Saving America w/ Dan Bongino

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The point is, mail-in balloting can be done relatively securely.

Let's just put this out.

I'd rather not have it.

Unless you're in the military or you're in a nursing home and you can't a medical emergency, it should not be a thing.

But it is.

We're stuck with it.

We can change it if we win.

Maybe we get HR2 passed.

But we're stuck with it now.

So I like the pivot.

Thankfully, he's made this pivot where now he's like, listen, let's just swamp this thing.

The Democrats banked their early vote.

You know what happens on election day?

It rains.

People's kids are late for school.

Someone gets a fever.

That's about one, two percent of the vote that doesn't show up because of some environmental anomaly.

The Democrats don't have that problem.

If that early voting starts tomorrow, vote tomorrow.

Dan Bongino is a prominent conservative political commentator, author, and entrepreneur.

As a former New York City police officer and secret service agent, Bongino's broadcasts at the Dan Bongino show are characterized by his profound patriotism and relentless pursuit of truth.

His commentary has garnered a record-setting following on various platforms where he's known for his no-frills analysis and unwavering defense of conservative principles.

Bongino is also a successful entrepreneur, departing from Fox News in 2023 and taking his live podcast over to Rumble, an online streaming platform where Bongino himself is a significant shareholder.

During the pandemic, Bongino was banned from YouTube altogether for questioning the efficacy of masks.

Google banned him from using their ad service.

The New York Times labeled him one of its top five election misinformation super spreaders in 2020.

All the while, Bongino's commentary continued to garner hundreds of millions of views.

In today's episode, we forecast the 2024 election, discuss Donald Trump's unique political strengths, and potential presidential debate strategies for each candidate.

We also weigh the merits of populist economics and the right's recent bifurcation on foreign policy.

As the temperature climbs in the national political landscape, Bongino's insights on the latest headlines help Americans make sense of it all.

Tune in for another fantastic conversation on this episode of the Sunday Special.

Hey Dan, thanks for stopping by.

Really appreciate it.

Good to see you again.

Yeah, you too.

It's been a while.

Last time I was in LA, now we're in Florida.

I know, I know.

What a major upgrade.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, it's like a free place and everybody's nice.

I know.

And the sun's always out.

And in December, it's, you know, it's 75 degrees.

You're swimming in the pool.

My kids' birthdays are in January.

You do pool parties.

Exactly.

No, it's awesome.

Okay.

So let's jump right into the election because obviously that's what everybody wants to hear from you about is what you think is going to happen in the election.

Why don't we start with sort of that broad view?

If you had to put money on it today, who do you think wins, Trump or Biden?

You know what?

Listen, predictions kill me because it's one of those things, you know, like gay holes, like everybody's got one.

But unless you can back it up with some data, it's kind of meaningless.

I love it.

Your facts don't care about your feelings, right?

I think what everybody's kind of miscalculating about this election, I think Donald Trump's going to win.

So let me answer your question first, plainly.

But there's a reason.

The coalition is completely different.

And this is where I think everybody miscalculated.

I think we can both agree.

You kind of saw it after 2020 and there was that whole 2021 year where there was, you know, a lot going on.

A news cycle was crazy.

There were, you know, there was a left January 6th hysteria and all this stuff.

Everybody's like, this guy's going to get smoked.

Forget it.

And all you kept hearing about, if you go back and look, you can actually see the coverage was suburban moms and independents are going to abandon Trump.

He has no shot.

And then this moment happens.

I had a friend of mine, you know, this guy too, but he's at a UFC.

And he calls me, and this is like, I don't know, end of 2021, early 2022, doesn't matter, right around that time period.

And he says, Dan, because you're never going to believe this, man, but I'm sitting in a green room and he said, I'm telling you, man, the black vote is going to go for Donald Trump in big numbers.

I mean, not a majority, obviously, but in big numbers.

I said, what makes you say that?

And I'd been kind of hearing that too, but anecdotes, you know, anecdotes, single subject designs, not that reliable, whatever.

He said, I was talking to a bunch of entertainers, sports figures in the green room, and business people, all black.

He said, and they could not stop raving about Donald Trump.

And I was kind of blown away by it.

And it wound up turning into this online kind of spat with me and this

other conservative, nice guy who was friendly and all, but he didn't buy buy it.

And now you see the raw data, polling numbers, the Trump coalition is just different.

Hispanic voters, black voters, you're seeing working class males and droves, and most importantly, union workers.

My brother's a local three electrician.

He doesn't know a single person voting for Biden.

When did the Republicans ever win the union vote?

And in my humble opinion, Ben, I think Trump's lasting gift, outside of the Supreme Court, Abraham Accords and other things, I really believe this.

I think his real gift to the Republican Party is going to be that he completely altered the coalition moving forward.

We've never, you've been following this as long as I have.

When did we ever in the past rely on black Hispanic voters and union voters?

I can tell you, like never.

And I think really that's going to be his laughing gift, gift, gift, excuse me, if we can keep it.

You know, Republicans have a knack for screwing stuff up.

So, I mean, what do you think that's based on?

Obviously, Trump is one of one.

He's a unique figure in American politics.

You know, the question of whether we can keep it is partially dependent on the fact that, is there anyone else like Trump?

And the answer is no.

But I think there's something else that's going on.

And the argument that I've been making about Trumpism since the beginning is that Trumpism is less a philosophy than a correct impulse.

And that impulse is F the left.

That what Donald Trump really is in a nutshell, because he's not somebody who's going to sit there and give you a 200-page tome on the American founding.

He's going to give you exactly what he thinks in his most instinctive way.

And mostly what he represents is a giant pulsating orange middle finger to a bunch of people who don't care about union workers, about blue-collar workers, about people who go to church.

And because the Democratic Party has become the distillation of Barack Obama's philosophy without Barack Obama's personality, I think that there was almost an inevitable backlash that was going to occur.

They've disconnected themselves, not just economically, but also

in terms of social values from the middle of the country in a radical way.

Yeah.

Yes, to all of that.

But I think the first part you hit on is critical.

The big middle finger to the establishment class, whatever that means, because it means different things to different people.

Again, we've been at this game a long time.

And can we at least both agree the Democrats have always beaten us at the message game, right?

I can tell you, because I ran for office, I used to knock on doors in Maryland all the time.

And they used to do this little trick.

People would say, Republican or Democrat, if they wanted to talk to you, most people would just slam the door, but I'd say, how about this?

How about I don't tell you?

How about we just talk about a few things, give me two minutes, and then you tell me what I am.

I'm running in Maryland.

It's not hard to find Democrats.

I would go knock on doors in Prince George's County, largely black, very wealthy county.

I'd be done after the two-minute spiel.

And I swear to you, seven out of 10 people go, you're a Democrat.

No, no, I'm a Republican and a conservative one.

They were stunned.

So they've just beat us at the messaging game.

I mean, they can tell you how they won, right?

Bill Clinton goes on our senior hall, starts playing the saxophone.

Everybody's like, man, I want to be like that guy.

They had no idea what he stood for.

Most people out there were just like, this is the kind of the cool guy, Obama, Hopi Changy.

What did that even mean?

No one knew what that meant.

If they knew Hopi Changy meant your insurance was going to be canceled, nobody would have done Hopi Changy.

But they did it because they're just really good at messaging.

So Trump comes along.

And we've had this stodgy, you know, Mitt Romney, George W.

Bush Republican Party forever, where we would go in like a methadone clinic, right?

And we'd be talking about the Laffer curve.

And the guys in there are like, bro, I'm like dying of a heroin addiction.

Like, I appreciate that that's a thing.

The laugher curve, that's great.

But what are you going to do for me?

And no one could talk plainly because we just came from a different stock.

It was like this Brahmin class that had never related to middle class workers.

And then the most ironic thing, you get this, you know, Queen's billionaire, billionaire, who should be, correct?

He's richer than you and me, man.

He should be so detached from the middle guy.

But because he was a builder, a builder, my father's been in this business his whole life.

He'll explain it to you perfectly.

You're dealing with union guys, cement workers, electricians, HVAC guys, steam fitters, tin knockers every day.

This guy was one of them.

It wasn't a money thing.

It was a talk thing.

And people, like you said, were just like, you know, he kind of talks like me.

The same losers I hate, he hates.

Is it a thing?

Is it about the Abraham Accords?

Is it about maybe to like the white paper crowd, you know, you and I read a lot of that stuff, but let's be honest, we're voting Republican anyway.

To a lot of independents, this is not a knock on them, Ben.

These people work for a living.

You know, this is what we do.

You and I get paid to analyze politics.

People have real jobs.

We don't have real jobs.

It's a fake job.

It is.

you know it.

Like you and I get paid to do what we love, talk about politics.

But it's a fake job.

You think the guy out there sitting in this Florida sun pouring concrete, is reading through a 51-page white paper on the marginal effect of a corporate tax cut?

He's actually doing stuff.

He's the one who listens to Trump and he's like, hey, man.

It's like Dave Chappelle.

Sorry, I mean, that Dave Chappelle said, he goes, I call this guy, you know, what does he say?

That segment about him being an honest liar, how he called Hillary.

Like, that's it.

Like, everyone in politics bulls you, but this is the first guy who does it honestly.

Like, it's the strangest thing.

The question, I think, for the Republican Party going forward is, is that replicable?

Right.

In the same way that the Democrats sort of fell for the Barack Obama model, but they didn't have Barack Obama.

Are Republicans going to do the same thing?

So here's my grand unified field theory of politics is that basically everything changed in 2012.

It wasn't 08 when Obama won the first time.

It was when he won the second time, because by all rights, he should have lost.

He was wildly unpopular with the American public.

His politics sucked.

Everybody hated Obamacare.

And then he basically decided to abandon the middle and run directly to his base and cobble together the coalition of the dispossessed along with some college-educated white ladies.

And then he won based on that.

And so that led to this idea in the Democratic Party that that was the winning coalition.

And it led to the idea in the Republican Party that that was an unbeatable coalition because the media kept saying that over and over, right?

Now they're all ripping everybody about the, you're talking about the great replacement theory.

The people who are talking about the great replacement theory first are people like Roy Teixeira, who's on the left, talking about how the demographics of the United States had changed and now Republicans would never win another election.

So 2016 happens.

Trump comes out of nowhere.

He wins the nomination and then he beats Hillary Clinton, who's trying to replicate the Obama coalition.

And the conclusion because of 2012 for Democrats was there's no way that Trump possibly could have won.

He must have cheated.

And the response for Republicans was, there's no way Trump should have won.

He must work miracles.

And so since then, we've been stuck in this sort of weird binary where Republicans think that Trump is a miracle worker and Democrats think that Trump is Satan.

And we're sort of stuck there based on this, the falsehood, which is that the one who was actually out of the box in terms of his political approach was Obama.

And the magic of Donald Trump in 2024, shockingly, is that he is the moderate candidate in this race.

If you look at him positionally, Donald Trump has grabbed the middle on every single issue.

100%.

It's interesting you say that because it's funny when people paint this guy as like this far-right conservative dictator.

And then like you said, you go back and look back.

And it was actually the first term was quite a moderate agenda.

I mean, I don't think there's any question that there are some positions.

I mean, listen, I love Donald Trump, endorsed him early, but we've had disagreements on my show, on the air, about things like abortion.

You know, he's more of a practical guy.

And as I've said about Donald Trump, and I think this is the appeal of Donald Trump, and I think this is what bothers conservatives, because you're right, we are kind of stuck in this fugue state right now.

Some old school conservatives.

I think what bothers them is that he's transactional.

And I don't say that as an insult.

Like guys like you and me and some of these old school guys who've been in the conservative movement, me kind of conservatarian, we're really passionate about this.

I mean, you know, don't kill babies.

Like I'm not, that's like my thing.

Like, you know, I always say like, we can argue tax policy all we want, but if you're dead, you're not really paying taxes.

So that's like kind of my thing.

Like, don't whack babies, you know?

And I believe it.

Like, that's, that's, that's in my soul, man.

That's, I'm not, I'm not going in front of Jesus Christ one day going, hey, I didn't fight when I could.

But he's transactional.

He sees everything as a spreadsheet.

It's his business background.

I think it's his general unfamiliarity with dirty politics.

He looks at something and goes, okay, you want to save X number of babies.

You're not going to get that done in this state.

So how about we do this?

And it's like, I think the old school conservatives, sometimes even like me, are like, but then

you're like,

he's not wrong about the politics.

Like we haven't done enough political work to get there yet.

You know, I think about other things too, like the Supreme Court thing.

Did he, I mean, did he personally look at each of these people and go, oh, here's what they're going to do about voter ID and abortion and the Second Amendment?

No, he's a transactional guy.

He's used to delegating.

He goes, hey, Leonard Leo, Federalist Society, these guys have had some pretty good ideas.

And that's what he does.

And maybe the Republican Party needs more of a transactionalist.

And you had asked in the beginning,

you know, can we keep this going?

And the answer is, I'm not sure.

I mean, I'm not sure we have this great bench of people who can blend this new populism.

I think there's something else that's happening with Trump, which is really unique.

And what that is, is when you talk about Trump being transactional, it's not just that Trump's transactional.

It's that the base is willing to accept that he's transactional.

So when you say Mitch McConnell's transactional, which he is because he's a politician, the entire base goes, that, that, sell out that.

Right.

And they do the same thing with any politician, John Boehner or Paul Ryan or now Mike Johnson, anybody who quote unquote caves caves to the left, who's being transactional, because that's what politics requires, is the transactional.

The difference with Trump is that we have such a visceral connection, the Republican base, with Trump that he'll be transactional, but we trust him.

We're like, okay, yeah, but we get that he's on our side.

And I think that because of that, that's the part that I'm not sure is replicable.

Meaning that when I talk about the people in our industry, it's sort of fascinating.

I spoke at the House Republican convention.

They have sort of a big get-together every year.

And one year they were doing it in Florida is when McCarthy was House Speaker.

And I got up and I said to the members of the House, listen, my job is not the same as your job, right?

My job is to say what I think is true and what you guys should be going for.

And your job is to get 75% of that.

And it's not to do my job.

It's not to go on TV and say what 100% would look like and that everybody is failing because of a lack of will and spine.

Generally speaking, I actually don't think the Republican Party fails because of lack and will and spine.

I think sometimes that's true, but I think generally...

The reason they fail is because right now they have like a two-vote margin in the House.

They don't run the Senate and they don't have the presidency.

And when it came to lack of William's mind, it seems to me like that was more when they actually controlled all three elected branches, right?

I mean, the very early parts of Trump, they controlled the Senate and the House and the presidency, and they didn't do enough that.

And that's when you, that's when we should be browbeating them.

But the thing about Trump that's unique is that Trump can say, yeah, listen, I'm getting against 75%.

And I'll go, that's amazing.

He's getting 75%.

That's awesome.

And I know that if he could get 100%, he would.

Yeah.

And but I think your analogy there, you got me thinking, which

happens a lot when you make a really good point.

The McConnell thing, you're right.

Why the disparity in kind of views?

Why are we so sure that McConnell sold this out, but Trump didn't?

And I think it's because I think they believe McConnell's playing a cynical game where Trump is really doing it because he believes people in the know have told him like.

This is the better path.

I'll give you an example.

Here's what I mean.

I think it's almost like political naivete is Trump's, is Trump's superpower, which sounds odd, whereas it's McConnell's curse because he's not politically naive.

I mean, there's no one less politically naive than McConnell.

Here's a perfect example.

The Abraham Accords.

How many Republicans or Democrats and Democrats, the entire swamp has said, you will never get any of this done without solving the Palestinian issue.

Don't even try.

There's legions of tape, John Kerry, Republicans saying it.

Don't even, but you got to fix the Palestinian issue.

Don't even bother.

Trump comes in because he's, and I say this

in a laudatory fashion, a compliment, and he's politically naive about it.

He's like, that's the way it was done.

I don't really buy that kind of BS.

Like, I'm going to do it my way.

We're going to put a spreadsheet down.

Here's a number of people I'm going to get on board.

And then he does it.

And everybody's like, oh, my God, he did that.

We weren't supposed to do that.

Well, why weren't you supposed to do it?

Because somebody told us we weren't supposed to do it.

And I feel like

that's the difference between him and a McConnell.

Like McConnell will get transactional and will grow a pair when there's something really on the line, like the appeals court filibuster.

Listen, I'm not a McConnell guy, never have been.

It's the most important move in Senate Majority Leader Hispanic.

Oh my gosh, he sent for

100%.

He permanently, there's no, I don't care how much you hate McConnell.

There is zero disputing that altered the direction of the country, Roe v.

Wade and everything.

But again, I think it was a political calculation at the time that likely could have been done earlier.

And I think that the difference between McConnell and Trump, too, is that Trump's...

McConnell's like a counterpuncher.

He's got to wait for the politics to come his way.

And I understand he's dealing with votes.

He's got to whip stuff, right?

But Trump will just throw it out there.

And really, I think it's just that, can he be a bit impulsive?

Yeah, I think that's an understatement.

I don't think anybody doubts that.

But I think people see him, see like, wow, that's different.

I've never seen that before.

Good.

Like, let's move the Overton window in our direction.

Democrats do it all the time.

I mean, they're impulsive every single day.

They'll come out and say some crazy stuff.

I mean, how do we get to the point where, you know, a boy can be a girl now?

That's the kind of thing 20 years ago, if you brought it up in a Democrat debate, in a Democrat debate, they would have laughed in your face.

And he pushes it, Trump.

He just keeps moving the ball forward.

And I think that's what they like about him.

So let's talk about kind of the difference between Trump 2020 and Trump 2024.

So when you look at Trump 2020, you know, I know that you have strong opinions about what happened in the election.

My take on that has been they changed the rules, which is a form of cheating.

They radically increased the amount of mail-in balloting, which is a form of cheating.

There was a voter increase of 22 million in terms of just pure number of votes between 2016 and 2020, which is unprecedented in American history.

It obviously benefited Joe Biden.

They hid the Hunter Biden laptop story for a full month.

The entire media were arrayed against him.

The institutions of his own government were arrayed against him.

All of that is a form of cheating.

With that said, I don't think the electoral fraud proof is strong enough to suggest that he lost purely on the basis of electoral fraud.

So there's that.

Assuming my premise, which is that he actually lost in 2020 on just the pure number of counted votes, what do you think changes between 2020 and 2024?

Because clearly something has.

He was lagging in the polls behind Biden the entirety of the 2020 election cycle by somewhere between five and seven points.

And then, of course, he ends up losing by much closer.

This time around, he's been leading almost wire to wire.

And so what that says to me, is that really about Trump and changes with regard to Trump?

Or is that people taking a second look at Trump because Biden is such unbelievable at being president of the United States?

Yeah.

Well, and you well know, the polls always underestimate.

Yeah, exactly.

So if he's ahead, and I saw it today, he's tied in Virginia.

It's crazy.

We haven't won Virginia since 2004.

Real Clear Politics just moved it into the thoughts of category.

I mean, and I hate polls.

I've said all the time they're points in time and they're typically off, but they always underestimate a straight.

But let's get to the election.

I want to say first, I can't prove it counterfactual.

Obviously, I love economics, but I can't tell you what would have happened because it didn't.

However, I absolutely believe that the results of this election were fraudulent, but I'm under an obligation to back that up, okay?

You got to produce some data to have an opinion, or else you're just talking a bunch of.

If you go back to 2012, and I encourage all your listeners to do this, it's a New York Times article, not the New York Post, it's the New York Times.

It's a piece by Adam Liptak.

It's called Error and Fraud Rises as Absentee Ballot Rises.

It's a New York Times piece written in 2012, over 10 years ago.

It was meant to eviscerate absentee balloting because back then, if you remember, it was a big deal in Florida with military and elderly.

So the New York Times...

You legitimately should be able to vote back.

Right.

You vote Republican.

And they didn't like it.

So they wrote this hit piece, and it was a pretty good analysis.

And you'll see they talk about all the stats stats and they quote a bunch of figures saying, you're almost guaranteed to double your rejection and fraud rates by mail.

It's not complicated logic.

There's a choke point if I vote in person.

You're the election official.

I have to go give an ID if it's a voter ID state.

I show up five minutes later and try to vote again.

They're going to be like, Ben,

Dan, you were just here.

In a ballot box, there is no such choke point.

So there's an obvious fraud mechanism.

This isn't hard to figure out.

So the fact that the New York Times did this expose says to me they already know there's going to be massive problems with, then mail-in balloting.

Then you do it for the first time.

You send out ballots across the country and you, I mean, this is laughable.

You tell us, oh my God, the most secure election in American history.

Like it's a joke.

I can't prove the counterfactual.

Well, nobody can.

It's a shame.

I don't believe in my heart that that thing was, that result was legitimate.

Combine that with some other things.

So it's not just that I believe the mail-in balloting was a complete train wreck.

And I believe probably, especially Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania changes the rules at the last minute and they just make it up.

You got to put a date on the ballot.

The court's like, ah, no, you don't.

We changed our mind.

Like, no, you do.

It actually says that, like in the law, it literally not figured out.

Right, no, you have to stop counting the ballot days beyond the election.

It's insane.

Yeah, nice.

And then there's this myth out there that, well, this has all been litigated.

No, it has not.

Nothing made it past the initial standing phase.

It was not litigated.

That is total garbage.

It was not litigated at all.

And then I'll make one last point.

The Hunter Biden fiasco.

It's obviously, that's a separate matter.

I get it.

But there was obviously a cabal, deep state, silly state, the blob, I don't care what you call them, of people who are very well connected, who hid from the public vital voting information.

You combine those three factors.

There's no sane person that can say with a straight face at the, with the barrel of a gun at their face going, hey man, this thing was totally legit on the up and up.

I don't buy it at all.

I think it was a total scam.

I'm just hoping now some states have made some pretty substantial changes, Georgia, Florida, Arizona somewhat, that in the swing states, we got to hold this.

It's going to be a train wreck in California.

I mean, the biggest question for me for Trump, just in terms of the mechanisms, are really the state parties.

How are the state parties going to perform?

Because when it comes to the turnout efforts in Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, there are certain states that Trump is expanding the map in, like Nevada, right now, he's leading well outside the margin of error, which is just.

He has been for the first time for the entire time.

It's totally crazy.

But if you look look at Michigan is razor thin.

Pennsylvania is super razor thin.

And there it's going to come down to a question of turnout.

So there the question is going to be really, how does the Pennsylvania Republican Party perform or the Michigan Republican Party, which has been pretty dicey in the last few election cycles in terms of its efficacy?

How are they going to perform or Wisconsin?

Yeah, it's a good question.

And I think we can both agree.

Listen, we don't like mail-in balloting.

Republicans just don't.

And I just told you why.

It's prone to fraud.

But the hard, I'm a realpolitik.

guy.

Go do it right now.

Go mail.

Brother, we're stuck with what we have.

You know where we did it?

We did it in Florida.

Yeah, and 2020 won by 20.

We killed everybody.

And Trump won twice.

So the point is, mail-in balloting can be done relatively securely.

Let's just put this out.

I'd rather not have it.

Unless you're in the military or you're in a nursing home or you can't, a medical emergency, it should not be a thing.

But it is.

We're stuck with it.

We can change it if we win.

Maybe we get HR2 passed.

But we're stuck with it now.

So I like the pivot.

Thankfully, he's made this pivot where now he's like, listen, let's just swamp this thing.

Because if we're stuck with these damn rules, I mean, think about it, like early voting.

When I ran for office,

I can't even tell you how many Republicans they say, I don't like voting early on principal alone.

I'd say, you realize there's no way to win an election that way, right?

The Democrats banked their early vote.

You know what happens on election day?

It rains.

People's kids are late for school.

Someone gets a fever.

That's about one, two percent of the vote that doesn't show up because of some environmental anomaly.

The Democrats don't have that problem.

We're stuck with this stuff.

Can we change it?

We can.

Do I want to change it?

Yes.

But I live in the real world, not the world I want.

And I'm glad they pivoted on that.

They got to swamp this thing and bang.

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So, we talked a lot about Trump.

Let's switch to the other side of the aisle because the reality is that if Joe Biden were doing a wonderful job, the numbers might look different.

But the reality is that, you know, when you said that you got a call from somebody in UFC who I'm sure we both know, you know, talking about all of this, that my guess is that that probably was not far after we decided to randomly surrender in Afghanistan and leave billions of dollars of military equipment in Afghanistan and get 13 American soldiers killed at Abbey Gate and all the rest of it.

If you look at Joe Biden's poll numbers, they've never recovered.

That was the inflection point for his presidency.

And he has never come back from that, mainly because it exposed the reality about Joe Biden, which is that he is venal, that he does not care about other human beings.

I mean, he was absolutely uncaring about what was going on in Afghanistan, that he's terrible at his job, that he lies on the regular.

All of these things were exposed by Afghanistan, and we've just seen that ever since.

And so to me, it looks like, if I'm looking at this election, it looks like so much is baked into the cake.

Everyone has an opinion on Trump.

You know what you think of Trump.

Nobody's opinion about Trump is going to change, whether he's convicted as he was or whether he's not.

If he goes to jail, frankly, I think it probably helps him in a wide variety of ways.

We can talk about that in a second.

But

nobody's changing their mind about Trump.

I think what's happened here is an enormous number of people have changed their mind about, I mean, I know them personally, right?

I mean, if we're going to talk anecdotal, I can tell you in the Jewish community, a lot of Jews look at how Joe Biden has approached Israel and they're like, I am not voting for that jackass.

I'm not going to vote for him.

And even the ones who are very left who are like, I'm not, I can't bring myself to vote for Trump because whatever.

They'll vote for RFK or they won't show up.

There's going to be like a significant problem for Joe Biden.

The enthusiasm for him is unbelievably low.

When you look at the Biden presidency, I've said, you know, this is the worst presidency of my lifetime, bar none.

You know, what do you make of the failures of Joe Biden?

Well, two points.

The first is the damaging political narratives.

The second will be none of this is changeable for him.

So first,

there are bad political stories that do harm and there are bad political stories that don't.

You know, why did this trial up in New York backfire spectacularly on Biden, not Donald Trump?

I mean, convicted felon, the Stormy Daniels stuff.

And the reason is because the only damaging political narratives, I learned this running for office, the only ones that do any harm at all are stories that change your pre-existing notion of who a candidate is.

If, let's say, Mike Pence, there was a story about him hanging out partying the weekend and drinking it up at a, you know, University of Michigan Rager.

You know, people would be like, that's kind of weird.

Like, that's not the guy.

If it was a story about, you know, Donald Trump or maybe Tom Massey or Rand Paul, you'd be like, that sounds like fun.

It's the same story, bro.

So the thing about Joe Biden, getting back to your question here is.

Why is Joe Biden so grotesquely unpopular, and I concur, the most destructive president of our lifetime, even worse than Obama, because he's dumb.

Obama was at least politically smart, is because he ran as the stability guy, the transition agent, the non-chaos agent.

He did, look at all these crazy things Trump did.

I mean, he never actually pointed anything, but, you know, he's like, look at the tweets and this guy's, he's going to be Hitler, Edi Amin, look at the Pol Pot.

And then you get Joe Biden.

And like you said, the first thing he does is you got people falling off planes in Afghanistan trying to fly their way out.

And you're like, wait, I thought Trump was the, so that started it, but he was still maintaining like a 45% approval rating.

You're right though.

It never goes down to that.

Then inflation, like, wait a minute.

I thought again, you were this stability guy.

My money's not even stable.

I can't even buy bacon anymore.

Like, what are you talking about?

So the destructive narrative.

And then he runs also as this kind of avuncular grandfatherly figure, right?

And then you find out the Hunter Biden story.

And you're like, wait, this guy is a good dad.

Like, I'm a dad.

I got a kid, God forbid, with some drug problem.

And I'm sending him overseas to hustle money for the family family so I can give.

I'm sorry, brother.

I'm not buying the good dad drill.

Good dad.

Get your kid and some, get him out of Ukraine and barisma and put him in some care.

Are you kidding?

So every one of the stories starts dinging at his credibility till he's down now to the 30% approval, 35%.

And those people, I'll make a strong case to you, are the hard left.

They don't really approve of Joe Biden.

They know he's dumber than Obama.

You got to remember, Joe Biden is the president Barack Obama always wanted to be, but was too politically smart to become.

Don't ever forget that.

Obama wants to be Joe Biden, not the other way around.

He does.

Biden's just too dumb to say no.

AOC and the squad come in.

They're like, Israel sucks.

Israel sucks.

Gaza sucks.

Gaza sucks.

Every day he changes his mind because he's too stupid to have a position.

But the problem he's going to have on the second point here is...

None of this is changeable.

He's only getting older.

He obviously has some cognitive frontal lobe dementia, if you just look at him.

None of his policies are changeable.

The economy is not going to turn around.

The Middle East isn't getting any better.

They still haven't completely sealed the deal.

Russia has been making advances in Kharkiv.

What is he going to change in three, four months?

There's no political trajectory that turns around for him.

And that's why I'm optimistic.

But, you know,

any red wave talk, I ban people from my show immediately.

Yeah, exactly.

Because we made that mistake in the midterm.

So that brings up what Trump's going to do in the debate with Biden.

So my advice to to Trump has been just don't do what you did in the first debate with Biden, right?

Just let Biden talk.

The recipe for success with Joe Biden is make him speak for a particular length of time without a teleprompter.

And when he's in debate, if Joe Biden does the anyway, and then just kind of fades away, then Trump should say, Mr.

President, you still have 30 seconds on the clock, go for it.

And then he should just be urging more talk.

from Joe Biden because the more you see of Joe Biden, the more he makes you very, very nervous.

And when it comes to President Trump, listen, we all find him entertaining.

We've already baked into the cake our perception of him as far as who he is personally.

But the perception that can change about Trump and that people keep wanting to change about Trump is that at some point, maybe it'll just get a little less nutty, right?

If it just gets a little less and nutty, like take down the, take down kind of the volatility and the, and the colorfulness, like 15%,

and he's president forever, you know?

Yeah, I get it, but I worry that that's the appeal that so many people out there who are not us.

see that.

Like my brother's a perfect example.

Like I said, local three electrician guy never voted for a Republican in his life.

And that's the appeal.

I get it.

I understand.

I've had this conversation with a bunch of people about it.

I don't, listen, I don't think at this point anything's going to change.

Like you said, it's baked into the cake.

But on the debate front, I think Donald Trump, yes, has to let Biden talk.

You're 100% correct.

The more he talks, the more Pandora's box opens up.

It's a disaster.

I think, though, Biden has a real Achilles heel.

If you watch him in debates, this is not the guy who debated Paul Ryan years ago.

I got to tell you, I was kind of stunned.

I was expecting Paul Ryan to kick his ass in that debate.

And Biden lied the whole way through it, but he lied really well.

You were like, wow, that's impressive.

This guy lies really good.

I mean, he was like a Gen Socky level of lying.

I was like, wow.

Slap on that Joker Ridge.

Just go for it.

Yeah, we were stunned.

I remember sitting in up in New York watching it.

He's a different guy now.

He's got this anger issue.

It's a serious anger issue.

He can't seem to control himself anymore, especially when his son is brought up.

So I think what Trump should do, and I've said this repeatedly, even to him, is they need to bring props.

I'm not talking about like a big rubber ducky or anything.

He needs needs to pull out a copy of that check, that $40,000 check.

Be like, Joe, it says Joe Biden, right?

$40,000.

Where'd it come from?

Joe, explain.

He'll lose his mind.

He clearly has no emotional control anymore.

I think Biden agreeing to the debate was a really, really awful idea.

I think it's the last straw.

I don't see him being the nominee.

Wow.

I don't.

I don't.

I don't see him being the nominee.

I see less than a 50% chance.

Obviously, can't predict the future.

However, the Democrats know this election is too important.

There's some big money that's sitting there on the sidelines waiting.

I think they watched this first debate.

If it goes bad, which it can, but who knows?

State of the Union, well, I don't know what the hell happened with him.

Who knows?

I ain't even getting into it.

But he gets up there at the State of the Union.

It's a horrible speech, but it's not like by Biden standards, it's okay.

He didn't fall over.

Yeah, he didn't fall over.

He didn't die.

There weren't that many

stuttering or stammering or anything like that.

If he shows up.

And we set the bar so low like we're doing, you always run the risk of like, oh my gosh, look, he did so well because you expected a one and you got like a 1.2 or something, you know?

Yeah.

And I think that's right.

I think that that's why I would urge President Trump to stop talking about, you know, quite how senile Joe Biden is and how he's going to kick his ass in the debate.

Because once you set those expectations, it's actually a real problem.

The other thing is, is that what Biden wants to do, Biden's game plan going into that debate is going to be make Donald Trump, suck him into talking about 2020.

Because if that entire debate is about 2020, then Biden does well with that.

Not because whether he won, whether he lost.

If people think that all Trump is fixated on is 2020 and January 6th and all of this, that's not stuff that most Americans want to hear about.

They want to hear about what happened in the last three and a half years under Joe Biden.

And I think that Joe Biden actually gave him a gift with the prosecution in this way.

I think that if he says, you know,

you wouldn't leave office and you tried to overturn the country and the Constitution and we haven't had anything.

He should say, you know, Joe, I may have done a lot of things, but one thing I didn't try to do was jail my political opponent.

Reframing.

I mean, it's a standard debate tactic you would learn in debate 101 is you take an argument thrown at you.

You know what I would do?

I would use that old, what is it, the British debating method.

Here's what I would say if I was Trump.

I'd say, Joe Biden's going to tell you X that I am a Nazi and a fascist and a wannabe dictator.

That's what he's going to think.

That's why when he says it, he looks like a tool.

And you say, but let me just,

let's put out this kind of predicate argument here.

Here's what Joe Biden did.

He goes through the list of names.

George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro, Mike Mike Flynn.

What do all those names have in common?

Those are people who committed no known documented crimes but found themselves under an extensive deep state Joe Biden team-led investigation.

Matter of fact, it was Joe Biden who recommended the Logan Act against Mike Flynn.

I forgot about that.

That's so crazy.

So who really is the dictator?

And Joe Biden's so not mentally there.

He'll forget that just happened.

And five minutes later, he'll be like, let me tell you who the dictator is.

And he'll look like a complete buffoon.

But it's clearly Biden who has really taken the presidency and really embarrassed us.

I'm not talking about mean tweets.

I'm talking about just the double-barreled middle finger to the Supreme Court.

I mean, the Calangelo leaving the DOJ.

This is just unprecedented.

Third world, Kim Jong-un's taking notes stuff.

Like, wow, it's pretty cool.

Maybe I should try that.

I mean, he's really, he's embarrassed.

Joe Biden beat him to the bunch, you know.

So when you look at, you know,

who would replace Biden, you suggest that he's not going to be the nominee.

The problem I see is who the hell do they get?

The only person who everyone on the right is afraid of is Michelle Obama.

Everybody else, I feel like, you know, Trump beats.

But if it's Michelle Obama and they pull her somehow out of the wings and she's playing Oprah Nouveau, like, listen, I think that she's vulnerable as a politician because she is a deeply radical human being, much more radical than Barack was, you know,

writing theses at Princeton about how she was a victim of racial discrimination at Princeton.

But, you know,

do you think that they can pull her out?

Are they really going to depose the old man for the least popular vice president in american history for kamala harris well listen she has to leave voluntarily the the left has boxed themselves in you know i call it my cannibalism theory and it's the idea that guys like you and i ignored cancel culture leftists a long time ago but there's power in it they enjoy it so they had to start feasting on their own because there was nowhere else to go that's why you see entertainers getting beat up by it now so that this cannibalism theory applies to that they boxed themselves in with kamala harris joe biden made crystal clear it was valuable to have a black woman as vice president.

What's he going to do now?

What's his people?

People go, oh, we changed our mind.

All of a sudden, the whole black woman DEI, which they, and I didn't say it, they did, that all of a sudden she's not worthy.

She has to step aside voluntarily.

On the Michelle Obama front, one thing I know well is the Obamas.

I worked with him for a couple of years.

I'm telling you, there is, I'll say 0.001 because nothing's impossible.

There is no way she's running.

No way.

She hates politics.

Any one of her agents back in the day will tell you she can't stand politics.

She hated being a public figure.

She absolutely hated the White House.

I always tell this story about the guys when they like, like, where were you guys?

They came back to the White House.

They're like, we were out at a Target or a Walmart or something like, what the hell are you doing at Walmart?

These are the FLD guys, First Lady's detail.

Because, you know, we all hang out together.

What the hell are you doing at Walmart?

I forget where it was.

I think it was a Target, but it doesn't matter.

And they're like, we were with

the First Lady.

Really?

I forget about her name, a renegade.

What was she?

He was a renegade.

And I said, what were you doing?

She wanted to go shopping.

I'm like, in what?

They took her in this low-key car.

She put on like a scarf and glasses and a hat.

And she was in Target shopping.

And they just like, everybody backed off.

And she just wanted to go out and be normal.

She does not want anything to do with this.

This is all one.

I hate that term, psyop.

I hate it.

It's so overused, but this is it.

I swear the left is playing games with us.

If it's going to be anyone, it's going to be be kamala if she voluntarily steps aside or there's an eruption and in chicago at the dnc which is possible

you could see an outsider josh shapiro in pennsylvania really popular i mean he's a he's a leftist but really popular guy i think newsom's kind of cooked i think a lot of people are sick of him but you know he's power hungry you know obviously whitmer wants it j.b pritzker I mean, you could see Hakeem Jeffries.

You could see a bunch of people who jump in, but I don't think he's the nominee.

The only thing stepping in the way of him leaving is him.

He is obviously a sociopathic level narcissist.

He believes he's like an FDR type figure.

That's why he, look at the polls, Jack.

Look at the polls.

We are looking at the polls.

Everybody hates you.

We're looking at the actual polls.

Jack, what are you looking at?

I mean,

which brings up Jill, who is obviously like an Edith Wilson figure who's really propping him up at this point.

The fact that they're deploying her out to every TV show when he can't appear on any of them to pretend that he is totally with it is really, it's an amazing statement.

So I'm turning back to the Republican Party for a second.

So the fact that Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party has had all these benefits that we've talked about, including the broadening of the coalition, including the fact that he's been able to break through the media in a way that no other Republican candidate of my lifetime has because he was so big that they tried to box him into being X, Y, or Z.

And everybody knew who he was already.

So it was very difficult for the media to attach whatever label they wanted on him because Donald Trump is Donald Trump.

Well, when I look at that,

that's the upside.

One of the downsides is, as we discussed before, he's not a philosophical conservative.

He's sort of an instinctive conservative, but pragmatic, meaning he has conservative instincts, but that doesn't mean that he's going to be thoroughly pro-life or that he has a fully formed theory of how foreign policy ought to work.

He has sort of a baseline root patriotism, believe in America.

America's military ought to be strong.

We shouldn't get involved in wars we have no place in.

Very good stuff, but subject to interpretation.

It's that that I kind of want to to ask you about.

So the fact that Trump is so heterodox in sort of his approach and that he's so pragmatic and non-ideological means that the party remains somewhat amorphous.

The conservative movement remains sort of amorphous.

And what that means, there's a lot of internal battling, obviously, over pretty much everything at this point.

And Trump himself as a singular figure sort of keeping a cap on it.

And that's everything from economics to social policy to foreign policy.

You're seeing sort of these internal battles inside the Republican Party on a lot of these issues.

So we can start with economics where

there's this bizarre battle that's been going on.

As long as I've been alive, the Republican Party has been the generally free market party that believes in free trade and private property.

And there's been a real push inside some wings of the Republican Party to push for a significantly more interventionist federal government that works on redistributionism and uses regulation to benefit certain populations at the expense of other populations.

And it's been called economic populism.

And Trump has been on kind of both sides of that debate.

He likes the free market, but he's also been the same guy who says we should never discuss Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid because that's a political loser.

So how do you see that shaping up in the post-Trump era, whether that's a year and a half from now or whether that's five years from now?

Well, first I'll say that's definitely not unique to the Republican Party.

I mean, you've seen these internal fights on significant issues.

I mean, it was Barack Obama who said, you know, marriage between a man and a woman, and then all of a sudden now we can't even figure out what a man or a woman is.

I mean, so the party's evolving certainly is nothing new.

But to your point, as an kind of an old school conservatarian, I say conservatarian because I'm definitely conservative on the fiscal front, but on the foreign policy front, I'm kind of a limited intervention guy.

So I have kind of different views on that.

That's nothing new, but you're correct.

I was a die-hard doctrinaire free trader from the libertarian front.

Free trade is good.

The Japanese want to be the kings of rubber dog toys.

Send them over, brother.

We'll produce AI.

Why would we want people working building rubber dog toys?

It's a waste of time.

But then you realize,

you know, I hate the term evolve because it's associated with them, but I listened to a podcast once.

I love Econ talk.

Yeah, he's just fantastic.

I think he had J.D.

Vance on one time, too.

And they were talking about how, yeah, ever since China got admitted to the WTO, they used the rubber dog toys to like build nuclear weapons to kill us.

So would you do that if there were two islands of people and you just divorced all the politics?

I mean, island A,

people A, people B.

Oh, let's trade, let's trade.

People B is like, let's nuke people A.

All of a sudden, you're not trading.

You can talk all the free trade crap you want.

And that's where I started to evolve my views.

I'm not a tariffs guy.

They're paid for by us.

However, it can be used as a strategic weapon if you're dealing with the threat of a hypersonic missile attack.

And I've evolved.

And believe me, that's not because of true.

This happened through a J.D.

Vance podcast way before Trump.

So I think he kind of sees that in a transactional way.

Like, okay, these guys want to kill us.

Yeah, yeah, make them pay more.

You know, I get it.

We pay more.

What does bother me though with this populist streak of economics is you are correct.

Entitlements will bankrupt us.

It's a matter of simple math.

It's not my opinion.

The math doesn't lie.

I don't really care what anyone's opinion is.

They will bankrupt us.

And if someone doesn't tell America the truth, and we haven't been, we've been lying about it forever.

And it's not just, you know, people who are maybe MAGA or Donald Trump or anyone else who's like, hey, we got to leave this stuff alone.

There are a lot of Republicans who will just, it's the third rail.

They won't touch it.

We have to look America in the face and go, hey, listen, you're a senior.

I get it.

The government made promises.

Your whole life's been ironed.

You're done working.

We got to make it right for you.

We have to.

It's our obligation.

Okay.

I've got an easy life.

The biggest problem in America right now is obesity and the size of your flat screen TV.

You guys fought in World War II.

You guys actually did psych.

I don't even have a real job.

I talk for a living.

We'll take care of you.

But to this 50 and younger generation, we've got to be straight with them.

And we've got, that's a part of the Republican Party we can't fold on because you will be bankrupt.

You are at some point, you are going to have some monetary fiscal crisis that is going to make the Great Depression look like romper room.

You can't keep issuing voluminous amounts of debt and say this is worth something.

I mean, this mug has a purpose.

You can drink from it.

The paper doesn't.

Unless you're using it for fire.

The minute someone believes it doesn't have value, it doesn't.

And that's the streak of the party that really bothers me is that we got to get back to telling people the truth.

You know, like I was just watching a video of Pierre Polvier

talking about the housing subsidies.

He's like, it doesn't matter if I agree with Trudeau.

The math doesn't agree with Trudeau.

It doesn't matter what I think.

The math doesn't agree with allowing entitlements to go forward like this.

They don't.

And so obviously in total agreement with you on that.

And I think that that,

in the end, because the math is what the math is, that perspective is likely to prevail.

The foreign policy front has been very fascinating because you've seen obviously some breakdowns on the right with regard to foreign policy.

And I think some of that is, you know,

some of it is a little bit dishonest in the sense that I think that there's an attempt to label people, quote unquote, neocon who are not neocon by either a classical definition or by the new definition.

The classical definition was, you know, people who used to be Democrats and then became conservative largely because of crime in the 1960s and 70s and were fairly hawkish on foreign policy.

And then it became sort of Paul Wolfowitz, we will transform the entire Middle East into thriving multiracial democracies using Woodrow Wilson ideology, right?

And the truth is, I don't know very many Republicans who are on that side of the aisle anymore, like anybody who realistically believes that it's the job of the United States to go transform a tribal land like Afghanistan into a thriving democracy.

I think that the real sort of battle that's happening inside the Republican Party right now is more about

what are the actual interests of America.

And what I see sometimes is a willingness to ignore that question almost entirely in favor of sloganeering.

And that I find problematic.

So we'll take the of, say, Russia-Ukraine.

So I can see an argument to be made about what level of support is necessary to provide Ukraine with the weaponry necessary to repel further Russian advances.

I've also been making the case since probably April of 2022,

a couple of months after the invasion first began, that the best possible outcome was going to be a hardening of lines in Donbass and Crimea because the chances that Ukraine was ever going to take back that territory were incredibly low.

And so the United States might have to actually just foist that solution on the region by giving certain security guarantees to Ukraine, telling the Russians they better stop their.

And now let's just harden the lines where they are.

And that's presumably where eventually all of this will end.

One of the cases that I've seen made about Ukraine, however, from some people on the right, is that we have no interest in Ukraine.

And we should, it's of zero relevance to us whether Russia takes Ukraine at all.

Or if the United States continues to fund Ukraine, that's like an active bad that's bankrupting the country.

And there I have some problems in even understanding the argument, I suppose.

I'm not sure I understand why it's in America's interest for Russia to take Ukraine or why it's of no relevance to us, given that Ukraine not only is a massive grain producer, but also borders a bevy of NATO countries with whom we have mutual security guarantees.

Also, obviously granting enormous more resources, access to the Black Sea in new ways to the Russians.

I feel like it's in the United States' interest to degrade the Russian military capacity.

Beyond that, the sort of

idea that foreign aid is equivalent to putting boots on the ground in Ukraine is obviously not true.

It seems like a fairly, if we're going to speak about the cost of war actually pretty plainly, it seems like the amount of money we're spending in Ukraine is a lot of money also by comparison to the federal budget.

It's a very small percentage of the federal budget.

And the reality is that it's a lot more expensive if you have to actually start forward deploying in a lot of these areas.

This is a great question because I think these are the best questions on these types of shows because I think this is where there's some daylight between you and I.

Let's address the big one first, this evolution of Republican, the old three-stool Republican, but where national security and an aggressive foreign posture was kind of like a, you the shibboleth to get into the party, right?

That has completely changed.

You see it, you know, I'm not a huge fan of being on X all day because sometimes you get depressed with all this stuff, but you do get a real flavor for what people are thinking because you're microblogging live time.

You see the shift happen.

But I think there's a reason, and I think we as conservatives,

one, you're right, we have to stop the neo- it's just stupid.

Like it's become like kind of a way to just discredit someone before they even open their.

So just like stop.

Let's have a dispassionate conversation about why so many many people distrust the federal government's decision-making and foreign interventions.

Where have we won?

Where have we won?

No, I'm not, this is where I don't want, I don't want people to get upset here, but we could have won in Vietnam.

The politics weren't there.

We could have won in Iraq long term.

The politics weren't there.

Remember that whole line?

You got the watches.

We've got the time.

No, we hadn't.

No, no, it's the other way.

They knew.

Everyone knows eventually our American public, which is very wealthy, we're the wealthiest country on earth, they don't want their kids dying in these wars where there's not some immediate strategic outcome.

It was very easy to explain World War II.

Nazis, you want to be speaking German?

No.

Okay, these heroes are like, let's kill bad guys and save the world.

People say to themselves now, they go, yeah, Afghanistan fell.

Joe Biden sucks.

We probably should have done that differently.

And I'm not defending Joe Biden's decision at all.

But what happened?

Did your life change?

No one else's did.

And you know, I'm going going to tell you just a

personal story, but

I never met my uncle, Greg Ambrose.

He was killed in battle March 15th, 1968.

He was shot in Thuduck, Vietnam, in the back.

He died.

He was defending his friends.

He got the bronze star with a V device for valor.

He was a hero.

I never met him.

I was born in 1974.

Ben, my family was never the same, man.

I mean, my grandmother died depressed.

You could never mention Greg around her.

He died in 1968.

My grandmother died in about 2002.

You could not bring his name up.

Her mood would shift instantly.

You know, we owned a bar and the day he was supposed to come home, they had all the signs up.

This is how horrible the story is.

Welcome home.

You know, two soldiers show up.

Goosebumps talking about him.

And my grandfather.

My grandmother remarried.

She lost her first husband, Greg's dad.

So my grandfather was a big guy.

He owned the bar.

He was 6'5 ⁇ , like 400 pounds or so.

He used to do beer commercials and stuff.

He sees these guys first.

And they said, we're looking for

Eileen Kramer.

And he knew.

He's like, no, no.

They said, no, we have to tell her.

He said,

you're not.

I'll tell her.

And that was it.

She died with a broken heart.

And I get it.

You know, I'm an evidence guy.

And for as emotional, that story is.

One story doesn't make, you know, a single subject design doesn't make an experimental result.

But if I can't explain to someone a tangible goal with Ukraine, let's bring it back to Ukraine.

You know, think of Fox Conner's rules of war, right?

Don't go to war alone, don't go to war for long, and don't go to war unless you absolutely have to.

Eisenhower loved Fox Conner.

Do we have to?

Because I know on one end, you make a good point.

It is, one, saying Ukraine's not in our interest is clearly, that's just silly.

Like if we have interests in every country, they may be small, they may be big.

Zero interest in Ukraine is not a real position, okay?

The question is, is it enough of an interest to risk war?

But then you get to the next question, like, well, what do we make in our decisions?

Because every time we do something, Putin says, I'm going to, so what, we don't do anything?

I understand that position too.

My question to people is:

there's trauma, there's disaster, there's bloodshed all over the world.

In Sudan, South Africa is having a mess right now.

The ANC just lost for the first time since Mandela.

I mean, everybody's a mess.

We can't fix this.

And

what if they totally forfeit Kharkiv, portions of

Ukraine in the east?

Crimea is obviously gone at this point, and their ports in the Black Sea.

If I can't explain to you how that materially changes your life, I'm the commander-in-chief.

I'm sorry, but I can't make a good case for a prolonged interest.

I have no problem with intelligence sharing.

But attack them,

send them into Russian soil, which could escalate.

And okay, they escalate.

What's next?

Everybody talks about, oh, well, what if Russia wins?

It's going to be so bad.

Yeah, Putin's a terrorist.

That sounds like real shit.

But what if he doesn't win?

And some psycho takes out Putin because Russia starts losing.

And now we're, now I'd rather the enemy I know.

Nobody who articulates this view of what this Ukraine war looks like tells you what an actual win looks like.

I don't mean Russia.

So I totally agree with that.

And in fact, one of the critiques that I've made of Joe Biden is that he has never defined what victory looks like.

In fact, what he has said is basically Ukraine will define what victory looks like.

And then Ukraine says, well, you know what victory looks like is 2013 borders, not 2015 borders.

Exactly.

But I think that

the kind of nor the kind of,

I would say, middle-of-the-road Republican position, to be fair, would probably be no troops on the ground, which everyone agrees with, no actual American military men or women in harm's way, funding Ukraine necessary to prevent the continued takeover of Ukraine by Russia with an eye toward the off-ramp for a negotiated settlement that, again, allows Russia to probably take some level of win that Putin can go back to his people with.

Yes.

And that puts pressure on Komensky.

No, I totally agree.

If Joe Biden would say that, and I get it, like he's got to be careful.

You know, the politics say making love and diplomacy is best behind closed doors.

And is that the informal strategy?

Let's just cause enough of a quagmire that it really screws up Russia but doesn't cause thermonuclear war.

That's okay.

But Biden doesn't seem to want to do that either.

I mean, it's- Well, right, the lack of clarity for Biden is one thing.

On the GOP side of the aisle, the conversation you and I are having is like a normal conversation.

I think one of the conversations that I've been hearing that's weird on the right is this idea that Putin is somehow good or that Putin is somehow in the interest of the United States.

And I think there's a far cry from

that to I want to know exactly what our commitment is, how long our commitment lasts, and what that's supposed to look like.

And the truth is that foreign policy also is not measured in terms of six months.

So I couldn't tell you, for example, probably in 1952, what was the specific interest that the United States had in, say, South Korea.

I can tell you right now what the specific interest the United States has in South Korea, but it's only because South Korea exists.

And so one of the things that's very difficult about foreign policy is that an ounce of prevention sometimes

prevents the pound of cure that's necessary.

Also, sometimes there's no, as you said about the election, sometimes there's no counterfactuals.

We don't actually know what happens if people don't do the things that didn't happen.

And so when it comes to particularly foreign aid to foreign countries, as opposed to putting American troops on the ground or military materiel in places, which seems to me like a complete ratcheting up, and that's where you have to be incredibly, incredibly meticulous about should we even be doing this like at all.

When it comes to us signing some checks or emptying stockpiles of old weaponry and then refilling them,

to me, the kind of escalation of that into cause celeb on the right is a weird one.

It's a strange one to consolidate about, given again, that there are a thousand reasons to hate Joe Biden's policies.

And again, I think that he's screwed up in Ukraine.

He can't articulate his policy.

He's slow-walking aid, but we have to give more aid.

It's a fight for democracy, but else we're not going to give them the aid necessary to actually allow them to win.

It's all a mess, for sure.

But on the right side of the aisle, I think that there is a difference between sort of the conversation between realists of different perspectives, which is I think most of the conversation, and then the people who are very rare now, the full-scale neocons, and the full-scale isolationists who who are like, America is a nefarious force in the world.

We shouldn't be involved anywhere on Earth, and we should get the hell out of the way when anybody is fighting because American intervention only makes things worse.

Well, a couple of things.

First, one, I've, yeah, I've absolutely been categorical about Putin from the start.

And I say to anyone who believes this guy is even remotely some ally to any movement, belief the United States or country.

I've been in Russia a lot.

If you believe, you are being grotesquely misled.

The Russians are the best in the world at running operations, especially online now.

They abuse Twitter to make you believe Putin will say whatever he needs to say to get you on your side.

Oh, you're a Christian?

Oh, look, I'm a Christian.

If tomorrow he thought Israel would fight for Russia, he'd be like, I'm Jewish tomorrow.

He will say he's an intelligence guy.

He suckers people for a living.

That's how he stayed in power forever.

He's a scumbag.

He's a terrorist.

And most of the stuff that's happening happening in the world right now that's causing this geopolitical fracas would stop tomorrow if him and G would just be like, hey, how about we just get along, romper room style?

Like this isn't really hard.

They can't.

They can't.

These guys are revenges.

They just want to change everything.

But, you know,

on the Ukraine front, it's just one last time.

There is a template here.

It's the Reagan policy.

The Reagan policy, it sounds, I hate clichés, man, but they're clichés for a reason because they probably work.

This peace through strength thing is real.

We didn't go to war with the Soviet Union because they were scared.

Because they were like, this guy's freaking crazy.

Look, he's building up nuclear weapons.

We've got a 500-ship navy.

What the hell is this guy doing?

We don't have to fight anyone.

There's only two ways to do this, okay?

Where people will generally leave you alone and not invade and kill you.

If you look throughout human history, you can be Vinnie.

Who the hell is Vinny?

Vinny's a kid I grew up with.

He's a real kid.

The kid was about 5'4, a buck 20, but he was legit crazy.

He would fight anyone, total New York kid, anytime.

I left the bar, Sally O's and Sunny Slubbins.

I walked outside.

He picked up a stop sign that fall off the ground and was fighting three guys with a stop sign.

I think weighed like 200 pounds.

I don't know how he was doing it.

And you know what happened?

Nobody messed with this kid.

Not that they couldn't beat him up.

They just didn't want to because he'd bite you.

He'd rip your...

This kid was crazy.

He's a real kid.

He did.

Nobody toyed with this kid ever.

And when someone tried to toy with him and didn't know him, someone would go, don't do it.

Trust me, don't do it.

That's like the Kim Jong-un type.

He's so freaking crazy that, yeah, we could wipe this guy off the face of the earth, but does anyone really want to risk that because he's just nuts enough to do something?

I don't want that, right?

I want the old Reagan approach.

That's the Brock Lesnar approach.

Brock Lesnar walks in a bar.

Nobody's fighting Brock Lesnar.

Why?

Because you're just not going to win.

He's so freaking big and just nasty looking.

He's the guy's like six, five, 300 pounds of steel.

Like unless you want to die, you just don't fight him.

So Brock Lesnar, the irony is he never has to fight unless he wants to make money.

That's what we do.

We go back to the Reagan era.

We go, I wish Democrats would cut the BS.

They should be like, tell you what, we're not doing five.

We're doing 600 ships.

We're going to triple our nuclear payload.

The nuclear triad, we're going to have the best triad in the world.

We're going to get bombers, hypersonics, and we're going to build a trillion dollar military budget.

You know why?

Because we're never going to use it.

And that's the glory of the, and we don't want to do it.

By the way, the magic of Donald Trump is that he was both of those things.

He's like crazy man.

By the way, he said that directly to me.

The reason to fundraise.

I'm not going to have both.

100%.

But you don't.

He literally said to me about Ukraine.

He says, you want to know why Vladimir Putin never invaded Ukraine?

The reason he never invaded Ukraine is because I told him I bombed the shit out of him.

And he said, Vladimir looked at me and he said, no, you won't, Mr.

President.

I said, I might.

Both are great.

But you know, it never happened.

He's a unique combination of both.

100%.

So, you know, final topic, because I know you have to run.

What we've seen that has been eating up the media coverage since October, obviously, has been the situation between Israel and Hamas.

And it is insane to me that there is such

a lack of understanding of the basic moral calculus between Israel and Hamas that the Biden administration has basically now been doing the PR work on behalf of Iran and Hamas in the weird belief that somehow if they sort of just calm things down temporarily, that his left won't eat him alive at the convention.

But that does have some deeper consequences.

I don't think that that particular conflict,

because it's so morally clear, the fact that you have hundreds of thousands of people on the streets of the West who are protesting on behalf of Hamas, that's a problem for the West.

Forget about for Israel.

That's a problem for the West, having a bunch of people out there who seem to believe that it is acceptable to protest on behalf of a group of terrorists who hate the West.

You know, it was Golda Mair, who really summed it up.

She said, you know, we can forgive you for killing our children, but we can never forgive you for making us kill yours.

This is obviously a really sensitive topic for me.

You follow me on Twitter or something, you know that.

I spent a lot of time in the Middle East, a lot, Jordan, Abu Dhabi,

Saudi, Kuwait, Israel.

And,

you know, when you were over there with the Secret Service, like there's no one protecting you.

Like you're it.

Like you're out there in advance.

You're protecting yourself.

So it was a really transformative experience because I'm not sure there's so many people with opinions online that are, you know, about this who know absolutely nothing about it.

It's really infuriating to me.

Go over there.

Just, I'm all at, you know what?

You want to kill Jews.

You hate Jews.

I'm never going to talk the crazy out of you, but just go.

Go visit Jordan or something.

I was doing this advance once for the First Lady, and I'm driving from Amman to Petra.

It's like a three-hour ride on Desert Highway every day.

And they would give me a series of these drivers.

These are people vetted by the embassy, but they're locals.

They're three-hour drives.

So after like an hour, they get

pretty much every day for two weeks, some driver would get, after like two hours, they'd be like, you know, Jews are dogs, right?

You'd be like,

this is every day.

And I'm like, really?

Like actual?

Like, how does that, how does that work?

And then they realize you're not, oh, I didn't mean this.

They don't want to get fired.

And I'm thinking, it really, I've never seen anything like, I've never seen a group of people so many people want to kill.

For reasons they can't, everybody wants to kill them.

They have, there's no real explanation for it.

Like, yeah, a banks or something.

Which one?

Like Bank of America?

I don't understand.

No one has an explanation.

And then you see this Hamas thing.

Clear as moral clarity cannot be clearer.

Savages rape women, kill people, cut their breasts off.

And then there's like women dancing at a festival.

What kind of dumb

do you have to be to be like, I don't know, this guy's got a point.

Like, what point do they, this is not an art.

This is not real.

Okay, I get it.

There are even disagreements with Israel about their internal politics some people like bb benny gantz i get i i i get it whatever you do your supreme court thing was a really there it was a huge deal you know the lefties i'm not talking about i'm talking about basic humanity

you 1947 to 68 who had the west bank oh the jordanians how come there's no palestinian state the answer is because the arabs hate the palestinians too they can't stand them Egypt tomorrow could evacuate all of Rafah.

Hey, come on in.

Come on in.

Everybody's going to be saved here.

They don't let him in.

Why?

Because nobody hates Palestinians.

That's not even a real group, by the way.

Nobody hates Palestinians more than the Arabs who made this group up because there's money in it.

UNRWA and all this other stuff, okay?

This is the biggest scam argument I have ever seen.

I cannot believe how many suckers fall for this.

And one more thing, too.

You get an intelligence briefing in every country you go to, right?

So you go over to the Middle East.

There's like a thousand terrorist groups in every country.

You're like, oh my gosh.

You're writing them down.

You're like, Joey Bagadona's terror group.

You're like, all right,

there's more.

And you're going.

Then you go to Israel and they're like, there's like one or two domestic terrorist groups.

Like, that's it.

Right.

And they're some hardcore.

And you're, oh, we're done?

Okay.

And then you think to yourself, like, if you're an Arab in Israel, you're really safe.

Like, unless some street crime happens to you, you're, you're, you're almost guaranteed, especially down in Jerusalem that's going to happen.

How many Jews live in the West Bank with the Palestinians?

Oh, and he has like none, zero.

And you're like, wait, there are Arab politicians in Israel?

How many Jewish politicians?

Oh, okay, the number is zero in the Arab world.

There's,

you got me, don't even get me going.

Because this thing's like, so, this so pisses me off.

Because here's one more thing.

Even for the people out there,

America first.

I'm with you.

I'm America first too.

I understand.

I get it.

I'm with you 100%.

These people don't see you as any different than the Jews.

They don't.

Their actual line is, first we get the Saturday people, then we get the Sunday people.

So even if you, for some bizarre reason, I don't like Jews.

I can't, whatever, brother, I don't know why you would say that.

Any other group of people, people look at you like, I don't like blacks.

Really?

Why?

No one has a real explanation for any of this, but it pisses me off because they don't understand.

They're coming for you next.

Nothing's going to save you.

You're not going to be like, no, on Twitter, I called someone a Zionist shill.

Okay, put your head in the guillotine.

They're going to cut your head off, dude.

They hate you.

They don't give a sh ⁇ .

They hate Christians.

You're not their friend.

They are using you.

And I cannot believe how many suckers fall for this.

Anti-Semitism is inexcusable.

But even as a practical matter, even if for some bizarre reason you hate X group of people, These people will kill you and your kids in a heartbeat and they'll throw them in a shallow grave and piss on you.

They hate you.

You have zero worries over in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.

You will not be killed unless it's by street crime.

I dare you to go over there.

Hey, I did a podcast on how much I hate the Jews.

Really, right off the roof,

they hate you.

I'm sorry.

I don't know.

I'm

obviously agree, but that tends to happen when you're sitting with Dan Bungin.

Oh, Dan, thanks so much for stopping by.

Really appreciate it.

It's great.

Appreciate it.

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