The Michael Knowles Show - Friendly Fire： So Republicans Lost... Now What？

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00:00:27.920 i thought that it was going to be you know like a punch in the face and actually it was like 0.76

00:00:34.160 being kicked directly in the crotch repeatedly by a robot yeah yeah you drew no i i think you know 0.74

00:00:44.200 i always feel that hope is a better strategy than despair so i thought i left open the possibility 0.88

00:00:49.060 that things might go well or might go less badly than i thought this is worse than my worst

00:00:54.240 expectations. I thought we were going to get a 50, you know, this is going to be bad.

00:00:58.440 We laugh so we don't cry. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:01:00.000 Okay, Walsh, how bad was it?

00:01:01.840 I, yeah, it was, I was expecting it to be bad. I'm always expecting everything to be bad.

00:01:07.380 And I usually am right. So that's one way, one way to ensure that you're

00:01:10.000 usually right is just to expect everything to not be good because it usually isn't.

00:01:14.920 But I didn't think, I mean, look, Texas flipping entirely blue was not something that I thought

00:01:20.600 what's going to happen.

00:01:21.640 Yeah, I can.

00:01:22.380 So it was even worse than I thought.

00:01:24.580 And listen, if there's any consolation in all this,

00:01:27.740 and I think you get a little desperate

00:01:29.380 searching for consolation in these moments.

00:01:33.140 So this is, and this is consolation that cuts both ways.

00:01:36.420 However, things change quickly.

00:01:39.920 We do know that.

00:01:41.540 And so, I mean, you look at, look at 2024.

00:01:46.460 I mean, we were in this, we were here.

00:01:48.540 And the jubilation that we all felt and that many people in the country felt, 2024, and you look at how quickly just this thing, you know, just fell off of a cliff.

00:02:05.440 Collapsed.

00:02:06.100 Collapsed.

00:02:06.760 So what that tells you is that, you know, it could happen the other way.

00:02:11.040 I mean, this moment, this blue tsunami, and it feels like the Democrats have taken a stranglehold on the country, and they have Texas, and they have everything.

00:02:22.060 I mean, it's possible that in 2028, we're going to look back on 2026 and be like, that feels like it was 200 years ago.

00:02:26.640 Yes, it always looks darkest just before it goes pitch black.

00:02:31.040 This is Friendly Fire. 1.00

00:02:34.060 Friends like these cooties, enemies. 1.00

00:02:37.240 Friends like these cooties, enemies. 1.00

00:02:41.040 I think we have to go back, though. 1.00

00:02:42.960 This is a huge transitional moment, and it's going to last another 10 years at least.

00:02:47.240 This is the moment, first of all, my generation is dying.

00:02:50.760 I'm afraid they might take me with them, but hopefully they'll leave me behind. 0.99

00:02:54.360 Who knows?

00:02:55.040 But I think there's going to be realignment.

00:02:57.980 In moments like this, radicals show up on both sides.

00:03:01.320 I hate to make the comparison because I don't think we're in that situation,

00:03:04.560 but this is what happened in the 30s in Europe.

00:03:06.460 You know, when there's this opening in the middle, the socialists rise on one side and the fascists rise on the other side.

00:03:14.320 In our country, they're both the same people.

00:03:16.880 But still, you know, that's the thing that happens.

00:03:19.440 And usually the center reforms.

00:03:20.660 And how it reforms is it reforms around an individual.

00:03:23.740 An individual comes along.

00:03:25.280 The people are not going to give you a vision.

00:03:27.340 The people cannot give you a vision.

00:03:29.240 Leaders give you a vision.

00:03:30.780 You know, leaders can only lead the people where they'll go.

00:03:33.820 But it's the leaders who provide the vision.

00:03:36.460 Trump's vision was too chaotic, too, you know, centered on himself, but it was urgently important.

00:03:42.620 He was God sent.

00:03:44.480 And as we know, God sends the weirdest people when he wants to help out.

00:03:48.800 But, I mean, he broke – we talked about the border that he fixed.

00:03:53.260 We've talked about other things that he did.

00:03:54.600 But the main thing he did, and if he did nothing else, he would still be an important man in a good way,

00:04:01.060 is he broke the stranglehold on speech.

00:04:03.500 And he did it with our help.

00:04:04.740 You know, he did it with the help of the new media, but he broke the stranglehold on speech.

00:04:08.280 And that means that a lot of people are saying things that they couldn't say before.

00:04:12.200 So you have people making jokes about retards again. 1.00

00:04:15.140 I think that's a good thing. 0.99

00:04:16.280 I don't think it's a bad thing.

00:04:17.160 I think we should always be joking about everything.

00:04:18.900 But you also have people saying, hey, socialism might be a good idea. 0.96

00:04:22.420 And, you know, you have these 20-year-olds who don't know crap from Shinola. 0.54

00:04:27.280 You know, they're sitting around going like, yeah, socialism might be a good idea. 0.90

00:04:31.260 You know?

00:04:31.700 And so we're going to go through this stuff.

00:04:33.100 It's going to go back and forth, but you hope that the center reforms around somebody that we can tolerate who loves America.

00:04:39.720 I think that the biggest thing that's happening, and I think this is across all parties right now,

00:04:44.460 is that President Trump was and remains and has always been a gigantic middle finger to whatever it is people were pissed off at.

00:04:52.120 In 2016, it was just, we don't like Hillary Clinton, we don't like Barack Obama, we don't like what's going on.

00:04:56.340 Here's a giant middle finger.

00:04:57.200 He had no policies to speak of in 2016.

00:04:59.520 I mean, he was literally on pretty much every side of every issue.

00:05:01.680 And then he sort of formed a series of policies almost by happenstance and because of the people surrounding him and largely because of oppositionality to Democrats coming after him and him reacting to that.

00:05:12.260 And then from 2020 to 2024, you got the backlash against Trump, one, as the Empire Strikes Back.

00:05:18.080 And then you got sort of the Return of the Jedi moment here.

00:05:20.240 But, you know, the story just it never ends that way.

00:05:23.160 And so it was a rejection of the rejection of the rejection.

00:05:25.160 And at no point has anyone in the last, I would say, you know, maybe 30 years in American politics provided a sort of cohesive version of what our politics ought to look like, how we ought to approach politics.

00:05:38.660 It feels like a grab bag of policies built around a person now.

00:05:41.380 And you're right.

00:05:41.740 People follow the great sadness of my life.

00:05:44.020 It truly is the sadness of my life is the recognition as I came into my 40s that people don't follow policy.

00:05:49.700 They follow people.

00:05:50.840 It's a very, very sad thing.

00:05:52.080 They don't follow ideas.

00:05:53.080 They follow humans.

00:05:53.740 and that's a difficult thing to reconcile

00:05:56.440 with what we do every day

00:05:57.320 where we're talking about policy and ideas.

00:05:59.620 But that's why I think it's easy

00:06:00.540 to overread an election like this

00:06:02.060 and read it in a wide variety of ways, right?

00:06:04.220 People like me, right,

00:06:05.280 where I was supportive of the initial Iran war,

00:06:07.380 even though I was not supportive of the MOU

00:06:09.020 and the delay in the Iran war after April,

00:06:11.280 I'm gonna say, well, it was the tariffs.

00:06:12.440 And people who hated the Iran war 0.67

00:06:13.600 are gonna say the tariffs were great, 0.97

00:06:14.940 it was the Iran war. 0.92

00:06:15.800 And in reality, it was like all the things

00:06:17.420 and none of the things in a certain sense.

00:06:19.000 It was all the things

00:06:19.720 and it was the perception

00:06:20.420 that President Trump is disconnected

00:06:21.680 from the American public

00:06:22.620 in a way that he was not in 2015, 2016,

00:06:25.000 and that he's sort of lost touch with the public

00:06:29.220 that wanted to give him the ability to do the things.

00:06:31.700 And that's why, you know, what I think is that

00:06:33.660 it's not so easily corrected.

00:06:36.060 Because I don't think it's a matter of just

00:06:37.380 you pull this lever, you change this policy,

00:06:38.900 and suddenly your popularity springs back into being.

00:06:42.740 I'm struggling to think of a time

00:06:44.580 when a president dipped into the 30s

00:06:46.600 and then rose back up into the 50s.

00:06:48.720 Certainly this has not happened in the last half century.

00:06:51.160 And so what does that mean?

00:06:51.780 It means what we're really talking about here, which is what comes next.

00:06:54.860 And that's the open question is really sort of what comes next.

00:06:57.320 And part of what's going to define that is how crazy the Democrats go.

00:07:00.580 If there was one silver lining here, it's that the Democratic victory was so overwhelming

00:07:04.000 and so large that I'm not sure they can talk themselves into moderation.

00:07:07.740 I think they're going to go for birth.

00:07:08.820 I'll make a prediction on what comes next.

00:07:10.960 I don't think that Trump is done as the leader of the GOP.

00:07:14.580 No.

00:07:14.820 I think he remains the leader.

00:07:16.200 I think he'll remain the leader through 2028 and even after.

00:07:20.220 I think that he can plausibly at least say, I wasn't on the ballot, and so don't blame me,

00:07:26.380 blame these other guys. And you can say, well, he was campaigning for them, and well,

00:07:30.220 it was your policies. I think he will credibly be able to say that. So I think he's the figure.

00:07:35.780 He still sucks all the oxygen out of the room. I think there was this, in those early days,

00:07:44.820 in the kind of inchoate, crazy days of 2016,

00:07:47.820 everyone said people just voted for Trump

00:07:49.280 for his personality, not for his policies.

00:07:51.740 But he did differ from the GOP.

00:07:54.040 When the whole GOP was ideologically free trade,

00:07:57.480 he was proposing protectionism.

00:07:59.420 When the whole GOP was in favor of legal migration,

00:08:03.800 he was calling for immigration restriction 0.65

00:08:05.400 and calling migrants rapists and murderers, 0.97

00:08:08.100 and that resonated. 0.97

00:08:08.900 So I still, I do think he offered this policy alternative

00:08:13.480 in a way that was more coherent than people give him credit for.

00:08:16.860 So I think he continues to hold that.

00:08:20.840 I just wonder if there's a structural problem now.

00:08:23.160 You see it in the UK, too.

00:08:24.540 How many prime ministers does the UK have?

00:08:26.180 That's like seven.

00:08:27.120 Like a billion in the last 20 years.

00:08:29.300 You think in the United States,

00:08:30.480 we had a Democrat House of Representatives for 40 years.

00:08:33.980 Now, it seems to switch back and forth all the time.

00:08:36.520 We had Ronald Reagan win two terms,

00:08:38.700 followed by a third term for George H.W. Bush.

00:08:41.160 Now we go from the end of Obama to Trump for a term, then Biden for a term, then Trump for a

00:08:47.420 term. And who knows? Right now it's not looking very good for the Republican in 28. I wonder if

00:08:51.120 there's just this deeper structural issue where we're not getting what we want. What we want is

00:08:55.520 cohesive societies that are high trust with economic flourishing that we got used to at

00:09:00.000 the end of the 20th century. And that just isn't happening anymore, anywhere in the Anglosphere,

00:09:04.340 really anywhere in the West. And I just wonder if political instability is the inevitable

00:09:09.360 consequence for the foreseeable future. I think, first of all, Trump by default will remain the

00:09:15.920 leader of the Republican Party for now. But if that remains the case into 2020 and beyond,

00:09:22.160 as you said, then the Republican Party has no future. You know, the leader of the Republican

00:09:25.980 Party cannot be in the future an 80-year-old lame duck, unpopular president. It just can't be.

00:09:33.100 So the process now has to be finding who the new leader is going to be. And as I said

00:09:37.680 than the other show. I mean, even if we had performed well during the midterms, that would

00:09:44.360 still be the case. But as to people follow ideas and not people, I think the answer is kind of

00:09:50.260 both. I think people follow people who have ideas they believe in, but the ideas are part of it.

00:09:57.880 It's not just the person. And so Trump in 2016, people were rallying around. Yeah, there was

00:10:03.360 there was the personality there was trump himself the blustery personality and all of that uh he was

00:10:09.980 funny and all these things and he could speak extemporaneously and the rallies were really

00:10:13.600 entertaining but he did have very simple understandable intuitive ideas drain the swamp

00:10:20.140 build the wall you know those are those are probably the two big ideas people rallied behind

00:10:24.240 and so it was this guy with these simple understandable kind of eloquent in their

00:10:29.920 simplicity, good ideas that people were rallying around. And I think I totally agree with that.

00:10:35.560 But I think that the problem is trying to abstract Trump. So you're right that it's a combination of

00:10:40.580 the person, but the person is a combination with their own ideas, which is why Trump is sort of a

00:10:44.240 one of one. And any attempt to either abstract a philosophy from him and then map it onto another

00:10:48.600 candidate is likely to fail. And so that's going to be the question for the next person who is the

00:10:54.960 leader of the Republican Party or of a conservative movement in not only what policies are Americans

00:11:00.140 likely to believe, but what are, who is the person who best reflects that in his own personage?

00:11:04.280 Trump was, because he was a throbbing middle finger, the ones that tended to reflect were

00:11:07.620 the things you weren't allowed to say, right? Don't open the borders wide and just let tons

00:11:11.520 of people in here. That's bad. You shouldn't do that. Or maybe we shouldn't trans the kids, 0.56

00:11:15.760 right? Like all those things where he would say sort of the obvious thing that was transgressive,

00:11:19.420 that united with Trump as a human. And I don't know if there's anyone in the Republican Party

00:11:24.160 who's sort of capable of capturing that in the same way.

00:11:26.620 And so I think that what you're getting

00:11:27.560 is a bunch of kind of nerds in the back room

00:11:29.500 trying to recreate fake Trump

00:11:31.260 from a bunch of like spare parts.

00:11:33.100 And I just don't, I don't know that that's going to work.

00:11:34.820 But you know, there's an expression in England,

00:11:36.640 the cometh the hour cometh the man.

00:11:38.280 And I think, you know, it's really Tolstoyan.

00:11:41.400 It's really about Leo Tolstoy.

00:11:42.960 You know, like Tolstoy said that men do nothing.

00:11:46.500 It's the age that raises the man.

00:11:49.040 That's not true.

00:11:49.840 There's a way that both things happen at once.

00:11:52.620 A Napoleon comes along when a Napoleon is called for, you know, and I used to tell Andrew Breitbart, he used to say I would be nobody if the Internet hadn't been invented.

00:12:01.520 And I'd say Fred Astaire would be nobody if the American musical hadn't hit that point when he was dancing.

00:12:06.400 And so I think that that's that's the thing you're looking for.

00:12:08.620 You can never see it coming.

00:12:10.020 Nobody saw Trump coming.

00:12:11.200 Nobody saw him coming.

00:12:12.440 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.

00:12:19.360 I mean, you know, that we're getting bad deals.

00:12:21.580 We need to make better deals.

00:12:22.620 We need to get rid of NAFTA.

00:12:24.240 I'm not disagreeing with that.

00:12:25.460 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.

00:12:34.860 Everybody is now going to pick and choose the thing they like.

00:12:37.060 Of course.

00:12:38.060 It wasn't that.

00:12:39.040 It wasn't that.

00:12:39.620 I agree with that.

00:12:40.340 I personally don't like this thing.

00:12:42.560 It must have been that thing that made it happen.

00:12:44.140 And that's why I say, like, in the end, the way that voters think about things is I just don't like this.

00:12:49.640 Like, all of this.

00:12:50.860 Like, I just don't like all of this.

00:12:51.960 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.

00:12:58.860 That's not the way that actual politics works, which is something that Trump always understood.

00:13:03.460 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.

00:13:10.160 It's the art of just being all of the things at once.

00:13:12.580 Yeah. You know, I didn't wonder because we've talked about the Iran war, obviously, a lot tonight.

00:13:16.320 I, one part we haven't touched on, yes, okay, the Iran war raised oil prices and diesel prices,

00:13:21.660 and it has all these downstream effects, but there, there's this kind of semiotic aspect to

00:13:26.760 it, which is, I wonder if voters saw in the very fact of the Iran war, uh, an image of the Iraq

00:13:33.160 war, which America, America spells this political trauma. Like to what, to what degree did that

00:13:37.860 just flip something? And Afghanistan, and Afghanistan, you know, you forget like 20

00:13:41.620 years in Afghanistan, and then it ends in this disaster. I mean, when I went over to Afghanistan, 1.00

00:13:47.480 I came back and said, this is terrible. We've got to get out of here. There's no country here 1.00

00:13:51.480 to save and all this. The Iraq war was overstepping, even though I thought many good 1.00

00:13:56.540 things actually came out of that, weirdly enough. But I still thought, you know, we got hit really 0.99

00:14:01.360 badly and it was traumatic. And I think we overreacted. I think we thought we could do more.

00:14:06.320 You know, the W idea that we were going to go over and turn, you know, the Middle East into flowering democracies was just absurd, you know.

00:14:16.280 And we were so upset and we were so angry with what had happened. 0.80

00:14:20.080 You know, I guess it made sense to follow that.

00:14:22.060 But these are the sorts of things that do have to turn back.

00:14:24.360 If America first means isolationism, you can forget it.

00:14:28.740 You can forget it.

00:14:29.300 We're an empire.

00:14:29.960 We're never going to be isolationist ever again.

00:14:31.580 That's not happening ever again until we're not an empire anymore.

00:14:34.060 And I think, so you've got to forget that.

00:14:36.700 But really, we need strategic alliances where people do the things we need them to do.

00:14:42.540 We need to be a new kind of empire.

00:14:45.620 We've never wanted to conquer people.

00:14:47.360 We've never taken over their countries.

00:14:48.860 But we need to at least know that they will go out and fight for the things that we care about.

00:14:53.280 And one of the things that is truly dangerous right now is I think we're losing Europe.

00:14:57.780 I think Europe is dead.

00:14:59.000 And I think really it's just being devoured by the creatures that come and devour the dead.

00:15:05.060 But then we have to know who is going to stand for us against Russia in Europe, against China in the China Seas, and against Iran in the Middle East. 0.98

00:15:15.480 I think all of that's true.

00:15:16.580 I also think that there's a fundamental disconnect in the American mind as to what we think is possible in war, how it's fought, and how you win.

00:15:23.380 And so in the same way, I think this is also happening.

00:15:26.640 This is sort of your question about systems and the fact that we keep bouncing party to party.

00:15:30.940 The case I've been making for a long time on the show and elsewhere is that the reason we're bouncing party to party is because you've got a bunch of politicians who are running their mouth about and delivering promises that no human can keep in the system that is built to not keep those promises.

00:15:43.920 Right.

00:15:44.180 Meaning we created a system of checks and balances to prevent specifically harsh, fast-moving action.

00:15:50.460 I'll go even further, though, because this is a very important point.

00:15:54.320 The politicians are promising

00:15:55.580 they're going to fix

00:15:56.120 the migration problem,

00:15:57.380 but you can't fix

00:15:58.000 the migration problem

00:15:58.800 when you have a welfare state

00:15:59.880 with zillions of dollars

00:16:01.340 of entitlements

00:16:01.880 and a below-replaced

00:16:03.260 is what's happening in France.

00:16:04.700 Yeah, so you just can't have

00:16:05.860 all the things at once.

00:16:06.860 And so I feel like

00:16:07.460 the same thing happens

00:16:08.240 with regard to the Iran war.

00:16:10.100 And I thought that

00:16:10.620 President Trump

00:16:11.360 had a fundamental

00:16:12.000 different understanding

00:16:14.000 because of his opposition

00:16:14.880 to the Iraq war,

00:16:15.900 which is, as you say,

00:16:17.000 a major factor

00:16:17.760 in why he won in 2016,

00:16:18.960 which was at the time

00:16:19.580 a very taboo position,

00:16:20.940 was that this is why

00:16:22.360 when he went in

00:16:23.460 and did what he did in Iran.

00:16:25.320 And he said, like, I'm going to move fast,

00:16:26.500 I'm going to break things,

00:16:27.040 and then I'm going to get out,

00:16:27.800 which is essentially what he did

00:16:29.000 with Midnight Hammer the year before.

00:16:30.680 I was figuring that it was going to be a campaign

00:16:32.200 that was much along those lines.

00:16:34.060 And I think that, you know,

00:16:35.040 the reality is that if you're trying

00:16:36.980 to deliver an outcome,

00:16:37.980 like, say, for example,

00:16:38.880 the toppling of regime,

00:16:39.740 which was always, I think,

00:16:40.940 the sort of sotto voce thing

00:16:42.820 you're not supposed to say

00:16:43.700 that we were trying to do,

00:16:44.500 but we weren't really trying to do,

00:16:45.600 but we were kind of trying to do.

00:16:46.700 Like, if you're going to do that,

00:16:47.600 then you have to be actually respectful

00:16:49.420 of the way that certain events come about

00:16:51.880 and what your actual goal is.

00:16:52.980 And if you don't do that,

00:16:53.940 the American people are not wrong to be disappointed in you

00:16:56.140 for not achieving all of that.

00:16:58.560 And so, you know, to me, that's the mistake of the,

00:17:00.700 like, if you're going to do it, win.

00:17:02.160 Move fast and win.

00:17:03.380 By the way, I apply that critique

00:17:04.740 to literally every ally of the United States as well.

00:17:07.860 This is my critique, actually, of Netanyahu in Israel,

00:17:09.760 is if you're going to go, go hard, go fast, and win.

00:17:11.840 And don't take two years to drag it out.

00:17:13.300 But, you know, the same thing is true with regard to this.

00:17:16.140 So there's a question on the consequences here,

00:17:18.660 our pals at Kalshiav.

00:17:19.560 will Trump be impeached and removed from office?

00:17:24.140 31% yes.

00:17:25.720 To me-

00:17:26.640 Yes to the first part, no to the second.

00:17:27.960 Yeah, so I mean, that seems like easy money.

00:17:30.560 The only way that you could possibly see

00:17:32.920 something like that happening

00:17:33.780 is if they really have a major corruption scandal

00:17:36.480 and you get a bunch of Republicans

00:17:37.620 who are now scared to death

00:17:38.980 that they're about to lose their seats in a swing state.

00:17:41.540 But who are you going to get?

00:17:42.500 Yes, there aren't that many swing states.

00:17:43.900 Right, and if Susan Collins goes down,

00:17:46.300 I don't know if we've had an update on-

00:17:47.240 Murkowski, so you could probably pick up Murkowski.

00:17:48.940 Yes.

00:17:49.140 Or 56.

00:17:50.340 You know, Cornyn, had Cornyn held on in Texas,

00:17:52.720 you could see him being swayed on something like that.

00:17:54.880 But he's out.

00:17:55.600 You know, a lot of these guys are out.

00:17:57.000 Yeah, Johnson's not going to do it.

00:17:58.260 No chance.

00:17:58.960 Yeah, so I just think...

00:18:00.460 Not to mention, they removed Trump.

00:18:01.960 They're putting Vance in office.

00:18:03.080 Yeah.

00:18:03.540 They're giving the presidency to Vance.

00:18:05.020 Yeah, right.

00:18:05.920 I don't think they'd be thrilled about that.

00:18:07.800 Other one from Kalshi.

00:18:09.240 Will Trump resign during this term?

00:18:11.040 No.

00:18:12.080 27% chance.

00:18:13.220 That feels like easy money.

00:18:15.420 Try in that prediction market and take the under on that.

00:18:18.080 No way.

00:18:18.440 So we've got Decision Desk HQ has called the Minnesota race for Peggy Flanagan, the Democrat, defeating Michelle Tafoya. 0.53

00:18:27.940 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.

00:18:38.820 We are talking about actual Antifa levels of now elected. 0.68

00:18:44.060 Yeah.

00:18:44.760 Again, I think that the biggest thing here

00:18:46.520 is that Democrats will undoubtedly overreach.

00:18:48.660 And so all of the pessimism of today 0.98

00:18:50.120 is based on the fact that tonight was just horseshit. 0.98

00:18:53.640 It was just terrible. 0.97

00:18:54.520 Yeah.

00:18:54.780 But like I've been,

00:18:56.780 we've all been around long enough

00:18:57.960 to remember several,

00:18:59.020 as you said earlier, Matt,

00:19:00.120 to remember several cycles of this.

00:19:01.160 I remember in 2004,

00:19:02.320 I thought Republicans would never lose again.

00:19:04.080 And by 2006, Nancy Pelosi was speaker.

00:19:06.080 And then I remember that Barack Obama in 2012 wins.

00:19:09.960 Yeah.

00:19:10.220 And by 2016, Donald Trump is president.

00:19:11.720 And so, like, it feels like we're never going to win again.

00:19:14.360 And that's not true.

00:19:15.200 We will win again. 0.65

00:19:16.240 It's just going to take the Democrats completely going off the reservation.

00:19:18.860 Well, here's the problem with that.

00:19:20.360 The problem, and it's true, they'll definitely overstep.

00:19:24.220 The hope, then, is that they will face a political consequence for it.

00:19:28.920 But I'm not sure if that's true because the really dark reality here is that, look, what

00:19:34.720 have Democrats and what has the left done for the last year?

00:19:37.760 I mean, they have been more extreme than we've ever seen them.

00:19:42.100 They have been openly celebrating the death of one particular conservative, Charlie Kirk.

00:19:49.420 The murder.

00:19:50.360 The murder, yes.

00:19:52.100 The murder of Charlie Kirk and calling for the deaths of many more conservatives.

00:19:57.840 And they've been doing that.

00:19:59.460 And apparently there is, so far, no political consequence for that whatsoever.

00:20:04.560 They've been awarded with this.

00:20:06.580 I think we're missing, though, I do think we're missing this bigger movement.

00:20:10.060 The West is moving to the right.

00:20:12.200 The West is moving to the right.

00:20:14.600 Could have fooled me tonight.

00:20:15.840 Yeah, I get it.

00:20:17.060 But they're not voting.

00:20:18.420 I don't believe that they are voting for leftist policies.

00:20:21.260 I believe they're voting against what we have in this moment.

00:20:24.200 And if you look at, you know, Glenn Beck was the guy who brought it up, what happened in Poland.

00:20:29.680 Yeah.

00:20:30.500 You know, the reason that happened in Poland, what happened in France, I haven't heard anybody else say this, 0.98

00:20:36.260 but I know it's true, that what happened in France

00:20:38.500 was a reaction to the visit of Pope Leo.

00:20:41.040 He came and 800,000 people said mass

00:20:43.660 in the symbol of the revolution, the Place de la Concorde.

00:20:47.920 And the left moved in on these minor demonstrations

00:20:50.760 and turned them into a riot

00:20:52.680 because they saw that there is a movement

00:20:54.920 moving to the right, moving toward religion,

00:20:56.860 moving toward tradition.

00:20:59.240 And I think that that's what's happening in Poland. 0.70

00:21:02.020 This was basically a coup in Poland,

00:21:04.020 which is not like Guatemala, it's like Poland.

00:21:05.940 And they know that the people are moving to the right.

00:21:09.940 They're doing everything they can to shut down the AFD in Germany, to shut down Marine Le Pen in France.

00:21:17.060 Is that happening here in the United States?

00:21:19.160 What's that?

00:21:19.540 It's about to.

00:21:20.220 Is the United States moving to the right?

00:21:22.040 Yes, yes.

00:21:23.480 What are the indicators of that?

00:21:25.580 It's moving to the right in terms of the populist right.

00:21:29.740 The populist right.

00:21:30.740 But what are the indicators that we're moving to the right?

00:21:34.340 The indicators I see is everything's pointing to the left.

00:21:37.900 No, I don't.

00:21:38.360 Not everything, but mostly.

00:21:38.820 I think this is an interregnum,

00:21:40.180 and I think the best historical analog right now

00:21:44.340 is the recent history of Great Britain.

00:21:46.380 So I think that what you watched in Great Britain

00:21:48.020 was the conservatives were in power for a long time,

00:21:51.040 and then they got sclerotic

00:21:52.060 and not particularly good at their jobs,

00:21:53.440 and then labor, radical labor, wiped them out,

00:21:57.160 wiped them out, and within a year,

00:21:59.400 labor was radically unpopular,

00:22:01.060 and now the conservatives and Nigel Farage

00:22:02.580 are on the rise again.

00:22:03.240 And I think that that is very likely to happen here.

00:22:05.300 The real reason why Democrats won tonight is because they don't have power.

00:22:09.340 That's the reason they won tonight, because none of their policies are being implemented.

00:22:13.620 Right now, whoever is in power gets shellacked.

00:22:16.200 If people are pissed off, they punish the party in power.

00:22:18.460 And so this couldn't have happened, I think, in a non-midterm election.

00:22:21.080 In fact, it didn't happen in a non-midterm election.

00:22:22.740 That was two years ago.

00:22:23.660 A midterm election is always a referendum on the party in power.

00:22:26.780 And because this is a referendum on the Republicans and people are pissed off, you get this.

00:22:30.140 And maybe that referendum lasts on for another couple of years and sweeps into Democratic term number one for somebody in 28.

00:22:38.040 But I have no faith.

00:22:39.300 Like right now, if I had to put money on 28, I'd put money on the Democrats.

00:22:42.780 If I had to put money on 32, I'm not sure that I'd put money on the Democrats.

00:22:47.920 And it won't be worth anything at that point.

00:22:50.140 What you said before is really important. 1.00

00:22:53.420 What people were voting for in Britain again and again was stop bringing in the immigrants. 1.00

00:22:57.700 They can't stop bringing in the immigrants because they need them to support the welfare state. 0.99

00:23:01.500 Nobody wants to give up the welfare state. 0.99

00:23:03.300 So what we need is a vision of what we do with the welfare state.

00:23:06.500 And I think I was talking again to Henry Olson, who, by the way, really needs to be talked to more.

00:23:11.400 I think we should hire him, frankly, but he's a brilliant guy.

00:23:15.200 And one of the things he invented Donald Trump before there was Donald Trump,

00:23:18.580 he said that the Republicans have forgotten that Ronald Reagan was a man of the people,

00:23:22.740 that he was a man who actually supported a welfare state

00:23:26.420 that would keep people from falling through the cracks.

00:23:29.960 And I asked him, so what does that look like now?

00:23:32.160 And he said, well, it looks like reforming the welfare state

00:23:34.480 so it takes care of the truly needy

00:23:36.120 and lets the rich take care of themselves.

00:23:38.340 I mean, I'm collecting Social Security.

00:23:41.060 I deserve it.

00:23:41.900 I paid into it, but that's not the way it should work.

00:23:44.540 I mean, I don't need Social Security.

00:23:46.480 And I love it because it's just somebody sending me money,

00:23:49.240 but that's not right.

00:23:50.620 we need to reform we need to stop talking about this ideal world where we get rid of the welfare

00:23:56.300 state because it's not going to happen you know i need to reform it i spoke to a billionaire

00:24:00.360 about 10 years ago and he was complaining about the same problem he said every single month the

00:24:06.040 the government sends me a check for 700 because i'm a parent he had younger kids it was you know

00:24:12.600 is an active guy. Fifth one. He sends me a check for $700. I'm a billionaire. I spend $700 a month

00:24:20.880 on tennis shoes. I do not need the government to send me $700. Now, of course, the left never

00:24:24.820 wanted the entitlements to be means tested because then it would make it a welfare program and then

00:24:29.820 it would be easier to cut rather than one that we've all paid into. So yes, look, all of these

00:24:34.480 things are going to be on the table. President Trump just spoke to Fox News, said, first line,

00:24:39.700 a part of it was Iran. So this is Trump acknowledging, to my knowledge, for the first

00:24:44.780 time that Iran would play a role. Well, he said he didn't care that it was going to do this,

00:24:47.720 but he said it was going to do it. Yeah. A part of it was Iran. He says, I don't think it was the

00:24:51.800 war. So he says, a part of it was Iran. Next sentence, I don't think it was the war. I think

00:24:56.900 it was the gas prices, meaning the consequences of the war. I can work with them on a lot of

00:25:01.600 things, the Democrats, or the Iranians. What's the difference? Immigration is a big deal. This 0.95

00:25:07.220 is president trump saying about the democrats a lot of democrats have called me in the last 20

00:25:11.940 minutes actually i've already spoken to certain leaders in the democrat party we will work with

00:25:15.940 the democrats i will consider doing whatever is good and appropriate for the country interesting

00:25:22.300 well he always makes this overture so so he made this overture after he won in 2016 1.00

00:25:26.780 that he would actually work with the democrats and they proceeded to yes yes like idiots by the way 1.00

00:25:32.620 But it was great for us. 1.00

00:25:34.520 No, they've learned nothing.

00:25:36.040 And their base demands, they not learn anything.

00:25:38.920 And so it'll get bad again.

00:25:41.060 By the way, that analysis is not wrong. 0.73

00:25:42.720 I mean, the truth is when he says it's the war in Iran,

00:25:45.480 but it's not the war in Iran, it's the gas prices.

00:25:47.540 He's correct.

00:25:48.300 I mean, the gas prices were at $2.50. 0.99

00:25:50.220 No one would give a crap, right? 0.99

00:25:51.020 I mean, that's the reality. 0.98

00:25:52.340 Just be a thing happening far away that we don't really care very much about.

00:25:54.800 And it is a big deal in rural areas, the gas prices.

00:25:58.040 And that's where our strength is.

00:25:59.900 Of course.

00:26:00.460 And so, you know, again, when you look for the really true, this would be like a normal evening, except for the fact that a bunch of truly red states that should not be in play now have to be considered in play.

00:26:11.980 And the map for Democrats in 2028 becomes a very, very wide map, right?

00:26:16.460 That's the problem, is that for the Republicans, they basically had to run an inside straight in the last several elections, right?

00:26:21.360 You got to win Arizona, Georgia.

00:26:22.540 We all know the map.

00:26:23.620 They'd win Wisconsin and Michigan and two of the three, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania.

00:26:27.820 That's a very narrow map, and there weren't a lot of other states that were opening up.

00:26:31.080 Now, Democrats have about 8,000 ways that they can win in 2020.

00:26:36.180 If Texas is open, 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.

00:26:48.580 They have, like, an extraordinary number of combos there.

00:26:50.840 And that's the real danger for whoever decides to run for the president.

00:26:54.700 Listen, I don't envy J.D. his position.

00:26:57.380 I really don't. I mean, I was just going to ask, what is your advice now for any of the guys,

00:27:02.320 whatever it is, four or five guys? I mean, so I think that there are certain guys where it's

00:27:06.000 like they're only going to be able to get the nomination if they run this time. Right. And

00:27:09.480 there you're thinking about Governor DeSantis in Florida, who already ran once. If he waits

00:27:12.740 another four years, then he's been out of office for too long and it's not really relevant. So

00:27:17.020 Ron is going to run. The vice president, I just don't see. I think that there is a not

00:27:22.340 unintelligent play where he says, listen, you know, this is I've got a young fan. He makes

00:27:26.640 an excuse i've got a young family and he's so young kids he's a kid he's a year older than i

00:27:31.620 he's a younger than i mean he's a baby he's a he's a kid um and he so he could easily you know

00:27:37.660 again we have the cal sheet numbers here saying that jd's the favorite at 30 rubio at 23 and

00:27:42.300 de santa at 12 you should absolutely short sell rubio like marco is not going to run he's not

00:27:46.200 going to run he's not going to run why do you why do you say that because because number one

00:27:50.860 2028 is likely a poison chalice.

00:27:53.360 Number two, if he runs against J.D. and J.D. runs and he loses to J.D., he's toast.

00:27:58.800 Number three, if J.D. wins the nomination, you could still pick him as his VP.

00:28:02.000 J.D. could lose and he would still be the heir apparent.

00:28:04.120 Number four, if J.D. runs, loses, and doesn't pick him, he could still be the heir apparent.

00:28:08.140 So if you're Rubio, every math ends with, I'm not going to run.

00:28:11.560 And so, you know, but if you're J.D., that's a very hard call because you look at that map.

00:28:16.740 You say, I'm running on the back of a president whose endorsement makes me the guy.

00:28:20.700 but the only way I become the guy

00:28:22.220 is with his endorsement

00:28:23.060 and he has a 32% approval rating

00:28:25.760 and he's got a bunch of policies

00:28:27.760 I don't necessarily agree with

00:28:28.840 that I'm going to have to quasi-own

00:28:30.240 but also quasi-separate from.

00:28:31.480 And the minute I separate from him,

00:28:32.900 President Trump is going to bop me 0.83

00:28:34.100 on the head of the stick. 0.71

00:28:35.680 That is a rough road.

00:28:37.200 And so my, you know,

00:28:38.020 I don't have,

00:28:38.900 I wish I had an easy solution

00:28:40.660 for the vice president,

00:28:41.600 but I just don't.

00:28:42.420 And the issue is

00:28:43.520 we can sit here all day and say,

00:28:44.880 well, actually,

00:28:45.480 here's the reason why

00:28:46.880 JD should wait for four years

00:28:48.720 or eight years.

00:28:49.140 but you know the thing is he's this close to the president if i were if i were the vice president

00:28:54.060 i'm running yeah of course you can't give it up now or never for him yeah yeah look he's young

00:28:59.280 he's very talented he's very intelligent his rise in politics is astounding actually and and so i

00:29:05.860 don't know that it's now or never but it's kind of now you know i mean it is he's the vice president

00:29:11.560 i think the president actually just spoke to the wall street journal but they took the quote away

00:29:15.540 from me. There it is. President Trump just spoke

00:29:17.440 with the Wall Street Journal, and hold on,

00:29:19.640 stop scrolling so much. I want to read the report.

00:29:21.740 He says, the president said

00:29:23.140 he had no plans to make personnel

00:29:25.500 changes inside his administration,

00:29:27.520 and he expressed support for Defense Secretary

00:29:29.280 B. Dag Seth, who has led the war

00:29:31.600 effort. I think he's terrific

00:29:33.560 actually, President Trump said. It's

00:29:35.500 just the way the ball bounces. Sometimes Trump said

00:29:37.360 of Tuesday night's primary results, or sorry,

00:29:39.280 the midterm results. So far, everything he's saying is true.

00:29:41.860 Yes, there's... Can you toss me the lighter?

00:29:43.420 It would be, this is an important issue, is getting you that lighter.

00:29:47.960 I mean, it's just the way the ball bounces sometimes is not.

00:29:53.100 The ball's not supposed to bounce in this direction.

00:29:55.480 The ball's not supposed to bounce and make Texas blue.

00:29:57.880 But to Trump's point, I think this is a good point. 0.79

00:30:00.600 You cannot blame Pete Hegsak because you don't like the Iran war.

00:30:04.000 I mean, I actually think it would be wrong of him to fire Pete Hegsak. 0.65

00:30:06.320 I mean, I agree.

00:30:07.160 Pete Hegsak works for him.

00:30:08.680 I mean, and there is a case to be made.

00:30:11.360 let's assume for a second, since the Iran war is obviously the big subject that everybody is

00:30:14.740 talking about tonight, I think, again, that the big underplayed subject will be the tariffs,

00:30:18.340 which dramatically increased prices across the board and everyone pretends don't exist,

00:30:22.820 even though they are wildly unpopular. But we'll put that aside because nobody wants to talk about

00:30:26.720 that. They were they were largely struck down. So it became kind of a dead. Yeah. But it didn't

00:30:31.320 really like the exit polls show 64 percent of Americans didn't like the tariffs and 63 percent

00:30:35.740 said it affected their business. So like not not great. But let's talk about the Iran war since

00:30:40.020 is more interesting

00:30:40.620 and people like talking about it.

00:30:41.260 Though the tariffs

00:30:41.720 did kind of affect

00:30:42.400 Mayflower cigars too.

00:30:43.540 We were able to eat the prices

00:30:44.740 and maintain burrito prices

00:30:46.080 for the consumers.

00:30:47.280 So, but, but.

00:30:49.040 They're a problem for people,

00:30:50.160 for sure.

00:30:50.660 But, but like,

00:30:51.420 but with regards

00:30:52.300 to the Iran war,

00:30:52.760 the question,

00:30:53.520 let's say you're JD

00:30:54.180 or let's say you're the president

00:30:55.220 is what you do now.

00:30:57.040 Right?

00:30:57.160 Because nobody has a time machine.

00:30:58.120 We can do recriminations

00:30:58.960 all day long and it's fine.

00:31:00.000 I mean, like it's totally deserved

00:31:01.020 and, you know,

00:31:01.860 like what happened happened

00:31:02.760 and we can now analyze

00:31:03.660 where we are now.

00:31:04.880 Maybe we, you know,

00:31:06.320 maybe we reverse

00:31:07.040 the recriminations

00:31:08.180 if things go well

00:31:08.940 over the course of the next two days or something.

00:31:11.280 But if you're the president or you're the vice president,

00:31:14.540 you have to start from the presumption

00:31:15.680 that the Iranians are not going to sign any sort of deal 0.86

00:31:17.500 because they clearly are not. 1.00

00:31:19.640 I mean, they clearly are not interested

00:31:20.880 in signing some sort of deal.

00:31:21.780 And so then the question becomes,

00:31:22.720 how do you get to a quasi-successful conclusion

00:31:25.180 as fast as humanly possible?

00:31:26.800 That really is what it is.

00:31:28.620 And because the faster, the better, obviously,

00:31:30.720 and the more successful, the better

00:31:31.680 because Americans don't like losing wars.

00:31:33.620 I know this is something that we tend to forget.

00:31:35.780 And again, a lot of people who are sort of

00:31:37.360 in the America first movement, so to speak,

00:31:38.940 will say that, you know, just ending the war is sufficient. Just ending a war is not sufficient.

00:31:43.300 If you end it and you lose, you become Joe Biden with Afghanistan. It doesn't actually, 0.61

00:31:47.320 like ending it, you don't get credit for ending it. You just get credit for winning.

00:31:50.820 You know, General Patton during World War II gave this great speech to the Third Army,

00:31:55.140 where he says, America never can and never has lost a war. And the funny thing is,

00:32:00.540 immediately after he said that, immediately after that war, with the exception of Desert Storm,

00:32:05.940 We lost like every war that we've engaged in.

00:32:08.360 I mean, imperial wars are like that, unfortunately.

00:32:11.200 But you have to remember, even ending World War II took atom bombs.

00:32:16.040 And we're not dropping them atom bombs on Iran. 0.70

00:32:18.740 It's not happening.

00:32:19.800 And I think the idea—

00:32:22.740 The definition of loss in a war changed or when a war changed, because no one will surrender anymore.

00:32:28.220 Right.

00:32:28.480 Meaning there are no regimes who are willing to get on the deck of an aircraft carrier and just be like,

00:32:32.440 okay, you know what, I'm giving up the ghost right here.

00:32:34.220 Because we're not fighting nations in the Middle East.

00:32:36.820 We're fighting, like, weird movements.

00:32:38.920 Tribal constellations. 1.00

00:32:40.360 Yeah, for sure that's true. 0.92

00:32:41.820 And the truth is that, you know, in Korea, basically,

00:32:45.120 we won to the extent that there is a South Korea.

00:32:48.060 Yeah, right.

00:32:48.540 I mean, you can't call that a loss in the sense that there actually is a nation called South Korea.

00:32:51.840 It was a tie.

00:32:53.000 It was a draw.

00:32:53.880 It wasn't a tie for the South Koreans.

00:32:55.040 It was a win for the South Koreans. 0.95

00:32:56.180 It was a loss for the Norcs. 0.94

00:32:57.520 But, you know, the reality is that the thing that we got out of World War II, in the same

00:33:05.000 way that we have a unique and weird view of how the 1950s worked, we're like, oh, that

00:33:08.060 should be the normal.

00:33:08.760 And actually, that's very, very abnormal.

00:33:11.060 People look at World War II like, oh, that's how a war should end.

00:33:14.020 And let me explain.

00:33:14.900 Almost no wars in human history have ended the way World War II ended with the full-scale

00:33:18.940 surrender of your opposition, and they just give up the ghost, and you actually just sort

00:33:22.860 of manage their transition into the next thing.

00:33:25.240 That is not what happened at the end of World War I.

00:33:26.940 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.

00:33:33.160 There was World War II at the end of World War I. 0.81

00:33:35.000 Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:33:36.220 And before that, there was a war in 1870 between the French and the Germans.

00:33:40.940 And before that, there was a gigantic war at the beginning of that century with Napoleon running rampant across the continent.

00:33:46.240 And so I think that we have models in our head of how things should work that are based on absolute outliers.

00:33:52.040 That's true of World War II.

00:33:53.480 It's true of the 1950s economy, which is not real. 0.81

00:33:56.400 It is not a real economy because in order for that to happen, we have to destroy the rest of the earth.

00:34:01.060 If you destroy the rest of the earth, you can have an isolated economy where the union worker gets paid a day's wage at $90 bajillion.

00:34:08.380 But there is a question about imperial America that really troubles me.

00:34:14.680 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. 0.87

00:34:20.240 This is correct.

00:34:20.720 We never do this.

00:34:21.700 This is correct.

00:34:22.260 And that's one of the wonderful things about us.

00:34:24.180 I think it's a beautiful thing that the only thing we left, the only thing we left in Europe

00:34:27.380 were our dead, you know, that's, that's, that's what we left there. But at some point, at some

00:34:31.880 point, we're now dealing with a Europe that is really not Europe. It's not, you know, I mean,

00:34:36.860 the, the speech that Vance made and the speech that Rubio followed it with were right. You know,

00:34:41.540 they're not, I mean, they're arresting more people for speaking in the UK than they are in Russia.

00:34:46.680 And, and I think that that's like, how do we, how do we deal with that? These are,

00:34:51.460 This is our mother country.

00:34:53.100 It's still our greatest Anglosphere ally.

00:34:56.420 But it's not a recognizable country in terms of its values.

00:34:59.880 So, I mean, we are – we stand alone at this moment.

00:35:03.560 And we have to look to Asia and we have to look to – we have to keep the territory of Europe. 0.83

00:35:09.500 Really, Poland and Hungary and, you know, all of those eastern countries are the only people who are aligned with our values at all. 0.68

00:35:17.540 And look what's happened there.

00:35:18.600 Yeah, exactly.

00:35:19.140 I mean, obviously, Hungary fell last year, and so it's kind of bleak.

00:35:22.900 And he's arresting his enemies, too.

00:35:26.440 Of course.

00:35:27.420 Totally as predictive.

00:35:28.560 As predictive.

00:35:29.420 You know what?

00:35:29.960 You're absolutely right.

00:35:31.020 You said it at the time.

00:35:31.980 I hate to say I told you so, but all to say, it's a rather bleak picture for the West,

00:35:38.820 and now it's come here in a very acute form.

00:35:42.120 But again, I also don't think that anyone on either side

00:35:48.420 has made a robust argument for Americanism as an argument,

00:35:53.040 as a fully fleshed out argument.

00:35:54.940 President Trump makes an extraordinary emotional appeal

00:35:57.160 to Americanism, right?

00:35:58.640 Just the love for flag, the love for country,

00:36:00.660 just the kind of root patriotism, that for sure.

00:36:03.480 But what are the actual values that make America America?

00:36:06.400 President Trump can't do a paragraph on that.

00:36:07.760 I agree.

00:36:08.600 And you've seen that.

00:36:10.260 You're one of the best spokesmen for it.

00:36:12.260 And everybody hates you.

00:36:15.180 Except for me, I like you.

00:36:16.400 Note to self, do not issue paragraphs.

00:36:19.060 But I think there's a reason for that.

00:36:21.060 And the reason for that is the minute you try to define a thing, you create controversy.

00:36:24.700 And until the American people are willing to get serious about defining the things that they actually are willing to do and want,

00:36:30.640 they're not going to get those things and they're going to be perennially disappointed.

00:36:33.380 If you refuse to define what you want from a war, you're not going to get it.

00:36:36.460 And if you refuse to define what sacrifices you're willing to undergo, you're not going to be able to make those sacrifices.

00:36:41.160 And if you're not willing to acknowledge what economic system you wish to live under and whether it is good or not, then you're not going to get it.

00:36:47.740 And if you want to say that you want to cut spending, but you also want an endless welfare state where we just pour gushers of money at you, 0.95

00:36:53.060 and then we fund that by bringing a bunch of illegal immigrants to work at low rent wages. 0.99

00:36:56.880 That's exactly right. 1.00

00:36:57.740 But isn't that the issue?

00:36:59.020 You know, when it comes to even the idea of Americanism as an ideology, that creates a big problem.

00:37:04.980 because the big anxiety that we felt throughout

00:37:08.060 not only the Anglosphere, but Western Europe as well,

00:37:11.600 well, all of Europe actually, is mass migration,

00:37:14.520 that the actual people of our country

00:37:17.280 have just changed radically.

00:37:18.700 And we don't have kids anymore,

00:37:20.000 which ties into the welfare problem.

00:37:21.820 And so I would say, look,

00:37:23.120 I want to preserve the American nation.

00:37:24.820 I love my country.

00:37:26.100 I love our way of life.

00:37:27.260 Not just the values, though I like those too,

00:37:29.460 but I like hot dogs on the 4th of July.

00:37:31.460 I like fireworks.

00:37:33.340 I don't know.

00:37:34.180 That's important.

00:37:34.980 The ineffable kind of stuff that we just do. 0.89

00:37:37.900 And because of mass migration, that is changing in our country and elsewhere.

00:37:42.060 People have a deep anxiety about that, 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.

00:37:51.340 But the problem is, one, I don't think nations can be reduced to that.

00:37:54.400 And two, our opponents aren't signing on board.

00:37:57.900 So even that doesn't quite work.

00:37:59.280 That's the key thing.

00:37:59.980 I'm sure you know Hilaire Bellock's theory that Rome didn't fall.

00:38:06.300 It simply became the Catholic Church. 0.51

00:38:08.340 And the Germans came in, and everybody said, oh, no, the Germans are here. 0.76

00:38:11.060 But the Germans wanted to be Romans. 0.88

00:38:12.580 We're letting in people who don't want to be Americans, which is just a real big mistake. 0.89

00:38:16.120 But I think the huge problem here that we're just ignoring is a lot of Americans just don't want to be Americans.

00:38:19.900 Yes.

00:38:20.560 I mean, it's not just the problem of immigration.

00:38:22.140 This is the problem of we've educated several generations of people not to believe in America and to hate America.

00:38:25.800 But because nobody in authority, nobody in power is doing what you just said.

00:38:32.860 Nobody is defining what it is America is that socialism is antithetical to.

00:38:37.780 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.

00:38:44.180 They were not saying that the truths were themselves self-evident.

00:38:47.560 They were saying we hold these truths to be self-evident, meaning this is not up for debate.

00:38:51.720 This right here is the stuff that's not up for debate.

00:38:53.460 And if you don't agree, you should get out.

00:38:55.460 Yeah.

00:38:55.800 You don't belong here.

00:38:56.780 And so, yes, obviously, a nation is the people that live in it.

00:39:02.360 But that's not enough.

00:39:03.860 And it's also not the idea.

00:39:05.160 I'll agree.

00:39:05.760 The ideas aren't enough.

00:39:06.500 It has to be combined with the people who are willing to live by those ideas and join in the tradition and all those things.

00:39:12.780 But the ideas are the fundamental because people change.

00:39:17.560 Their kids turn into socialists. 0.59

00:39:20.040 They can be good Americans and their kids turn into little jackass socialists who vote for Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and James Tallarico in Texas. 0.94

00:39:27.400 Gen Z voted plus 48 for Democrats in this cycle. 0.84

00:39:30.900 The vast majority of the people who voted in that cycle, I promise you, are children of Americans.

00:39:36.580 And so what we've got right now, the Republican Party needs to, someone needs to articulate what exactly are the principles that are supposed to bind us and do so in muscular fashion.

00:39:47.840 and without the kind of like,

00:39:49.480 what if we just soft sell what the Democrats are selling,

00:39:51.400 but a little bit less?

00:39:52.440 Yes, that's the problem.

00:39:53.720 That is exactly the problem.

00:39:54.440 Well, you know, there's also our Boris Johnson version.

00:39:56.820 We define things negatively all the time,

00:39:58.480 what we're against.

00:39:59.060 We know what the conservatives are against,

00:40:00.660 but they never really come out and say what they're against.

00:40:02.180 You know, our intrepid Brekka from Michigan,

00:40:06.060 she was reporting in Michigan at Abdul's campaign headquarters.

00:40:09.520 She's interviewed a Muslim couple on the street today,

00:40:12.700 and you can check it out on our social media channels.

00:40:15.420 And they said, who'd you vote for?

00:40:16.420 we vote for Abdul al-Sayed. Okay, and what do you make of his view that men can become women

00:40:21.560 and women can become men? The Muslims said, what do you talk about, that men can be men?

00:40:27.060 No, no, no. He supports transgenderism. He said, no, no, it cannot, no, he does not, 0.99

00:40:31.380 he cannot believe that. He's Muslim. He cannot believe that. And it was this beautiful video,

00:40:36.060 I mean, so hilarious, but though dark. And you say, well, you know what? It's going to be very

00:40:41.360 easy to blame Muslims in Dearborn or whatever for Abdul al-Sayed. That, you can actually, 0.55

00:40:47.600 because his deepest base is like college educated whites. Yeah, of course. By the way, it's both.

00:40:53.140 And also the Dearborn Muslim is totally right. Abdul al-Sayed does not believe in transing the 0.99

00:40:56.720 Yeah, that's true. He's a religious Muslim who is lying to make common cause with people who 1.00

00:41:00.000 want to trans the kids to destroy the civilization. Well, this is, this is the other thing. They're 1.00

00:41:03.380 both right, in other words. People are the leftist who's pretending to be a religious Muslim. Yeah. 0.97

00:41:07.620 For him, he's a religious Muslim. If he's a Muslim pretending to be a leftist or a 1.00

00:41:11.220 leftists pretending to be a Muslim. 1.00

00:41:12.420 I actually don't know which is worse. 0.80

00:41:13.940 We do, unfortunately, have more bad news.

00:41:15.840 Some more calls to report.

00:41:16.960 CNN has called the main Senate race,

00:41:19.440 as I feared and predicted for Democrat Troy Jackson,

00:41:25.100 who has defeated Susan Collins.

00:41:26.820 Wow.

00:41:27.100 Susan Collins, an amazing political survivor. 1.00

00:41:29.900 We all got irritated with a lot of her votes 1.00

00:41:31.920 because she was playing a game.

00:41:33.520 Brett Kavanaugh would not be on the Supreme Court

00:41:34.940 if they were not.

00:41:35.340 Yes, no, no, no.

00:41:36.120 I'm like a Susan Collins enjoyer and defender.

00:41:38.880 She played a game very, very well.

00:41:41.220 And even she, a total pro, like the varsity superstar athlete of play in politics,

00:41:48.460 went down to Troy Jackson, who has two kids with his cousin.

00:41:51.280 NBC News also calls Pennsylvania's first district for Democrat Bob Harvey

00:41:56.740 defeating Republican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick.

00:41:59.860 I don't like Brian Fitzpatrick, but he was a huge squish and everything. 1.00

00:42:04.320 It seems hard to dismiss this as a sort of fleeting, 1.00

00:42:09.980 well, this is just how midterms go.

00:42:12.620 It feels like something far more significant than that.

00:42:15.640 And maybe it won't be.

00:42:16.660 But I mean, as you pointed out,

00:42:19.200 there's a generational problem here.

00:42:22.640 Gen Z is falling to the siren song of socialism.

00:42:29.800 And so how does that play out in the long term? 0.99

00:42:32.560 I'd like to think, as I said at the beginning,

00:42:34.400 things change quickly.

00:42:36.000 And so Trump was the most popular thing

00:42:39.340 in the world 2024 and now look at it

00:42:41.100 and maybe it'll swing back the other way,

00:42:42.820 pendulum swing.

00:42:43.740 But the far more pessimistic view

00:42:46.780 is that what we are seeing

00:42:48.340 is the beginning of a generational shift

00:42:52.420 that is only just beginning.

00:42:56.120 And you hardly even want to consider

00:42:58.740 what that means.

00:43:00.000 But the reason I'm hopeful

00:43:01.640 is simply because of things I've seen.

00:43:06.340 Direction is all important.

00:43:08.580 The way the country is going is all important.

00:43:11.420 Reagan turned the country around.

00:43:14.840 He didn't actually succeed at a lot of what he wanted to do,

00:43:18.000 but he gave us 25 years of prosperity.

00:43:20.360 That entire Clinton administration was just riding the wave of Reagan's prosperity.

00:43:25.280 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.

00:43:32.980 That's how bad the crime was.

00:43:34.380 And I'm not even exaggerating about that.

00:43:35.800 I couldn't go out for a pack of cigarettes without worrying that I was not going to come home.

00:43:40.560 And Giuliani turned it around simply by coming into office.

00:43:45.080 It started.

00:43:46.320 And that's just the beginning.

00:43:48.300 But the way the country is going means everything.

00:43:50.560 If the country is going left, leftism doesn't work.

00:43:53.200 It's the only thing we have going for us if leftism doesn't work.

00:43:57.000 And so I think that if someone came into office who was a free trade person, who was a capitalist,

00:44:03.880 who's a freedom person things would turn around you know all those guys who were in the bonfire

00:44:08.680 of the vanities in that tom wolf book who went into the stock market and started making a billion

00:44:12.840 dollars five years before that they were long-haired hippies at woodstock same people

00:44:17.640 same people so things things really do turn around and they turn around because of prosperity and

00:44:22.700 peace you know that's what that's what i also think that you know they they turn around in

00:44:27.700 some cases faster than you would think yes nixon gets impeached in in 75 or it was about to be

00:44:33.720 and he's out of office and you have Gerald Ford

00:44:35.560 and then he loses to Jimmy Carter

00:44:37.180 and it feels like the end of the world for Republicans

00:44:38.560 and four years later, they're so bad.

00:44:39.960 You get Reagan who is effectively three terms plus Clinton.

00:44:43.680 CNN is also releasing some of their exit polling.

00:44:46.680 It shows Democrats winning young white men

00:44:49.020 by 17 points tonight.

00:44:50.920 Trump won young white men by 28 points just two years ago.

00:44:56.160 Also from the exit poll. 0.74

00:44:57.340 It's true that the Iran war is the economy. 0.59

00:44:59.680 Yeah. 0.82

00:44:59.820 I think that shift with white men 0.99

00:45:03.000 is astounding, I think, male, 0.95

00:45:05.640 because God forbid you ever specifically support 0.51

00:45:09.380 white men as a group.

00:45:11.740 And if you're not willing to speak to white men

00:45:15.020 and acknowledge them specifically as a group,

00:45:17.480 the way that politicians on both sides

00:45:20.880 have no problem talking to specifically any other group,

00:45:25.000 women, black people, anyone else, Asians, whatever.

00:45:28.180 But with white men, they don't want to do that.

00:45:30.200 But think about this. 0.84

00:45:30.520 So I defended Sarah on that ad.

00:45:33.000 because the policy was good, 0.75

00:45:34.820 and she felt that it was expedient to scapegoat white men,

00:45:38.600 that that was the only way to sell it politically,

00:45:40.620 even to white people.

00:45:42.180 And so I defended her tactically on it,

00:45:44.600 and I think she's doing a good job.

00:45:46.740 However, there's this Pew Research survey that came out

00:45:51.980 that shows you this problem. 0.99

00:45:53.640 Every racial group has majority racial identity. 1.00

00:45:58.320 So if you look at black people,

00:46:00.960 Those who say that race is a very or at least somewhat important part of their identity, it's over 70%.

00:46:07.460 If you look at Hispanics and Asians, it's over 50%.

00:46:10.660 For white people, it's 15%.

00:46:12.940 Now, those numbers are a little out of date now.

00:46:14.820 I think they're eight or nine years old, maybe older.

00:46:17.860 Probably white racial consciousness has increased as the inevitable consequence of the racial identity politics of every other group.

00:46:25.240 So to your point, Matt, it remains to this day taboo to speak to the young white men who just totally flipped over to the Democrat side to speak to them as an identity group.

00:46:37.620 Do you think that will change as a result of the midterms?

00:46:40.260 I don't think that that will change as the result of the midterms.

00:46:43.680 I think that there's another factor there,

00:46:45.200 which is that there's a downside risk to speaking

00:46:49.420 because that poll, no matter how much it's moved,

00:46:52.820 would still, I would assume,

00:46:54.380 show a minority of white people

00:46:55.840 not identifying as white identitarian.

00:46:59.440 So even on just a raw political, 0.72

00:47:01.180 put aside the morality of all groups

00:47:02.400 identifying on the basis of ethnic identity

00:47:04.520 as opposed to religious identity

00:47:06.100 or ideological identity or political

00:47:07.600 or anything like that.

00:47:08.640 Put that aside.

00:47:09.520 Just in raw political terms, 0.85

00:47:11.440 what you do by doing the white identitarian

00:47:13.600 is the Beau French thing. 0.55

00:47:15.280 You just alienate everybody else. 0.97

00:47:16.860 Including white people. 0.97

00:47:17.720 Including most white people.

00:47:18.940 So that turns out to be a mistake.

00:47:20.880 That's not what's happening here. 0.76

00:47:22.320 I think what happened with young white men

00:47:24.340 is that there was a misread by Republicans

00:47:27.760 that because they voted for Trump

00:47:29.600 and they shifted from kind of Bernie Sanders land

00:47:31.880 to Trump land, like the Joe Rogan, Theo Vaughn guys,

00:47:35.320 and they moved into Trump's camp,

00:47:37.840 that these were now like a core part

00:47:39.900 of the constituency that would not go away.

00:47:41.760 And I've been saying for a while,

00:47:42.880 That's not true.

00:47:44.000 Like, there's a variable group of people.

00:47:47.540 White people overall voted for Trump.

00:47:49.620 They voted for Republicans in this election.

00:47:51.060 The exit poll shows the only racial group that voted in favor of Republicans in this election cycle, which was dire.

00:47:56.280 Young white men are incredibly variable.

00:47:59.180 They are incredibly reactive to whatever is sort of the transgressive narrative of the day.

00:48:04.900 And so, I mean, Joe Rogan was basically endorsing James Tallarico in the middle of the race.

00:48:09.180 Treating Joe Rogan as though he's sort of a fellow traveler on the right and just an erstwhile Republican voter is a category error.

00:48:14.980 And the same thing is true for Theo Vaughn, who's been doing the same thing with Democratic candidates.

00:48:18.240 So, again, those votes were very much up for grabs.

00:48:20.620 By the way, again, you do have stats in that exit poll.

00:48:23.920 Points from my memory, even though it's late at night.

00:48:25.540 I did say cost of living was the number one issue with the bullet at 89%.

00:48:28.340 That was right.

00:48:29.280 58% of those voters voted Democrat.

00:48:31.900 So, again, Iran is part of that, too, but it's not the whole thing.

00:48:34.000 Iran is part of that, but interest rates are part of that.

00:48:36.160 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.

00:48:43.220 The other issue on the white people voting Republican, the only racial group that did, white people voted Republican, whatever, 52-48.

00:48:50.960 51-47.

00:48:51.800 51-40, yeah, okay, 51-47.

00:48:54.540 The other racial groups voted Democrat in a much more decisive way.

00:48:59.720 Oh, it's 88-9 for black people. 0.52

00:49:01.740 But the one that shifted, and this is where Republicans, again,

00:49:04.720 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?

00:49:14.680 This was the Henry Olsen goal.

00:49:16.420 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.

00:49:26.920 You can't. 0.88

00:49:27.640 Like, that's just bad politics. 1.00

00:49:29.660 You may want those people, meaning, like, that lady was a criminal in real life. 0.94

00:49:33.700 But optics matter in politics.

00:49:36.560 Trump should know this better than anybody

00:49:37.640 because he actually isn't optically intelligent.

00:49:39.840 But the fact that the ICE operations,

00:49:42.960 and this is why Greg Bometo is terrible at his job

00:49:45.060 and Tom Homan is good at his job, right?

00:49:47.000 Like, you do the thing quietly without bothering people.

00:49:51.120 That's the way you actually do policy.

00:49:52.540 You do things quietly without bothering people.

00:49:54.300 And when you just yell from the rooftops

00:49:55.820 that you're being mean to people, 1.00

00:49:56.820 it turns out that people who are Hispanic go,

00:50:01.020 oh, God, that's not what I meant. 0.97

00:50:03.380 It would be nice, though.

00:50:05.040 You know the famous line about Churchill that he mobilized the English language and sent it to war?

00:50:09.500 It would be nice if we could elect somebody who could speak.

00:50:12.160 You know, it's not a small thing.

00:50:14.240 No, I've long defended Trump as having actual poetic diction in the Barfieldian sense.

00:50:19.580 He does have poetic diction.

00:50:20.920 He doesn't have political diction.

00:50:22.920 Something happened with Trump.

00:50:24.280 I don't know what it is exactly.

00:50:25.300 But it seems like in this term, he totally lost touch with the base.

00:50:33.380 completely in a way that, I mean, like you were saying earlier that it seemed like with Trump in

00:50:40.100 2016 that he kind of would figure out the policies as he went. And there was a little

00:50:45.580 that's true. It's also true what Drew said, that many of the things he talked about, he'd been

00:50:48.920 talking about for decades. I think what actually happened was this like dialogue he was in with

00:50:52.920 the base where he would say something that was a little bit wild and kind of out there.

00:50:58.760 and then the base through like Twitter would come out and say, well, I think what he really means

00:51:04.100 is this. And then he would read that and go, yeah, I meant that. And so there was this back

00:51:07.840 and forth. And through that dialogue, he actually constructed a really good set of policies.

00:51:16.060 And in 2024, it's been completely severed. And I thought, and I brought this up on the other show,

00:51:21.880 To me, the giant red flag that something major had changed was with Epstein.

00:51:29.280 Because no matter how we feel about Epstein, that was really important with the base.

00:51:32.980 I agree with you on that.

00:51:34.000 I agree with you too.

00:51:35.780 Epstein was a disaster.

00:51:37.340 It was the first time, Epstein was the first time when Trump seemed to be totally, wildly, in a baffling way, out of step with his own base.

00:51:47.660 And it seemed like he didn't even know it.

00:51:49.720 Yeah.

00:51:50.040 And so I don't know what that is exactly.

00:51:51.700 Maybe a lot of it is truth social rather than just being on Twitter.

00:51:55.060 I mean, I think that might be part of it.

00:51:56.140 I think a large part of it was he convinced himself, because he has a unique capacity to convince himself of things, which is why he's authentic.

00:52:01.860 He believes the thing he's saying in the moment.

00:52:03.700 When he says 2024 was a great historic victory that has never been paralleled and every Republican is still with me, 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.

00:52:17.600 But you're right. 0.88

00:52:18.580 The rollout was out of touch.

00:52:20.160 And he didn't bother to kind of go out.

00:52:21.940 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.

00:52:28.360 You know, I was just about to bring Dan up because.

00:52:30.420 Hold on.

00:52:30.700 Before we get into Dan, we do have a few more updates.

00:52:33.340 On the bright side.

00:52:34.960 There's a bright side.

00:52:35.880 Oh, good.

00:52:36.240 There's a bright side before we go to bed.

00:52:37.980 The AP calls the Louisiana Senate race.

00:52:40.320 Oh, could we win Louisiana?

00:52:41.020 Save Louisiana, great.

00:52:42.700 We save Louisiana.

00:52:43.700 The Republican wins Louisiana by two points currently.

00:52:46.960 Yeah.

00:52:47.200 Oh, my God.

00:52:47.780 Currently by two.

00:52:48.420 But, okay, so Republicans win Louisiana.

00:52:50.200 Back to bad news.

00:52:50.940 No, not as good.

00:52:51.840 It's actually not bad.

00:52:52.300 Democrats are currently leading by a solid margin at this point.

00:52:56.260 All four contested Texas Supreme Court.

00:52:59.500 Wipe out in Texas.

00:53:00.500 Wipe out.

00:53:01.540 But Dan Bongino, I think, is a real straight arrow guy as far as I can tell.

00:53:05.660 I agree. Yeah.

00:53:05.840 And he left the administration.

00:53:08.160 And the minute that happened, I thought, what did he see that he could not bear?

00:53:12.380 There was something he saw that he couldn't bear.

00:53:14.240 And he's been loyal enough not to come out really.

00:53:17.200 Well, go ahead.

00:53:18.040 I mean, I won't speak on behalf of Dan,

00:53:19.440 but I kind of think that you don't have to read

00:53:21.440 the tea leaves very well to understand

00:53:23.740 that there was significant conflict

00:53:25.000 inside the administration about the level of transparency

00:53:27.640 that was being provided around the investigation. 1.00

00:53:29.680 And, you know, Pam Bondi did a horrible job. 0.99

00:53:35.620 I mean, she did a horrible job.

00:53:36.820 I mean, like everyone knows she did a horrible job.

00:53:38.660 And so there was this disconnect, it kept emerging.

00:53:41.660 Listen, the first time it truly emerged for me

00:53:43.360 was, you know, Liberation Day.

00:53:45.600 I think I will maintain and the polls show was a disaster.

00:53:49.140 It was a terrible, terrible idea.

00:53:50.920 It was the most, I know that everybody is rolling their eyes.

00:53:53.040 Yeah, no, I don't know that it was, it could have been a bad,

00:53:55.500 I just don't think that really.

00:53:57.420 It is when the streams crossed.

00:53:58.940 You can look on, it is that day.

00:54:00.900 You can look where he went from net approval positive

00:54:03.240 to net approval negative, and then he never stopped.

00:54:05.420 And when you walk out and you start tariffing penguins,

00:54:09.580 because it's just stuff that you can do.

00:54:12.500 Like if you wanted to do tariffs, again,

00:54:13.960 I'm not arguing against all tariffs.

00:54:15.900 I'm saying that you can't declare trade war on the entire world in the middle of affordability, inflation spiral,

00:54:22.360 and then claim that your top priority is quashing inflation.

00:54:25.840 But I think it was a structural thing that Matt was getting at that was really true,

00:54:29.400 that this dialogue that Trump was in with his base, that I was at a cigar night in Virginia.

00:54:37.200 You know, they have this, the Republicans gather once a month for the cigar night.

00:54:40.400 and my friend Sebastian Gorka was there

00:54:43.240 and somebody said to him,

00:54:44.740 you know, what went wrong basically with Trump one?

00:54:48.240 And Sebastian then spoke for an unbroken 45 minutes

00:54:50.960 about how the Republican Party

00:54:53.720 set about peopling the administration

00:54:56.840 with people who hated Trump

00:54:58.340 and were working against him.

00:54:59.740 And that when he and others sat down and thought,

00:55:02.100 well, who can we enlist who will join us?

00:55:04.980 And actually, they came up with like five names

00:55:07.560 and they had nobody else.

00:55:09.420 Trump solved that problem during those four years

00:55:11.480 and surrounded himself with people who agreed with him

00:55:15.200 and who were pretty good, I think.

00:55:17.820 You know, I mean, you say what you will about Pete Hex.

00:55:19.580 He brought the military back so that people were actually listening.

00:55:24.200 No, I will say this.

00:55:25.560 I think that some of the...

00:55:26.580 But it cut him off.

00:55:27.100 Just to finish the thought, it cut him off from that dialogue.

00:55:30.180 He was surrounded with people, with yes men, but also supporters.

00:55:33.780 But it cut him off from that dialogue with the people

00:55:35.620 who could disagree with him and also move him.

00:55:37.780 Well, I certainly think that it is true that he created a bubble around himself in this White House.

00:55:41.620 And I think that there's no one in the – it went from let's talk with the president about what should be done.

00:55:46.680 And maybe in most cases, obviously, we're going to always defer to him.

00:55:49.860 He's the president.

00:55:50.500 But we'll push back.

00:55:52.040 And it went to how do we effectuate the thing that he says he wants to do right now?

00:55:56.260 Right.

00:55:56.520 And how is – and let's race to do it.

00:55:57.980 Let's like – let's run to do it.

00:55:59.980 And so the sort of – by the end of the administration, I'll just take as an example William Barr versus Pam Bondi.

00:56:05.320 There is no question that William Barr, who is the attorney general, was a far superior attorney general to Pam Bondi.

00:56:11.180 William Barr was great.

00:56:12.340 And William Barr was doing many of the things that Trump wanted.

00:56:14.840 But he would also say, you know, Mr. President, this is a bad idea.

00:56:17.860 You probably just shouldn't do this thing.

00:56:19.420 And he was abiding by the law in doing that. 0.87

00:56:21.380 And Pam Bondi was kind of running around like chicken with her head cut off to just effectuate the will of the president.

00:56:25.200 You do need people.

00:56:26.240 I mean, this is true in everybody's life.

00:56:27.540 Forget about politics.

00:56:28.200 You need people in your life who you trust and want the best for you, but who are also capable of saying to you, you know, this one is not a win.

00:56:34.920 Well, you know, it's curious in this administration, in the second Trump administration,

00:56:39.160 I'm basing this just on reporting, but a lot of the reporting comes out and says,

00:56:43.220 especially on the Iran war, that you had figures who were urging caution in Iran.

00:56:47.600 Probably the most prominent is J.D. Vance. So it's helpful when the guy who is providing some,

00:56:53.060 you know, alternative views is in a position where he can't get fired and he's, you know,

00:56:56.960 elected by the American people. He's in a good state. But there were other figures in the

00:57:00.700 administration too. There was some reporting about John Ratcliffe and Marco Rubio and other people

00:57:05.400 pushing back on some of these ideas. So you do have some of that disagreement, but probably the

00:57:10.740 rest of the staffing of the administration, you have less- They're so thinly staffed. Also,

00:57:15.860 they are just unbelievably thinly staffed. And if you go below the top level, there's almost no one.

00:57:19.800 Right. And at the top, they're very, very good people. Two more updates for tonight. The votes

00:57:24.260 are coming in from Alaska, showing a very tight race with only 21%. Reporting so far,

00:57:30.320 Democrat Mary Peltola is leading with 54% over Dan Sullivan at 45%.

00:57:37.680 Dan Sullivan. There are two of them. Yeah, right. On the bright side, CBS is now calling

00:57:44.940 the Tennessee editorial race. We finally take that cabot all night. Cabot. Well, you know,

00:57:51.840 The Tennessee governor.

00:57:52.500 I said, buddy, if Marsha Blackburn's not the next governor, like, we got to move.

00:57:57.260 I don't know.

00:57:57.820 There's no place to move.

00:57:58.680 Down to Florida.

00:57:59.320 Right.

00:57:59.900 That's right.

00:58:00.520 You guys are going to be in your own country.

00:58:02.260 So, all right.

00:58:03.100 So that's good news.

00:58:03.920 Is that much closer than you thought, though?

00:58:05.680 Yes.

00:58:06.240 45-43.

00:58:06.820 Oh, my God.

00:58:07.420 Where do we have?

00:58:08.100 I can't see the-

00:58:08.920 45-43.

00:58:09.960 Which is insane.

00:58:10.620 Wow.

00:58:11.080 That's totally insane.

00:58:12.060 Yes.

00:58:12.540 By the way, that is insane.

00:58:13.880 Byron Donalds won by two points against David Jolly.

00:58:16.620 Yeah. 0.84

00:58:17.060 Ashley Moody won against a psychotic Democratic Socialist of America candidate named Angie 1.00

00:58:21.660 Nixon in that Senate race? By two points. Just nuts. No, this is a tsunami. There's no question 1.00

00:58:27.320 about it. It's as bad as, you know, it's as bad as it can be. Okay. Does anyone want to say anything

00:58:32.060 happy before we go home? No. It's the end of the night. Yeah. I'm happy about that. I enjoyed your

00:58:36.800 cigar. Thank you. Thank you. One silver lining. Wonderful to be with all of you. Who was it who

00:58:42.720 earlier said, I guess it was Glenn Beck, who said, you know, God is sovereign over history. He's not

00:58:46.600 up for re-election. He knows the hairs of our head, you know, a sparrow doesn't fall with that

00:58:49.460 his knowledge. So that is the consolation and the comfort we take for tonight, and probably the only

00:58:54.280 one. Thank you for watching Friendly Fire and our election night coverage. We'll see you tomorrow.

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The Michael Knowles Show - November 04, 2026

Friendly Fire： So Republicans Lost... Now What？

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