. Trump comes in, doesn't pass any new laws,
00:33:31.360 shuts down the border immediately. Well, now all of a sudden, if Texas is blue,
00:33:35.700 purple leaning blue all of a sudden border enforcement is going to be a little bit
00:33:39.880 trickier so that that's a brutal fact at the state level at the state level the republicans
00:33:45.340 got wiped out as well brutal brutal night but just a little from the uncharacteristic doomer in the
00:33:55.020 group for the last night for the last weeks brutal brutal night but keep it in context
00:34:02.320 keep it most importantly in the context of god's sovereignty over history but also keep it within
00:34:08.500 the the more terrestrial more modest context of the 1994 midterm election keep it in the more
00:34:15.780 modest context of what the democrats can do and what they can't do there's a lot that they can't
00:34:20.460 do keep it in the more modest context of this doesn't mean that it's all over for the republicans 0.78
00:34:25.980 because the the voters now support transing all the kids and killing all the babies and 0.83
00:34:30.940 obliterating election integrity. That's not even what showed up on the ballot referenda 0.97
00:34:36.220 last night during the worst drubbing for Republicans that we've seen for Republicans
00:34:41.900 maybe ever. There is still a lot of good stuff. There's still a lot of good ingredients. And
00:34:48.900 with the pendulum swinging so radically, as you saw from 2024 to 2026, 38-point swings,
00:34:55.900 One of the upsides of that is you could easily imagine it swinging back.
00:35:00.840 A lot of that is going to depend on how President Trump responds.
00:35:03.340 Don't forget, when Bill Clinton did have that historical route in 1994, he came out.
00:35:08.480 He said the era of big government is over.
00:35:10.440 He started changing the way that he was talking about politics and enacting politics.
00:35:14.240 There was some shakeup in the personnel in the administration.
00:35:17.200 So depending on how President Trump reacts to the midterms and specifically how he conducts
00:35:21.480 the Iran war in the next 48 hours or until the war ends. The Republicans might actually have a
00:35:30.340 decent shot again. If passed as precedent in 94 to 96, they might have a decent shot again
00:35:34.560 in 2028. Who that nominee is going to be remains a somewhat open question. Okay.
00:35:40.980 Did you sleep last night? I didn't sleep very much, but I did sleep well. I got home at about
00:35:46.360 1 a.m. or so, a little after 1 a.m., I went to bed. I had a TV hit this morning. I was on Fox News
00:35:52.540 Central Time at about 4.50 in the morning. So, I'm waking up a little after 4 o'clock in the
00:35:59.660 morning. And then I come, I write the show. I got to be right back in this office. I didn't sleep
00:36:03.540 very much, but I slept very well. It's crazy. It sounds crazy. I got three hours of sleep.
00:36:10.340 I woke up feeling quite good. And do you know why? Because I have Bowling Branch sheets.
00:36:16.680 There's a lot more to say. First, though, go to bowlandbranch.com slash Knowles,
00:36:20.400 code Knowles. There were not very many consolations last night. With the election results,
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00:36:30.980 which is very similar to their waffle blanket. It's absolutely magnificent. Maybe I should have
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00:36:44.820 and I'm very grateful. They've sent me some product just for free when they joined the show,
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00:37:38.100 apply.
00:38:08.100 my favorite comment yesterday has nothing to do with the midterm elections at all my favorite
00:38:14.360 comment is why did mozart kill his chickens because when he asked them to name the best
00:38:21.980 composer they all said bach bach bach do you get it bach is a composer do you get do you get that's
00:38:32.640 why mozart you know i've got a related one this is going to be my contribution to that comment just
00:38:36.320 just for a little levity just so that we can all have a horse walks into a bar a bartender says
00:38:44.200 do you want to drink and the horse says i think not poof he disappears
00:38:48.780 you see that is a joke that is a joke about the french philosopher renee descartes who famously
00:38:56.540 said i think therefore i am but if i had told you that part first i would have been putting
00:39:02.320 Descartes before the horse. Okay, just a little, I don't know, it's apropos of nothing. I guess,
00:39:10.100 you know, it kind of follows maybe a little bit from that comment. I just, we just need something,
00:39:13.180 folks, because it was a brutal, brutal night. Do we have, I'm going to check in with the
00:39:22.020 producers. Are any other races being called right now? Do we have the results from Mississippi yet?
00:39:27.940 do we have? Last night, obviously, we're in Tennessee, and I was hoping that I could go to
00:39:35.000 Marsha Blackburn's victory party. I love the Blackburn family. They're great people. I assumed
00:39:39.320 this would be a very easy coronation. Marsha's very popular, very good candidate. 0.99
00:39:43.860 The blue wave, the blue tsunami was so bad that we were following the race in Tennessee. I couldn't
00:39:53.400 go to the victory party because I was working here. I had to do my day job. But, one, it's
00:40:00.060 Tennessee. But the margin of victory was much, much lower than we were hoping. No races are
00:40:07.460 yet being called again. There's going to be a lot to look out for, though. I mean, there are dozens
00:40:12.500 and dozens of outstanding House races that have not been called. Now, Senate races that still
00:40:17.760 have not been called. Some of the ballot referenda have not been called. So, it's not even over.
00:40:23.400 This really, I made the joke yesterday as well on the election coverage, but some people were
00:40:29.420 optimistic, some people were pessimistic about the election. I am always hopeful, but I like to be
00:40:33.520 realistic, which is why I was predicting a route for the Republicans. And I said, you know, that
00:40:37.740 the difference between the conservative optimist and the conservative pessimist is the conservative
00:40:41.840 pessimist says things can't get any worse, and the conservative optimist says, oh, yes, they can.
00:40:46.620 So I don't know if you're optimistic or pessimistic about the rest of these races, 0.97
00:40:49.720 But I do assure you, things could get much, much worse. 0.97
00:40:54.580 So then the question becomes, what happens for 2028?
00:40:59.760 This again, I think you're seeing a lot of people opportunistically trying to push their
00:41:04.320 own agenda on 2028.
00:41:06.520 But structurally, I don't think 2028 really has changed much at all.
00:41:12.700 My predictions have been pretty good recently, so I think I got some cred here.
00:41:17.660 The heir apparent for President Trump is J.D. Vance.
00:41:21.060 No question about that.
00:41:22.260 That has been true for a long time.
00:41:23.560 Some people don't like J.D. Vance.
00:41:25.780 It's a very minority position among,
00:41:28.960 especially kind of more beltway conservatives,
00:41:30.920 but it exists.
00:41:31.560 So J.D. Vance has his haters.
00:41:33.200 And so they've been trying to push alternative candidates.
00:41:35.040 One of those candidates has been Marco Rubio,
00:41:37.940 but Marco Rubio doesn't really fit the bill
00:41:39.420 for a couple of reasons.
00:41:40.540 Three reasons, really.
00:41:41.640 One, I don't see a world in the modern age
00:41:44.000 in which the Secretary of State
00:41:45.040 is gonna get the nod over the sitting vice president.
00:41:46.900 It's just very, very hard to do that.
00:41:49.520 Even if the White House wanted to, there's no indication that they do.
00:41:53.020 Two, Marco Rubio already endorsed J.D. Vance and said he would support him if he runs and he would like him to run.
00:42:00.900 Three, Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance agree on most everything.
00:42:06.400 the knocks that some especially of the more beltway types are making on jd vance that he
00:42:11.720 supports a common good kind of capitalism and constitutionalism which is contrary to the
00:42:19.680 conservative movement of 1986 and we can't use this phrase common good because common good
00:42:25.180 capitalism is just a euphemism for socialism well guess what guys marco rubio coined the phrase
00:42:30.680 common good capitalism so there's not a lot of daylight there i don't think that dynamic has
00:42:34.780 much changed. There was a little bit of a change last night, though. I think Trump still remains
00:42:39.560 the grand poobah of the Republican Party. I think Donald Trump still basically picks the nominee for
00:42:44.940 2028. And I think right now it's the vice president's to lose. I think he is the obvious
00:42:50.740 heir apparent. None of that changed. However, there are other candidates who want to run.
00:42:56.480 There are a lot of other candidates who want to run, actually. You saw some talk from Rand Paul
00:43:00.920 some months ago that he might run for president. Rand Paul could occupy the libertarian lane.
00:43:05.980 There's always someone running in the libertarian lane, and he's probably the best guy to do it.
00:43:09.640 He's one of the two or three best guys to do it without question. Senator Cruz has indicated that
00:43:13.860 he wants to run multiple times now. He obviously was the number two guy who nearly beat President
00:43:20.840 Trump in the 2016 primaries. So he is a kind of a natural figure. Had the Republicans done really,
00:43:26.480 really well in the midterms, or I don't know, not really, really well, but better than they did,
00:43:31.760 it would have been harder for Senator Cruz to find a lane. I think his lane has opened up
00:43:36.200 considerably here, though he will still have an issue. Does he run as the alternative to Trump,
00:43:41.800 the number two guy in 2016, or does he run as the true heir to the Trump legacy? He's worked well
00:43:47.740 with Trump in the Senate, and in some ways you could argue he agrees with Trump more than some
00:43:52.880 members of his own administration. That would be the pitch for the campaign. Those are two
00:43:56.260 contrary pitches. So it's unclear. After the midterms last night, Senator Cruz running as
00:44:02.700 the alternative to Trump is probably the better lane, especially if it's a fait accompli that
00:44:09.400 Trump is going to endorse one of the people in his administration, most likely J.D. Vance.
00:44:14.360 Okay, so the calculation changes a little bit, and I think Senator Cruz's stock went up in the
00:44:18.320 primary. The other guy who had a big win last night was Ron DeSantis. Ron DeSantis, who really
00:44:23.660 did not have much of a lane at all.
00:44:25.400 We've been examining this for months now.
00:44:26.860 And I said that the trouble for DeSantis in 2028
00:44:29.880 is going to be the same trouble for DeSantis in 2024.
00:44:33.280 Namely, the pitch for DeSantis is that he's Trump,
00:44:37.680 but bigger, better, faster, stronger.
00:44:40.400 Now, look, that argument did not carry any weight in 2024.
00:44:43.780 They tried to make that argument.
00:44:44.840 It did not work.
00:44:45.940 But that's a different argument than Senator Cruz could make.
00:44:49.600 Because Senator Cruz's argument would be,
00:44:51.620 look, guys, these other candidates, they're the heirs to Trumpism, but I'm the heirs to
00:44:58.300 Reaganism. I'm a return to a more sensible kind of conservatism that is distinct both from the
00:45:05.140 Beltway establishment and from the more populist elements of the last 10 years, which caught us
00:45:09.860 a drubbing in the midterms. So the cruise lane is I'm Mr. Conservative. I'm the heir to Reagan.
00:45:18.840 For DeSantis, the argument has been for his whole political career now, that I'm Trump,
00:45:25.600 but better, with more discipline in my rhetoric and whatever. Again, that argument was never
00:45:32.180 going to play when he was literally running against Trump in 2024. And obviously, that primary
00:45:36.340 more or less should not have even existed. Now, however, it's a little bit different because
00:45:42.840 there's this big data point that DeSantis can point to, which is the Republicans got white
00:45:47.980 out everywhere. Texas, duking it out in Mississippi. I mean, brutal, brutal stuff,
00:45:56.860 but not Florida. The Florida Republican ticket swept, one across the board.
00:46:02.800 And DeSantis is going to take credit for that, and I think he deserves to take credit from that.
00:46:06.800 Now, there are going to be disadvantages to a DeSantis candidacy, down to his retail skills,
00:46:12.980 down to President Trump's continued domination, which I predict of the Republican Party. So,
00:46:16.680 again, I'm not saying DeSantis' stock rose 500,000% last night, but it rose. There's no
00:46:24.580 question about that. And that's important because while you might think we're getting ahead of
00:46:28.880 ourselves, it's not true. Last night was the midterm election, which means that today is the
00:46:35.780 first day of the 2028 presidential primary. Okay, so much more to get to. We have this new segment
00:46:41.720 that I kind of hate, but it's growing on me. It's called News or Noise. The rest of the show
00:46:45.440 continues now. You do not want to miss it. Become a member. Use code NOLSKNOWLES at checkout for
00:46:48.600 two months free on all annual plans.
00:47:02.860 Father, I used to feel Christ. I cannot feel anything here.
00:47:15.440 They take me out of my bed, and they brought me here,
00:47:22.440 and they tell me nothing.
00:47:24.440 What have I done?
00:47:25.440 Article 58, counter-revolutionary activity.
00:47:28.440 That is all I know.
00:47:30.440 They have to deal with so many enemies of the state,
00:47:34.440 all of whom claim their innocence,
00:47:36.440 who protest, who cry.
00:47:45.440 There are no answers here.
00:47:49.440 Other than the ones they put in your mouth.
00:47:51.440 You'll break.
00:47:54.440 Today is your opportunity to demonstrate your loyalty to the people.
00:48:01.440 I'd like to know why I'm here.
00:48:03.440 Of course.
00:48:06.440 But you already know, don't you?
00:48:08.440 You must believe in something greater than the party.
00:48:13.440 You will remember your duty.
00:48:14.440 I've told you I know nothing.
00:48:16.440 Knee ground like a feral animal. 1.00
00:48:19.440 You stink of failure. 1.00
00:48:21.440 You want me to lie. 1.00
00:48:23.440 Still a drunk. 1.00
00:48:24.440 Damn you! 1.00
00:48:27.440 They all break. 1.00
00:48:31.440 Maybe.
00:48:44.440 Thank you.