00:00:24.680Well, tonight was a big and consequential debate.
00:00:26.800But I have to say it, before we get into it and this entire podcast, we're going to analyze the debate in depth and say what it showed about where the race is, where President Trump is, where Kamala Harris is.
00:00:41.040But I do want to point out it is exactly midnight as you and I are recording, which means it has just become September 11th.
00:00:49.300And for our listeners who are downloading this, you'll be downloading this today during September 11th.
00:00:55.800And so I just want to start by acknowledging that 23 years ago, the worst terrorist attack in our nation's history happened.
00:01:04.000And you and I both lived through 9-11.
00:01:08.840We had friends who lost their lives in 9-11.
00:01:13.800And we have talked on this podcast many times about my view that today we have a greater risk of a major terrorist attack than we have had any time since September 11th, 2001, because of the disastrous policies of the last four years.
00:01:31.080And so I want to acknowledge that at the front end.
00:01:33.740And then we're going to walk through right now what the biggest takeaways are from the debate tonight.
00:01:40.860Senator, this was a obviously important debate for Kamala Harris.
00:01:47.560It was really a rollout in a sense where she could be challenged.
00:01:52.700What we quickly saw, though, was a three-on-one debate against Donald Trump.
00:01:58.560And ABC News, what an in-kind donation they gave.
00:02:02.240Yeah, the ABC moderators did not do a good job.
00:02:05.800They clearly were biased towards Kamala Harris.
00:02:09.040We saw that from their live, quote, fact-checking, where repeatedly they'd follow up what Trump said by contradicting him, by disputing him.
00:02:16.980Many instances their fact-checks were wrong, and they never could be bothered to fact-check a word that came out of Kamala Harris' mouth.
00:02:26.200But, look, ABC News was the least consequential part of tonight.
00:02:30.940What tonight illustrated is that Kamala Harris is utterly incapable of defending her own record.
00:02:40.420And what we saw tonight, this was her stump speech, and this was her DNC convention speech, cut into sound bites and repeated.
00:02:51.420She memorized a series of vignettes, a series of little segments, and just repeated those talking points ad nauseum.
00:03:00.320And it really became clear with the very first question of the night.
00:03:05.460And the first question of the night that David Muir asked her is the question that you and I in Monday's podcast said is the single most important question of the debate and really of every election,
00:03:15.700which is, are you better off than you were four years ago?
00:03:19.920And to Muir's credit, he started with that question.
00:03:23.960Are people off today than they were four years ago under Trump?
00:03:27.300Now, interestingly enough, Kamala refused to answer it at all.
00:04:18.000Like, it's impossible to defend on every front inflation.
00:04:21.740All right, let's just take inflation and the economy.
00:04:24.540Her policies and Joe Biden's policies have been disastrous.
00:04:29.420America, the working people of America have seen the price of just about everything go up, from food, to electricity, to rent, to lumber, to health care, to gasoline, to mortgages.
00:04:43.380And critically, this is where her record matters.
00:04:47.820Kamala Harris was the tie-breaking vote multiple times on the floor of the Senate on trillions of dollars of the out-of-control spending from this administration that has caused this inflation.
00:05:01.460She was literally, without her vote, the trillions of dollars that we borrowed and the trillions of dollars that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ran the printing presses on that drove this inflation.
00:05:13.400That doesn't happen, and she can't defend that.
00:05:17.900When it comes to energy and gas prices, people are hurting because of gas prices.
00:05:23.180Well, it is her policies and Joe Biden's policies that has waged war systematically on oil and gas production and American energy, and she can't defend that either.
00:05:34.360And so instead, she simply says, well, we're going to lower energy prices, we're going to lower gas prices, with no acknowledgment that, wait a second, she is in fact the sitting vice president, and who knows where the heck the actual president is, besides passed out asleep on a beach.
00:05:51.640When you see, I think, the strategy, and now it actually, I think, makes more sense, right?
00:05:58.040Like, just hide her, buy ads, get the media to cover for you and protect you at all costs, and maybe that is a winning strategy, which comes to, obviously, the next big question.
00:06:32.980Well, listen, I think Trump should absolutely accept that offer for another debate.
00:06:36.860He should jump on it and say, let's go.
00:06:39.260I think the debate is a valuable opportunity to calmly litigate her actual record.
00:06:46.880And let me say this, though, even if Trump does follow that advice and does accept the debate, I think there's very little chance it happens.
00:06:57.760I think Kamala's team will back out on it.
00:06:59.560I think they're mostly just puffing out their chest and boasting right now with the offer of another debate.
00:07:05.040I think there is no world in which they let her do a second debate.
00:07:09.200I think it's back to the basement, and if I were to predict, we're not going to see Kamala emerge from the basement until Election Day.
00:07:18.880Until she sees her shadow on Election Day, she doesn't get to come out of the basement.
00:07:22.360Other than to show up at a rally here and there and read from the teleprompter the same speech, but they want to keep her absolutely controlled and repeating.
00:07:34.080And listen, I will say, the Democrat Party has very good message masters.
00:07:59.060And it's why, look, this is the same reaction I had with her convention speech.
00:08:03.060It's dangerous as hell, because if you're not paying close attention, what she says sounds nice unless she is forced to confront her actual own record.
00:08:14.260And in the entire debate, the ABC moderators never once pointed out that her record is exactly the opposite of what she what she said on the debate stage over and over again.
00:08:24.320So when I watch the debate, the question I always ask myself is, OK, if I was going in tonight voting for Donald Trump, was I convinced by Kamala Harris that I should switch my vote?
00:08:36.180And if I'm a Kamala Harris voter and was going into the night watching Kamala Harris saying I'm going to vote for her, am I going to switch my vote to Donald Trump tonight?
00:08:47.740Does that mean that this is a draw in essence where, hey, Donald Trump's team, they walk out of this going, OK, maybe we could have done a little better on this, that or the other.
00:08:58.380Maybe we'll work on that for the next debate.
00:09:00.000But we didn't do any harm and we got out some good points.
00:09:03.500Kamala's team probably says, hey, we had it.
00:09:22.820Well, Kamala's team and all of her cheerleaders in the corporate media are going to relentlessly hype that she won, that she won, that she won.
00:09:30.380And by the way, they were going to say that whatever happened, she could literally fall to the ground and start screaming and wailing and kicking her feet in the air and they would say she won.
00:09:37.380So that that was going to be the narrative regardless.
00:09:40.640I will say what we learned is she doesn't have a good answer to her own record.
00:09:46.420The Trump campaign needs to continue to prosecute the case.
00:09:49.960So let's take, for example, there was a whole back and forth on abortion.
00:09:54.200And Trump said accurately that she supports late term abortions into the eighth and ninth months of pregnancy.
00:10:02.700And she just said over and over again, no, I don't.
00:10:06.780And the moderators sat there like potted plants.
00:10:10.780Well, it so happens that Kamala actually has a record.
00:10:13.760And in particular, she has voted for legislation on the floor of the Senate to strike down every single restriction on abortion in the country and to legalize abortion in the eighth and ninth months up to the moment of birth.
00:10:29.580That is her actual voting record, what she has voted for.
00:10:32.580There was another exchange where Trump points out that the governor of Virginia, the former governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, had advocated for post-birth abortion.
00:10:43.420And she flat out lied and said, no, no, he didn't.
00:11:59.860So when she says, that's ridiculous, that's no, no, no, no, no, that's not true.
00:12:03.680Well, Kamala Harris voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act.
00:12:08.600And that was a bill that we voted on on the floor of the Senate that said if during the course of an attempted abortion, the child is delivered, the child is born.
00:12:18.440And this happens, and the child is alive and breathing and outside the womb, that the doctor cannot just let the baby die.
00:13:49.320And that's something you and I have talked about in this podcast a lot.
00:13:52.200It was my legislation in the Senate that sanctioned Nord Stream 2 and shut it down.
00:13:57.100Trump signed my legislation and Putin literally stopped building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline the day that Trump signed my sanctions legislation in the law.
00:14:07.580Nord Stream 2 was a dead hunk of metal at the bottom of the ocean until Joe Biden and Kamala Harris came into office.
00:14:12.900And they demonstrated weakness and they waived the sanctions on Nord Stream 2.
00:14:19.000And it was a multi-billion dollar gift to Russia and it caused the war in Ukraine.
00:14:25.840None of that does she have an answer for.
00:14:28.560Canadian women are looking for more, more out of themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world around them.
00:14:35.660And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.
00:15:19.760And I do think that's going to have a turnoff, I would hope, to some of those voters, maybe in the middle, the undecideds, which very much can be the deciding factor in this election.
00:15:32.160Will that play with undecideds, do you think?
00:15:34.320Did they see the bias that you and I saw?
00:19:23.240There was one of the best exchanges was something Trump said on the border where he made the point that, listen, she could secure the border today.
00:19:32.280And listen to this, what he said to her right now.
00:19:35.520I would say we would both leave this debate right now.
00:19:39.540I'd like to see her go down to Washington, D.C. during this debate because we're wasting a lot of time.
00:20:16.660Today, there are hundreds, if not thousands of illegal immigrants crossing the border right now today.
00:20:24.220Today, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are apprehending hundreds, if not thousands of illegal aliens, and they're going to release them tomorrow.
00:20:32.200There are criminals they're going to release tomorrow.
00:20:35.400There are murderers they're going to release going forward.
00:20:39.160There are child molesters, and they keep on doing it.
00:20:41.520And the point Trump is making, and listen, his campaign needs to follow this up by really explaining, look, when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris came into office, they inherited the lowest rate of illegal immigration in 45 years.
00:20:57.700Donald Trump, I worked hand in hand with President Trump to secure the border.
00:21:41.180It is also right that if, and I pray when, Trump is reelected, that he will reverse all three of those decisions on January 20th of next year.
00:21:52.120And we will see the border crisis end, and it will end quickly.
00:22:26.560And in fact, we saw peace breaking out in the Middle East.
00:22:29.920We saw the Abraham Accords being signed.
00:22:31.960We saw Arabs and Israelis coming together.
00:22:34.740And I think it is absolutely the case that if Trump were still in the White House today, the war in Ukraine would not have happened and the war in Israel would not have happened.
00:22:44.420That it was Joe Biden and Kamala Harris's weakness that caused those wars.
00:22:50.540And critically, and Trump did a good job of this, too, laying out that, listen, Kamala Harris has flowed over $100 billion to Iran.
00:23:00.420Iran provides 90 percent of the funding for Hamas, 90 percent of the funding for Hezbollah.
00:23:06.080Kamala Harris, in a very real sense, paid for the death squads that carried out the atrocities on October 7th.
00:23:21.200You know, I also think, and you go to the end of the debate, that one of the best parts was actually Donald Trump and his closing argument.
00:23:28.520And it goes back to the campaign strategy that I think he needs to have moving forward.
00:23:34.440And that is to make sure he makes this about what she has done in comparison to what she claims she wants to do while she's in charge.
00:24:11.720She should leave right now, go down to that beautiful White House, go to the Capitol, get everyone together and do the things you want to do.
00:24:19.400But you haven't done it and you won't do it because you believe in things that the American people don't believe in.
00:25:08.280And on every single level on inflation, on crime, on illegal immigration, on foreign policy, on safety and security, the world was much, much better when Trump was president than it is today.
00:25:24.220And that that needs to be emphasized every day between now and Election Day.
00:25:28.740Senator, final question, I think, for you and really for for me when I was watching this tonight.
00:25:33.660And it say, OK, where do we go from here?
00:26:19.500It is about it is about young, young couples are going out and buying their first home and they're discovering that a seven and a half percent mortgage rate is much, much worse than a two and a half percent mortgage rate that you get about half the house.
00:26:36.600It's about a single mom who's trying to make ends meet and she can't afford to buy groceries anymore because the prices have gone so high.
00:26:44.260And when she tries to fill up her tank to go to work, it just about breaks her.
00:26:48.160It's about the people who are suffering.
00:26:53.520Look, today on September 10th, there was a ceremony in the Capitol where the Congressional Gold Medal was awarded to the 13 servicemen and women who were murdered in Afghanistan from the absolutely disastrous and incompetent withdrawal from Abbey Gate.
00:27:13.940And I'll tell you, the families were there and it was a beautiful ceremony.
00:27:18.080And the families, I spoke to many of the families.
00:27:21.220I thanked every one of them that I could to say thank you for your service and sacrifice.
00:27:37.400The focus for the campaign every day from now to Election Day needs to be the difference between Trump's record and Kamala's record and critically bringing it home to the voters how their lives were much better when Trump was president than they have been under Kamala.
00:27:58.900And that her policies are failures and they're hurting the American people.
00:28:05.720Yeah, as you mentioned a second ago, on this anniversary of 9-11, I think it's important that we also take a step back.
00:28:15.340Remember how important it is that you have competent leaders that understand how important it is to protect and defend the homeland, to protect and defend freedom.
00:28:24.020And also, just a moment to say thank you to all of those that serve this country, to all of those that wear the uniform, to all of those that have given the ultimate sacrifices and their families.
00:28:36.440There were so many people that died on 9-11, but there was also the second part.
00:28:41.500And that was so many that died because they wanted to protect and defend us after 9-11 that gave the ultimate sacrifice.
00:28:49.580And I said to everybody listening, say thank you to a veteran, text them, everybody knows a veteran, tell them thank you.
00:28:56.840I had the privilege of playing golf today with some of those that actually took out some of the worst terrorists in the world, some special operators, and they were amazing guys.
00:29:10.760And I say to them, thank you, because without you giving up years of your life and risking your life and losing your brothers in uniform, we wouldn't have the freedoms we have today.
00:29:22.100And that's what we need to remember, I think, during this election season as well.
00:29:25.940Don't forget, we do this show Monday, Wednesday, Friday on Verdict.
00:29:29.160I do my show, Ben Ferguson Podcasts, every single day.
00:29:32.400So grab our podcast, hit that subscribe or auto-download button wherever you listen to these podcasts.
00:29:38.360It's always fun when we get to do a joint podcast.
00:29:40.740The Senator and I will see you back here in a couple days, and I'll see you back here tomorrow on the Ben Ferguson Podcast as well.
00:29:47.100And again, God bless America, and thanks to all of our veterans that are listening.