On this week's episode of the podcast, we dive deep into the Democratic presidential debate, the one we just had in Philadelphia. I was there in person, but to tie this into the broader context of what exactly has been going on in this election, more generally, tie this to the last debate. Remember the two debates were scheduled together? What are the implications of that? Often we react to what we're served up in short news cycles, lasting days or even hours. But we don't often take moments to take a larger step back and ask ourselves why it's played out the way that it has. Is Kamala Harris really the candidate or is she a representative of a broader machine? That's the conversation we deserve to be having in this country, not just the Republican Party, but more generally to cut through the smokescreen to understand what's really going on. Let's get right into it, shall we? -Eugene Vellian, CNN Senior Political Commentator and Senior Editor at The Weekly Standard, joins us to discuss the Democratic primary debate in Philadelphia and what we can learn from it. - What's going on behind the scenes in politics and politics, and why it matters so much? - Who's winning and who's losing the most in 2020 and what's going to win in 2020? -- Elyssa Mastropietro, CNN senior political analyst and senior political writer at The Daily Caller, and senior contributing editor at The New York Times and The Daily Wire, among other things. -- Thank you for listening to this podcast! -- A very special thank you to our sponsor, Sarah Abdurrahman, for helping us make this podcast possible. -- CRITICISM IS MOST IMPORTANT! Thank you, Sarah, for giving us access to the podcast more than possible, and she gets it all out there, too much of the chance to help us make it better than that, and we also helps us spread the word out there more than she can help us out in the world like that's more of it helps us do it more of that, really helps us like that, thanks she s a good thing, really does it, really really does that, right she s not even needs it, right really really helps it, she s really good, really doesn't even helps us, right said it, thanks really really really says it, good enough, right says it really does, right so much of it, etc...
Transcript
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00:00:00.000On this week's episode of the podcast, we dive deep into the presidential debate, the one that we just had in Philadelphia.
00:00:27.000Often we react to what we're served up in short news cycles lasting days or even hours, but we don't often take moments to take a larger step back and ask ourselves why it's played out exactly the way that it has.
00:00:42.000Is Kamala Harris really the candidate or is she a representative of a broader machine?
00:00:47.000That's the conversation we deserve to be having in this country, not just the Republican Party.
00:00:52.000But more generally, in the lead up to this election, to cut through the smokescreen to understand what's really going on.
00:01:03.000I had the chance to attend the debate in Philadelphia last night, the spin room at least around the debate, and it was an interesting experience.
00:01:11.000It was even quite a bit different than the CNN debate that was the one in Atlanta.
00:01:21.000Just even the way the press was run, the way the entire city was being run around it, the environment around the debate.
00:01:27.000It had a sense of organization to it in a way that the last debate didn't have.
00:01:32.000And I share that as a small detail, but to take people a little bit behind the curtain for what I do think is going on here, because I think there are some parallels between the last debate and this one in a deeper sense.
00:01:43.000I think there's a deeper project at work in the narrative that the media is trying to sell the public.
00:01:50.000Now, what was interesting to me was heading into this debate, the expectations were set low, and I believe purposefully low, for Kamala Harris.
00:02:09.000But I think that this is part of an interesting pattern and I think a concerning pattern dating back to how the media handled the last debate.
00:02:17.000You can't view the last night's debate with Kamala Harris without actually understanding it against the context of the first debate that Trump had with Biden.
00:02:25.000And I was at that one as well in Atlanta.
00:02:48.000It was a negotiating condition for, at that point, the Biden-Harris campaign.
00:02:54.000They said they would not have debates, but these are the terms on which they were going to agree to have a debate.
00:02:58.000They were only going to have a debate, they said, if this was the schedule of debates.
00:03:01.000They had this one scheduled with ABC for September, on the date that exactly we had it last night, September 10th.
00:03:07.000But they would only agree to that if there was also an earlier debate in the month of June, before either the Democrats or even the Republicans had formally nominated their candidate.
00:03:18.000That was the first time that's happened in the history of televised presidential debates in a general election.
00:03:24.000Now, at that debate, in the lead up to the debate, you had No expectations one way or another that was set for Biden because it was a trial balloon.
00:03:33.000The reason they negotiated that was it was what in the world of finance or business you would call a free call option.
00:03:40.000That means that you have the option to exercise it, say you're a candidate, but you don't have to.
00:03:45.000That's exactly what Democrats bought themselves.
00:03:47.000It was a bit of a trap that was laid for Trump and for the Republicans to say that if Trump beat Biden so badly that he was going to win the election versus Biden they would still have enough time to swap him out but if Biden somehow surpassed and exceeded expectations that would have reset the otherwise failing race.
00:04:06.000Well, they succeeded in getting that debate.
00:04:18.000Not only did that result in a free call option for Democrats where they were able to figure out that their then current candidate wasn't gonna be a winner, they got to swap him out for free.
00:04:29.000But it also did something really important for the media.
00:04:31.000And that's the link to last night's debate.
00:04:33.000What it did is it created a shock to the American audience, to the American voters, that even many previously left-leaning networks, cable networks, print digital media publications, all decided to be critical of Biden in a way that they hadn't been critical of a Democrat for a really long time.
00:04:52.000They were more critical of Joe Biden during the early part of that summer than they were of Donald Trump or of Republicans.
00:04:59.000And what that did was that banked a certain amount of credibility that the media gained with the public.
00:05:06.000And I think that that was the second untold benefit of what happened after that first debate.
00:05:12.000So the first is the Democrats got a free option.
00:05:14.000It says, you know what, if the trial balloon works, we'll ride the horse.
00:05:24.000And they got something that had value that they previously didn't have, was the option to swap out their candidate.
00:05:30.000But it wasn't just the Democrats that had helped.
00:05:32.000I think it gave the media and restored and rebuilt and rehabilitated credibility that a lot of the political media had lost to the public by saying that, you know what, now we criticize Democrats.
00:05:42.000We're going to talk about Biden's cognitive deficits.
00:05:44.000We're going to talk about his poor performance at the debate.
00:05:46.000We're going to talk about how he has ducked questions, even as the sitting U.S. president.
00:05:51.000Partificating about the threats to our democracy, failing to partake in the most basic norm of a U.S. president to communicate exactly what he's doing and why he's doing it, and to answer even modest, if not tough, questions from the press.
00:06:04.000We saw the New York Times, you saw CNN, you saw every...
00:06:08.000which hosted the debate, you saw the Washington Post, you see every major mainstream media outlet then not only turning on Joe Biden, but treating him with the same harsh...
00:06:21.000Now, that allowed them to sweep under the rug the fact that for three years, they actually covered for Biden and his cognitive deficits.
00:06:29.000They covered for Biden and his policy failures.
00:06:31.000They covered even for some of his most disastrous policy failures, like the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and the way that that was executed.
00:06:39.000They completely swept that under the rug for three years.
00:06:42.000But in three short weeks, they were able to re-bank some of that credibility by saying, no, no, no, we're not biased media.
00:06:48.000They'll say that the media leans Democrat.
00:06:50.000No, here's our best proof that we don't lean Democrat.
00:06:52.000We're most critical of the Democratic president of the United States and the Democratic nominee for U.S. president in a race versus Donald Trump, where at least for those three short weeks in June and into early July, they could say that, no, no, no, we actually are And like it or not,
00:07:12.000I think it's a hard fact that much of the public, especially those who aren't dialed into American politics every day or the political media, Or weren't paying particular attention to the primary process.
00:07:24.000So that, you know what, maybe these people are more balanced than conservatives or others may claim.
00:07:30.000I could see them right before my eyes, criticizing Joe Biden, criticizing the sitting Democratic president of the United States, criticizing the Democratic nominee, even in his race, against Donald Trump.
00:07:40.000So those are the two objectives accomplished by that prior debate.
00:07:43.000And that's what really laid the groundwork for yesterday's debate, which, remember, was not scheduled after or anything else.
00:07:50.000It was scheduled as part of the exact same plan, right?
00:07:53.000The negotiated conditions for these presidential debates locked in both of those debates at the same time.
00:08:02.000And that was all part of, this is not some sort of Some sort of speculative conspiracy theory.
00:08:08.000It's just a statement of fact that that was a negotiated plan that the Democrats agreed to as the condition for allowing Joe Biden to debate was there were going to be two debates, one on September 10th, one in June.
00:08:19.000Why wasn't there going to be one in July or August?
00:08:21.000Why wasn't there going to be ones scheduled at the usual time they have presidential debates in September and October?
00:08:26.000No, it was going to be June and it was going to be September and it was going to be under those pre-specified conditions.
00:08:32.000There's a deep link between the conditions that created.
00:08:35.000It gave the Democrats enough time between June and September to swap out their nominee if Biden performed poorly, which he did.
00:08:41.000But it also allowed the media to shore up their credibility such that whatever they were going to do in potentially tilting the scales of how this election was going to be portrayed in the fall, they had to shore up a deficit of credibility they had with the American public.
00:08:54.000That's what was accomplished with that first debate in June.
00:08:57.000So then we get to what exactly happened.
00:08:59.000They won back that credibility and you bank that capital, that political capital and social capital with the public only to then deploy it last night.
00:09:10.000And I think what we see both last night and others have said it, I said it, I'll say it again, what was effectively a three-on-one debate That would have been one thing if people went into that without having seen the media criticize Joe Biden.
00:09:24.000But now they have this artificial illusion that, hey, the media is balanced.
00:09:28.000We trust the way the mainstream media is running this.
00:09:34.000To now, through that slate of hand, to say, okay, we're actually going to have a three-on-one versus Donald Trump, and we're going to allegedly fact-check one candidate without stopping Kamala Harris at a single one of the many lies, the many deceptive facts or deceptive statements that she made last night on the debate stage, with still the aura of objectivity and credibility.
00:09:57.000I think that that is actually, in some ways, more devious and more dangerous and more deceptive Then if they had just stopped the charade around the Joe Biden bit around the month of June, that's exactly what ended up playing out last night.
00:10:12.000So they stopped Donald Trump to fact check him for things that he didn't even say.
00:10:16.000I thought it was remarkable that one of the two moderators stepped in for the first time in the evening just to make an assertion.
00:10:22.000So during the topic of abortion, Donald Trump spoke about the fact that many Democrats have favored radical policies that would permit abortion all the way up to the time of birth.
00:10:35.000He cited that there are Democratic politicians in certain states that have advanced certain measures.
00:10:40.000Now, one of the two moderators last night stepped in to fact-check Donald Trump when she was contradicting something that he didn't even actually say, She said that just to be clear, there are no states today that allow abortion after or at the time of birth.
00:10:57.000That's not what he said, but to somebody who isn't watching this very carefully at home, who's just tuning in, disconnected, God bless them and thank, probably better for them, from American politics, but checking in on this presidential debate.
00:11:10.000It allows them to say, okay, Donald Trump said something, I don't remember exactly what he said, but this objective moderator from media networks that I know, I get a sense of objective, because they were objective, they were hitting Biden just as hard as they were hitting Trump, now comes out and says, no, no, no, Donald Trump has just been put in his place through a lie that he told when he actually didn't tell a lie at all, but that's the appearance they cultivate, to then do that systematically over the course of last night.
00:11:32.000That was the beginning of a pattern that you saw yesterday in Philadelphia.
00:11:37.000Without actually doing the same for what were a much wider range and a deeper and more concerning set of lies that Kamala Harris told with a straight face yesterday.
00:11:48.000Talk about the number of times she brought up Project 2025. You might like some of the things that Project 2025 has to say, you might not.
00:11:55.000But whether or not you like it, and some conservatives haven't loved Donald Trump's position distancing himself from that, but it doesn't matter.
00:12:01.000You have people on both sides have their own views on the substance of it.
00:12:04.000Project 2025 is a different set of policy objectives than that have been embraced by Donald Trump.
00:12:10.000He has distanced himself from it publicly.
00:12:11.000He says that he's had nothing to do with it.
00:12:15.000Kamala Harris knows this and yet purposefully used that in a way that if the debate moderators were using the same standard they used to quote-unquote fact-check Donald Trump, to say that, okay, because you said that some Democrats are In favor of abortion and permitting abortion all the way up to the time of birth, that somehow we're going to fact check you by pretending that you said that some states actually allow it and we're going to come in and make sure our audience is informed of that assertion.
00:12:41.000If you're applying that same standard to the other side, if Kamala Harris is saying that Donald Trump is going to implement Project 2025, you would expect that same debate moderator to say, in fairness, as a fact check to the audience whose perceptions they care so much to protect, you might predict that moderator would say, but yes, Donald Trump has disavowed that several times over, you might predict that moderator would say, but yes, Donald Trump has disavowed that several times over, Vice President Harris, so Didn't hear a word of it.
00:13:04.000Same thing with respect to the federal abortion ban.
00:13:07.000She said, point blank, that Donald Trump would sign a federal abortion ban when in fact he has been clear, to the point of even getting criticism from some on the right for it, that he would not sign a federal abortion ban into law.
00:13:20.000Same thing with respect to her insinuations that Donald Trump has insulted the military.
00:13:23.000There hasn't been a shred of evidence that Donald Trump said what many in the then media alleged that he did.
00:13:30.000It's now been debunked that Donald Trump ever said something disparaging about military members.
00:13:38.000Kamala Harris asserted it last night as though it was fact without going challenged by the moderators.
00:13:43.000Same thing with respect to her false claim that Donald Trump somehow claimed that it was just fine people on both sides of what happened in Charlottesville.
00:13:52.000If you look at the entire context of what he said, it was a clear quote.
00:14:09.000They Most Americans should not have their lives consumed with following partisan political jousting.
00:14:16.000I don't think it's good for the country.
00:14:17.000I don't think it's good for most people.
00:14:18.000But I also think it's good for most people still to be engaged in being able to know what each candidate has said, what they haven't said, what they stand, what they don't stand for.
00:14:26.000And yet the media that claimed this artifice of being objective in the way they went after Joe Biden, after his CNN performance, and the way they went after Donald Trump last night, completely failing to apply that same standard to Kamala Harris when they know that this myth about what Donald Trump said after the Charlottesville incident was actually dishonest.
00:14:49.000Project 2025, federal abortion ban, insinuations about what he said in the military, the Charlottesville fine people hoax, The fact that she claimed that cops died, effectively she directly implied that, say what you will about what happened on January 6th, there were no people who were killed, no cops who were killed, and Donald Trump factually said it, the only person who was actually killed at the Capitol that day was Ashley Babbitt.
00:15:13.000Think about her statements about Xi Jinping and COVID-19.
00:15:18.000The moment where she said, Donald Trump said that Xi Jinping was my friend or something to that effect, when she was now concerned that Xi Jinping was not being transparent about the origin and the causes of COVID-19.
00:15:45.000But if you called it the Chinese strain, then somehow that was racist.
00:15:48.000That's what they were saying about Donald Trump back then.
00:15:51.000But she's banking on the fact that voters don't remember exactly what the truth was back then, to create and invent a new reality that Donald Trump somehow was the one who was cozying up to Xi Jinping when he proposed a travel ban from China that many in the Democratic Party opposed, when he proposed greater transparency and labeled it even the China when he proposed greater transparency and labeled it even the China virus the Wuhan virus.
00:16:10.000They called him a racist for saying it.
00:16:12.000Now, four years later, Kamala Harris is saying that Donald Trump was claiming Xi Jinping was my friend when Xi Jinping was not transparent about the causes, about the origin of COVID-19.
00:16:22.000It was many, even in the Biden administration afterwards, that were trying to cover up for the origin of that pandemic.
00:16:29.000Now, one of the things I thought was most remarkable about last night, this list of inconsistencies and lies continued throughout.
00:16:35.000The moderators could have called her out at any point on any of these questions if they were applying the same standard they did to Trump.
00:16:40.000But one of the most remarkable parts about this is her ability to present herself as some sort of transcendent, unifying figure saying, we don't want to go back to the name-calling and the personal insults and the attacks.
00:16:52.000When you actually look just objectively at who was leveling personal insults and attacks and engaging in name-calling last night, it was actually Kamala Harris.
00:17:04.000The number of times that she called Donald Trump a criminal, the number of times that she used the word disgraceful in reference to Donald Trump.
00:17:13.000She was the person actually using those types of adjectives and using that type of mudslinging and name calling, while at the same time decrying the practice of dirty name calling in American politics.
00:17:25.000Now, should Donald Trump have been able to call it out if this was a debate where you had microphones that were on in all directions and you didn't have moderators?
00:17:43.000Far more professional than the setting that was set up at that first debate in Georgia, in Atlanta.
00:17:50.000was almost a concrete poem and a symbol of a deeper plan, is what it was, for two debates that were set up each to accomplish their own objectives, the first to test Biden and discard him as the nominee if necessary, while shoring up credibility for the media, political capital that they would then expend while shoring up credibility for the media, political capital that they would then expend and take to the bank, and cash in on this debate when it came to applying egregiously differential standards in the way they
00:18:17.000So the real question right now, for not only the future of this election, but I think the future direction of our country, is whether voters are actually going to buy what they are trying to sell.
00:18:30.000So I'm hopeful that most people in this country now have been burned by the news media enough times that they're going to seek out answers on their own.
00:18:41.000We saw this in some of the polling and focus groups that were done afterwards.
00:18:55.000Everybody's in a bubble environment right there in the media, spin room, surrounded by, in my case, I was watching the debate with a lot of prominent Republican politicians and leaders across the country, but all of whom have similar views.
00:19:07.000I'm not trapped in an echo chamber of perspectives that are disconnected with what most Americans at home think.
00:19:14.000But I think what you saw was a lot of people at home, which is what I saw in several of the focus groups of undecided voters immediately afterwards, after that debate, to hear what their perspectives were.
00:19:24.000And I even talked to some of my own liberal friends and family members.
00:19:28.000Liberal friends and then family members were more either outside of politics, may lean conservative, but outside of the world of the daily grind of partisan politics, just to get their diverse range of opinions.
00:19:40.000And what they said was, okay, Kamala Harris, my liberal friends, did she perform better?
00:19:54.000You perform in the context of a performance.
00:19:56.000But does that convince somebody on her ability to actually implement policies and execute action that lifts up the quality of life and the well-being of everyday Americans?
00:20:07.000I think that's where a lot of people, even on the center-left, were unconvinced because the core question, both heading into during and after yesterday's debate, is that why isn't she actually doing the very things that she was talking about last night?
00:20:22.000The moment where Donald Trump hit that nail on the head, I thought, was where he said, we could end this debate right now.
00:20:27.000You could just go back to Washington, D.C. You're talking about the border.
00:20:31.000You could either sign a bill or sign an executive action that closes the border right now, And yet you're unwilling to do it.
00:20:39.000I thought that was powerful because it got to the essence of the difference between talk and action.
00:20:44.000Actions speak louder than words, and I think that this is one of the areas where, again, the media has failed to scrutinize Kamala's shift on a lot of the policy positions.
00:20:53.000She did get one question to that effect last night.
00:20:55.000It was as though they checked the box to say they asked her about it.
00:20:58.000But completely let her off the hook in actually answering it.
00:21:21.000She didn't just say she supported it as a presidential candidate.
00:21:23.000She did that, too, in 2020. But as a U.S. Senator, she took active steps.
00:21:28.000She co-sponsored a bill with Bernie Sanders to create, effectively, a single-payer healthcare system, Medicare for All, in the United States of America.
00:21:36.000Those are words compared to her action.
00:21:38.000She now says she is against a ban on fracking.
00:21:41.000She, when she was AG of California, sued the Obama administration over granting fracking permits.
00:21:48.000Same thing goes for offshore drilling.
00:21:49.000She said she wanted to end the filibuster to ram through the Green New Deal, which would end the coal industry and end a number of other energy industries in the United States.
00:22:29.000What is your perspective on this issue?
00:22:31.000As though it were an issue in the first place.
00:22:35.000That, I think, was the ultimate deceit here.
00:22:38.000It wasn't the fact that it was a biased debate.
00:22:39.000If it's a biased debate, then it's a biased debate and people can make their own judgments.
00:22:44.000But it was the slate of hand of creating the optical illusion of balance by going after Joe Biden the way they did, which actually accomplished their objective, but which then also gave them the veneer of a temporary credibility that allowed them to bring that special air of sanctimony around their supposed objectivity that was dripping last night in the face of what was I think actually far more egregious bias than we've probably seen in any modern presidential debate in history that certainly I can recall.
00:23:13.000And I think all of this reveals the heart of what's at issue in this election.
00:23:16.000You hear a lot of fellow Republicans refer to Kamala Harris as a far-left ideologue or a Marxist or a communist.
00:23:24.000You won't generally hear me leveling that critique against her because I think it gives her too much credit.
00:23:31.000Gives her the credit of being an ideologue.
00:23:34.000A guy like Bernie Sanders, he's an ideologue.
00:23:37.000But I can respect anybody who at least has a clear set of principles who guides them in their actions and their beliefs, even if I disagree with most of the content of those beliefs.
00:23:58.000Perverted, upside-down version, hellish version of the San Antonio Spurs under Greg Popovich or something like that in the sphere of American politics.
00:24:07.000You could replace the individual person who's playing in the position, but it's the machine that ultimately achieves its objective.
00:24:14.000And that's what's really going on in this race.
00:24:17.000This isn't about Republicans versus Democrats.
00:24:34.000This isn't about Republicans or Democrats even.
00:24:36.000It is about the managerial class, the bureaucratic class, and the everyday citizen.
00:24:43.000That's the real divide in this country.
00:24:46.000You see, in recent days, not only Liz Cheney, but Dick Cheney.
00:24:50.000You know, people who've watched my race last year know that I've been no fan of him and His recent endorsement of Kamala Harris has nothing to do with it, but Dick Cheney came out and publicly endorsed Kamala Harris.
00:24:59.000I consider this one of the less surprising things to have happened in American politics this year.
00:25:04.000And at the same time, you've seen many former Democrats, even iconoclastic Democrats, that have criticized candidates like Kamala Harris or Joe Biden even from a progressive vantage point, now shifting over to support Donald Trump.
00:25:18.000I think it is evidence of the fact that the real divide is not really between the traditional Republican and the Democrat, but between this managerial class, the people who were never elected to exercise political power, be they in the media, be they in certain parts of the corporate capture machine, or especially be they in the administrative state, the unelected bureaucrats who are writing more laws and setting more policies than even Congress, which was elected to actually carry out that function.
00:25:43.000That's who's actually running the country.
00:25:47.000It's not their ideology because I don't think they have one.
00:25:50.000It is the permanent state, the fourth branch of government, the leviathan, the swamp, the managerial class, the committee class, the bureaucrats.
00:26:08.000That's what Donald Trump meant the first time around when he said he wanted to go in there and drain the swamp.
00:26:13.000And I think this time more than ever, he has the toolkit to actually do it.
00:26:18.000The U.S. Supreme Court has finally laid a foundation that we haven't had in modern American history with West Virginia v.
00:26:24.000EPA, the major questions doctrine that says that if Congress didn't actually pass the law, then a regulator can't just, for major questions, write it into existence by the stroke of a pen with a regulation.
00:26:36.000The overturning of Chevron deference in the recent LOPA ruling.
00:26:39.000This paves the way for Donald Trump to be able to do what he wasn't even under the legal constraints that applied then able to do in the first term with shutting down that regulatory state, taming it, and lifting our economy in the process.
00:27:06.000Now, with that media bias, with the Democrats playing the tricks that they're playing, with that managerial machine, even beyond the Democratic Party in a way that pervades the Dick Cheney's of the world and the Republican Party to behave the same way, how are we going to do it?
00:27:27.000For those of you who followed my campaign, it's based exactly on a lot of those themes.
00:27:31.000The book is called Truths, The Future of America First.
00:27:35.000The reality is we're not going to win this just by criticizing individuals on the other side.
00:27:40.000We actually made that mistake for the better part of the last year and a half by going after Joe Biden and his cognitive deficits when Joe Biden isn't even the nominee.
00:27:49.000Kamala Harris even used that to her apparent, tried to strike an apparent advantage by saying you're not running against Biden.
00:27:55.000Well, it's interesting because you were the very people who said that we were going to be running against Biden, that Biden was the nominee, it was a conspiracy theory to suggest otherwise, until as recently as just a few weeks ago.
00:28:05.000I think it was the distance between Kamala Harris being the nominee at the debate last night for when Joe Biden was last the nominee is about the distance that we have still between now and the election on November 5th.
00:28:16.000But the real question is, we're not running against that individual candidate.
00:28:22.000They made us, even when I ran for U.S. President, sign the so-called Beat Biden Pledge.
00:28:27.000I said at the time that this is silly.
00:28:29.000We're not actually running against Joe Biden.
00:28:31.000Why are we training our fire on one man and his particular background when, in fact, the criticisms need to be leveled against the machine that we're up against?
00:28:40.000I think we risk making that same mistake now against Kamala Harris.
00:28:44.000The more we obsess over her individual failures, I think the more we're falling further into the trap that they've laid for us.
00:28:51.000We're running against that machine, and the way we're going to defeat that machine is actually by offering our own vision to this country.
00:28:58.000I think Donald Trump did a good job of that on policy last night.
00:29:01.000If the last night's debate was decided on policy, and it was the policy portions of the debate, I think it's hands down, in my opinion, clear that Donald Trump won.
00:29:09.000And I think it's going to be very clear to undecided voters who don't want verbiage and flowery language.
00:29:17.000You saw that in many of the post-poll interviews and many of the post-poll panels.
00:29:21.000They were not convinced by the soaring rhetoric at times that was forced by Kamala Harris and whatever her handlers gave her.
00:29:29.000What they want to see is actual action of what's going to grow this economy and that border crisis at the southern border and the mass influx of illegal mass migration in this country.
00:29:38.000And I think the way we're going to ultimately win this election is to reach those people with our own alternative vision of who we are and what we actually stand for.
00:29:50.000And if we're being honest, I think for the last 20 years, the Republican Party hasn't done as good of a job as we possibly can.
00:29:56.000That's what's going to be required between now and the finish line.
00:30:01.000I think the way in which he laid out a lot of his clear positions last night in a way that Kamala Harris didn't, I think is a good first step.
00:30:08.000But even beyond policy, Share with the people of this country.
00:30:12.000It's what we've got to do at every step.
00:30:13.000Not just Donald Trump, but the Senate races in this country where we're behind in many of the states where we should be ahead.
00:30:18.000Donald Trump's ahead in many of the states.
00:30:20.000Shows actually what good he is doing for the Republican Party in this race.
00:30:25.000Many of those Senate candidates are still behind.
00:30:27.000My advice to them would be the same thing.
00:30:30.000Focus this final sprint to November 5th on who we are and what we actually stand for.
00:30:38.000Answer what it means to be a conservative, what it means to be a Republican, what it means to be an American in the year 2024.
00:30:44.000The reason they're trying to slay the traps for us, get us talking about the things they want us to be talking about in the manner that the mainstream media set last night or in other forms between now and the election, forget that.
00:30:57.000We're going to offer our own vision for why we believe in meritocracy and free speech and open debate in the United States of America.
00:31:05.000Why we believe that even if you disagree with us, you get to speak your mind openly as long as I get to in return, that that's the American bargain.
00:31:11.000That the best person gets the job regardless of their race or their gender or their sexual orientations.
00:31:17.000That you get ahead in this country, not on the color of your skin, but on the content of your character and your contributions.
00:31:26.000And the people who we elect to run the government ought to be the ones who actually run the government, not the unelected bureaucrats in the deep state.
00:31:34.000That we believe in that model of self-governance that set our country into motion the first time around.
00:32:46.000Most people in this country do believe in a higher power, and I don't think it should be taboo to talk about it.
00:32:50.000Most people in this country do believe in the power of the individual, don't believe in apologizing for success or excellence, even through free market capitalism, as Kamala Harris tried to do to Donald Trump last night to embarrass him for his success.
00:33:04.000No, we're not a country that makes you apologize for your success.
00:33:09.000The nuclear family isn't some vestige of oppressive capitalism as the BLM view of an old world left-wing progressive Foucault-derived worldview they try to sell you for years.
00:33:22.000The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance and the greatest institution known to mankind for prosperity.
00:33:28.000And we're not going to apologize for that.
00:33:31.000The idea that I'm a citizen of this nation, not some nebulous global citizen fighting the existential threat of climate change that you heard Kamala Harris spouting off about last night.
00:33:41.000I'm a citizen of this nation, the United States of America, the greatest nation known to the history of mankind, and I'm proud of it and proud to serve this country in my own way, closing that gap at the 25% recruitment deficit we have in our own U.S. military.
00:34:08.000If you just trace the history of this election just for a sobering moment of truth here, we've seen unprecedented steps taken that we've never seen in the course of American history in any presidential election.
00:34:26.000Major prosecutions against one of the two major candidates by the party in power and by the candidate who's in power, Biden and then Harris, in the middle of an election.
00:34:35.000That used to be the stuff of Third World Banana Republics.
00:34:37.000You saw civil lawsuits against that same candidate.
00:34:40.000when those started to flail, the civil lawsuits and the criminal prosecutions, they tried extrajudicially, outside of the judicial system, without going through the courts at all, I'll remind you, to literally remove Donald Trump's name from the ballot.
00:34:53.000So this same election, we're having this debate.
00:34:56.000Don't forget, this was the very same election where it was the proposal of the very people who are debating Donald Trump now to say that they didn't even want to give voters the choice by offering his name to be printed on the ballot in states like Maine.
00:35:11.000It was just one individual, a Democrat, in an elected office that said that I don't want the people of my state and eventually of this country to be able to vote for one man.
00:35:21.000That's unprecedented and never seen it in American history.
00:35:24.000And you see things get even darker over the course of months.
00:35:28.000You see them go after him extrajudicially through the removal from the ballots, through the civil lawsuits, through the prosecutions.
00:35:36.000And I think the reality is the heated environment that we've created in this country created the backdrop conditions for what I hope And pray was the worst thing that we see in this presidential cycle was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump that didn't come up once from the moderators, one of the most significant events in modern American history in the 21st century.
00:35:55.000I don't believe we've seen an assassination attempt in a generation on a U.S. president.
00:36:01.000And yet that happened in this cycle, this summer in the lead up to this final phase of the presidential race.
00:36:07.000You didn't hear a peep about it last night.
00:36:09.000And yet, against that backdrop, do we think that that is really going to be the final set of tricks from the ballot removal attempts to the prosecutions?
00:36:20.000No, I do think that we're going to see some...
00:36:25.000Interesting things happen between now and the time of the election.
00:36:28.000I think we've seen that at every step of the way.
00:36:30.000I think we're going to continue to see some of the most aggressive steps we've seen in American history that have defied historical convention.
00:36:37.000I think we're going to continue to see that pattern continue all the way through Election Day.
00:36:51.000The best advice I give to my kids, I preach it to the left, we've got to acknowledge it for ourselves.
00:36:56.000The person who's most responsible for whether or not you achieve your goal.
00:37:02.000Not to say that's the only factor that matters, but the number one factor in determining whether or not you succeed in achieving your goal is actually you.
00:37:28.000Led by the media, deeply divided to this point of believing that the national division runs deeper than it actually does, but this election needs to be decided by a decisive margin.
00:37:52.000It's not going to work for electoral success for Republicans.
00:37:54.000It's not going to work for the success and revival of our country.
00:37:59.000If we want to get serious about this, we have to, for the first time I think in a really long time, Offer our own alternative vision of who we are and what we stand for.
00:38:11.000Some of those policies the other side may label as extreme.
00:38:13.000Do I think that many of those federal bureaucrats need to be fired?
00:38:22.000But that is how actually you revive an economy.
00:38:25.000not only through lower tax burden, not only through the laws that are going to be passed, but through rolling back the effect of that managerial class.
00:38:32.000That's what Kamala Harris represents, the use of the regulatory state, the use of backdoor regulation to achieve through the backdoor what otherwise could not be achieved through the front door under the Constitution.
00:38:42.000They've been threatening tech companies through the backdoor to censor speech they couldn't through the front door.
00:38:45.000They've been effectively using administrative agencies to pass laws that limit small business owners and individuals from being able to live their lives in ways that Congress never actually authorized.
00:38:58.000We're up against a corrupt system where many of those same bureaucrats and politicians end up with lucrative careers in the private sector.
00:39:07.000But using their private connections in government to do it is wrong.
00:39:11.000Why do we still not have a ban on lobbying for at least 10 years until after you've left the government?
00:39:16.000Well, the reality is probably what Joe Biden's going to be doing and his family's going to be doing directly or indirectly after they leave the White House.
00:39:21.000The fact that they've been selling off the influence of our own foreign policy.
00:39:25.000Well, Hunter Biden's collecting money from Ukraine.
00:39:27.000Not an issue that came up once last night either.
00:39:30.000These, I do think, are the issues that whether you're on the left or the right, we should be able to unite around as Americans.
00:39:34.000That we're a country where we want public service to be back again about serving the public rather than lining your pocket.
00:39:41.000And I think it's for that reason that we require leaders in this pro-American movement, in this not just conservative movement, pro-American movement, Who come from outside of the traditional treadmill of partisan politics.
00:39:57.000The fact that Donald Trump was not a professional politician, was a guy who's actually signed the front of a paycheck, not just the back of one, is part of why his economic policies make a lot more sense than Kamala Harris'.
00:40:07.000This is probably a big part of why, and this came out in the debate as well.
00:40:16.000It turns out most people who've been in the private sector know this.
00:40:18.000If you fire somebody for underperformance, they tend not to like you very much in return.
00:40:23.000That's what happened with a lot of the people Donald Trump fired.
00:40:26.000He was very plain spoken about it last night, and the truth is he said, I'm a different kind of person, referring to versus Kamala Harris, in that I do fire people when they fail to do a good job.
00:40:37.000We need more of that, not less of that in the government.
00:40:40.000The fact that the very people who were responsible for the botched withdrawal in Afghanistan, the very people who were responsible for the failed economic policies that created the highest rate of inflation we've seen in the 21st century while wages remained flat for much of that period, The fact that every one of those people, to an individual, to a person, to a T, still holds the job that they do, is a damning indictment of the managerial class that actually runs the show.
00:41:07.000All they care about is preserving their own position of authority.
00:41:12.000I do think that I'd love to see the Republican Party, as it has become, Continue to remain the party for governor roles for the US presidency in the future.
00:41:21.000Be the party that puts an outsider rather than a groomed political insider in that role.
00:41:40.000And it pains me to see this election at least as close as it looks right now when I know that 80% plus of people in this country share these views.
00:41:52.000I've traveled this country over the last year.
00:41:53.000If there's one thing I learned from traveling this country over the course of the presidential campaign...
00:42:00.000We're not really as divided as the media would have you believe, actually.
00:42:04.000If you turn on cable news, you turn on algorithmically amplified social media and political social media, you'd believe that our country, actually at the heart of the individual people in the country, is on the precipice of a breaking point.
00:42:19.000I think, to the contrary, being in roomfuls of people, not without a camera in between, but roomfuls of real people by the tens or the hundreds or the thousands across this country.
00:42:31.000I don't think that we're nearly as divided as the media would have you believe.
00:42:36.000Eighty plus percent of people in this country agree on those basic values.
00:42:40.000The rule of law, self-governance, economic growth, meritocracy, free speech, open debate.
00:42:49.000Eighty percent of Americans agree on that and half the 20 percent are frankly people younger than me who never learned those ideals in the first place who I believe we can bring along too.
00:42:57.000But it's up to us to call that bluff for what it is.
00:43:01.000And to do that, we're not going to end up doing it by obsessing over one candidate at a time.
00:43:09.000Biden's cognitive deficits, they were not a bug.
00:43:11.000They were a feature to the people who manage him and control him.
00:43:14.000Kamala Harris' policy deficits, they are not a bug, but a feature to the people who do and will control her.
00:43:21.000The reality is that's a trap that we risk falling into.
00:43:25.000We've been led into a trap time and again.
00:43:28.000This is the biggest trap of all, is that the shenanigans of the other side and the inconsistencies of the other side and the ever-wavering policy commitments of candidates like Kamala Harris, that they cause us to forget to tell the country who we are and what we stand for.
00:43:44.000We're not just running from something anymore, guys.
00:43:47.000Now is our moment, more than ever, to actually start running Back to our vision of what it means to be a citizen of this nation.
00:43:56.000What does it mean to be a citizen of the United States of America?
00:43:59.000It means I pledge allegiance to this nation, not another one.
00:44:02.000It means the people I elect to run the government, that we elect to run the government, better darn well run the government rather than the unelected bureaucrats who we can never fire.
00:44:09.000It means that we're going to shut down agencies like the U.S. Department of Education and countless other three-letter agencies that have really aggregated power at the expense of the American electorate.
00:44:19.000I think in some ways that requires not being more moderate, but more of what some in the media will call extreme.
00:44:25.000The American founding was extreme at its origin, right?
00:44:29.000The idea that we the people create a government that's accountable to us rather than the other way around.
00:44:35.000Or the idea that you get to speak your mind openly as long as I get to in return on open platforms that aren't shut down in a free country like the United States.
00:44:44.000That was a radical idea at the American founding.
00:44:47.000For most of human history, it was done the other way.
00:44:50.000People were skeptical that voters could self-govern and decide for themselves how to sort out their differences.
00:44:56.000That was the whole point of having backroom kings and nobles in the back of palace halls in Old World England, and for most of human history, that made those decisions for the people that couldn't be trusted to make those decisions for themselves.
00:45:08.000That's what you're seeing reemerge in the modern American aristocracy as well.
00:45:13.000A skepticism that voters, without having tilted the scales of what information they can and can't be exposed to, the voters themselves will make a wrong choice for themselves unless you actually have the heavy hand of elite government interference or elite bureaucratic interference getting in their way.
00:45:28.000But that's what's on the table in this election.
00:45:30.000I do think that this is one of those elections that's not about the traditional Republican versus Democrat talking points.
00:46:46.000The pursuit of American exceptionalism is about that, a pursuit.
00:46:49.000Acknowledging that, you know, we're not perfect as a country, we never have been, but we're about the pursuit of perfection.
00:46:54.000We're going to keep pursuing that that's who we are, that ambition of making America greater.
00:46:59.000That's what you hear from Donald Trump this time that I think is even different than what you heard in 2016. I think that second Trump term, I do believe, has an opportunity to be even more successful than that first term was.
00:47:12.000But we're going to get there by focusing on that actual vision for our country.
00:47:17.000Even in very practical terms, not just lofty, theoretical, philosophical terms.
00:47:25.000Stay out of World War III. Restore law and order in the United States of America.
00:47:29.000That's something that Americans across the political spectrum, I know, are going to get behind.
00:47:33.000But focus on that actual vision rather than falling into the traps that not only the Democratic Party and their puppet of a nominee Kamala Harris and the media industrial complex working with them will lay.
00:47:45.000No, we immunize ourselves against that risk by actually offering our own vision and the more we stick to that, the more I still think we have an opportunity.
00:47:54.000To win this election, not by a little bit, but by a lot.
00:47:57.000I'm going to be traveling the swing states in the coming weeks ahead.
00:48:01.000A lot of my schedule I've ended up clearing to focus on.
00:48:05.000Yes, I'm doing a lot through the private sector and I'm enjoying that.
00:48:07.000Returning to my life as a businessman for part of the way I've spent this year.
00:48:12.000But we have an important enough six weeks ahead that I'm clearing a lot of my schedule.
00:48:17.000I'm going to be traveling to places like Michigan and Georgia and North Carolina To be able to show up in the places where Republicans aren't traditionally going to show up, universities even in Pennsylvania, going to be traveling, everywhere I can to swing states between now and the election,
00:48:34.000to show up not just in the usual echo chambers, sometimes where politicians and those who are running for office may end up, But to show up in the places where we're not going to usually show up, I'm going to go to college campuses.
00:48:49.000I want to reach the next generation of young Americans, so many of whom have been betrayed and feel betrayed by the political class that have left them hanging out to dry with a version of the American dream that really is just that anymore, a dream.
00:49:01.000The idea that you get a four-year college degree and load yourself up with a bunch of college debt only to realize that that gender studies major from some school in California doesn't really get you that head start on making it in our economy.
00:49:15.000That's the fault of a system that sold him a false bill of goods.
00:49:18.000I think we've got to show up at the places where traditional Republicans historically at least haven't shown up.
00:49:24.000Donald Trump, better than any candidate I've seen in a general election, has done a great job of that.
00:49:28.000But I think we need that up and down the ballot to win not just the presidency, but I think hopefully lasting and decisive majorities in the Senate and the House as well.
00:49:38.000That's how I'm planning to spend my time in the coming days and weeks ahead.
00:49:43.000And if you all do your part, speak your mind openly, do it without fear.
00:49:47.000I promise you Donald Trump's going to do his and I'm going to do mine to make sure that we do make America not just great again, but greater than it has ever been.
00:49:56.000That we get in there in early 2025 and once and for all take that federal bureaucracy and no longer just reform it, but get in there to do what's needed to actually shut it down.
00:50:12.000That's how we restore self-governance and grow our economy and restore what this country was founded on, which is the idea that you get to achieve the maximum of your God-given potential without any government or system or bureaucracy standing in your way.
00:50:32.000The debate was one milestone yesterday, but what's going to determine whether or not we succeed is do we actually achieve Articulate to voters and prove to voters that we have an alternative vision.
00:50:45.000And if we do, I continue to like where we stand.
00:50:49.000I'll see you when we'll take all of you with us on the road as much as we can digitally as I'm on those college campuses, traveling those swing states.