Shocking New Biden Cognitive Decline Details, Elon's Future, and Cory's Long Speech, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 1040

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Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at New East. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Liberation Day to you. You might have thought that was, I don't know, I guess kind of July 4th.
That's what the Trump team is calling today ahead of his big tariff announcement at 4 PM. Didn't we just have trans liberation day? What was it? They should, they shouldn't have kept it so close.
I was just, I'm exhausted from that celebration. Um, okay.
So anyway, we're going to have a big 4 p.m. press conference.

So the tariff thing will be all over the news this evening and tomorrow.

We'll have it covered for you in our AM update and then again on tomorrow's show.

And we will be hearing from the president in his Make America Wealthy Again Rose Garden address.

Plus the results of last night's elections, where the media hype did not deliver any actually close finishes in Florida or in Wisconsin. And I've got I got a clear take on what happened in Wisconsin.
And a bombshell new book reveals what Joe Biden ally Ron Klain, who was his chief of staff for two years, really saw while prepping for that disastrous debate. Now the stories come out bit by bit.
The stories come out about what they knew. They're all trying to save their own asses by being like he was a hot mess.
And I knew, well, why'd you lie to all of us publicly over? And how does that save your ass? Truly? How, like, why, if you were part of the cover-up, would you be so dumb as to grant a bunch of interviews acknowledging, yeah, I knew. I just, why wouldn't you just continue the lie? I had no idea.
It's an interesting question. We'll attack it among others with our guests today for the full show.
The guys from the fifth column podcast who are celebrating their nine year anniversary this week, Camille Foster of Freethink, Michael Moynihan, host of Two Ways, The Moynihan Report, and Matt Welsh of Reason Magazine. You can find their work and subscribe at wethefifth.com.
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Welcome back, guys. Hey, Megan.
Thanks for having us. Hey, media queen.
Happy anniversary. Thank you.
Thank you so much. But not as long as you guys.
It's been nine years. Media queen.
Yeah. What can I turn to, and there isn't Megan Kelly this past week and a half? Oh, thank you for that.
Well, congrats. I understand why the show has withstood the test of time because there are very few rivals to the top quality work that we get from the fifth column.
And I mean that sincerely. You know, I love you.
You have great judgment. Thank you.
Thank you. I do.
That's true. We have to start with Biden because this was not going to be our lead today, but

this Guardian article is so juicy.

We got to do it.

So the Guardian got his hands on this new book.

It just hit, um, you know, shortly before we, we came out and, um, they, the, the new

book takes a deep dive into what Joe Biden was like prior to, um, his debate fall, uh, disaster. And trying, oh, the name of the book, Uncharted, Uncharted by some guy named Whipple, last name Whipple, Chris Whipple.
He's a reporter. Okay, so Ron Klain is no underling.
You know, he's not like some no-name staffer. He was the chief of staff from 2021 to 2023 and then returned last June, again,

not even a year ago, to run debate prep. So very clearly on the innermost Biden circle

and somebody who they trusted. And he, I'll just give you the third paragraph of the Guardian

piece. According to Klain, as reported by this book, Uncharted, it turned out Biden, quote, did not know what Trump had been saying and could not grasp what the back and forth was, left preparation for the debate and fell asleep instead by the pool, obsessed about foreign leaders saying, quote, these guys say I'm doing a great job as president, so I must be a great president, end quote, has the ring of truth, quote, didn't really understand what his argument even was on inflation and had nothing to say about a second term other than finish the job and get off my damn lawn.
Those two things weren't. No, I added the second one.
And there's so many other juicy quotes in here. We'll go through it.
But can I just get your initial reaction to Ron Klain laying it all out there, or at least most of it out there, to this reporter for his book? Anyone? Ron Klain is one of the biggest modern villains in American politics, and this just underscores his absolute duplicity. He was described in a lot of reporting.
Wall Street Journal was probably the best on this before it was popular to talk about Biden's not just his cognitive decline, but the shrink wrap, the bubble wrap, Operation Bubble Wrap. It was literally called to protect him from, I don't know, having meetings with anybody.

Ron Klain was the lead of that. He was described as having more power as a chief of staff than just about any modern chief of staff.
He would run interference anytime someone dared suggest that Biden had any cognitive problems. And he was still saying this in August last year.
He was complaining that they've been forced out Biden in August of last year and saying that he was fit and sharp and all of this. So I enjoy him attempting to salvage what remains of his reputation.
But he's a bad person. mm-hmm i'm reminded of the biden quote the only biden quote i really like good luck in your senior year that's that's what i have say to Ron Klain.
It's a great quote. I don't know where it comes from.
The inanity of it really works, though. Go ahead, Camille.
I don't know if I'm being more fair to him or anything like that, but I do want to try to say the best case scenario here, and it does seem binary. It's either he's being aggressively duplicitous here or he's a total moron.
the fact that all of us from so far away could like see joe biden's decline in real time and noted regularly and that these people like the best explanation explanation for their or the best accounting of their behavior and their oh my god i can't believe this happened it was so terrible um is that they just didn't see what was going on they were oblivious to the fact that this man didn't know where he was most of the time. And here, at least, he seems to be admitting, like, we are doing debate prep and the president can't keep up.
After 45 minutes, he didn't seem to know where he was or what he was talking about. He couldn't understand that when he looked into the camera in a kind of confused way, that wouldn't suggest to people, wow, Donald Trump is saying crazy things.
It would suggest to people that this guy really has no idea what planet he's on. And it was, I mean, this should have been a five alarm fire for them in real time.
They shouldn't have let him run at all. But certainly while you're in debate prep, even before it airs, you should be calling every single high profile Democrat, you know, leaking this story to every member of the press you can so that you can try to replace this guy on the ticket.
And they did not do those things in real time. They are waiting till now.
And that's the part that makes it all look so kind of gross and slimy. Also interesting that, like, where is Joe Biden? Like, it's not unusual for presidents to go dark after the inauguration.
He went to see a play. Like, Barack Obama, you kind of did see him around in 2017.
He may not have been giving grand statements. Joe Biden is gone.
They've disappeared him. It's nuts.
He might be on the International Space Station. Elon might have been responsible for this.
He might be in El Salvador. I don't know.
He might be in El Salvador. Yeah, he had the wrong tattoo and he got picked up.
No, I loved. Oh my God.
I'm not in a gang. What about Poyanda? I am in a gang.
My mom. Yeah, I told the audience my mom got a tattoo when she turned 70.
It's a rosary on her foot. Is she almost out of here? Oh my God.
Is that what's happening? I saw your mother and I was like, who's that elder stateswoman of the Venezuelan gang scene? And she doesn't wear Michael Jordan gear, but she does. She did go to a

garage sale once and come home wearing a

FUBU sweatshirt.

Oh, that's great.

For us, Irish.

By us, Irish.

It's a black thing. It's not for elderly

suburban white grandmas.

Are there photos of this, Megan?

Oh my God. If you want to remain

in the news cycle, Megan, that Matt is saying you're all over, just come next episode all FUBU gear. What you're saying is my mom is on the next plane to El Salvador.
Of course. That's the important thing.
We love you. We love you, Mrs.
Kelly. But please be careful.
Mistakes are going to happen. Like, that is still worth it.
I loved, by the way, on this, I saw some, you know, Ron Klain, no one was closer to Biden. So therefore, these stories have a lot of credibility.
There's no one who's further from Biden than me. And I knew this for four and a half years.
And if you went back, because we've been doing it for nine years, if you went back to us in 2020, I guarantee you there was some conversation about Joe Biden being too old. I was on Bill Marsha in 2022.
And I remember talking about this, that the majority of Democrats thought he shouldn't run again. Why? Because they thought, you know, he wasn't liberal enough or something.
No, it's because he thought he was too old. All of this stuff is just confirming things that everyone has known.
And by the way, there's one great thing is these quotes in there where the cadence of a quote makes all the difference. Like there was a quote in there of Donald Trump said it.
It would be the most Trumpy thing where he's like, I'm the best president. All the people in Europe say it.
I'm the best. They all know me, but I must be the best.
If Trump says that you start laughing, if Biden said that you're like, oh my God, he's going to wander into traffic soon. Like it's a crazy person quote.
It like, you know, Trump wants to destroy NATO more or less. Joe Biden thinks he's the president of NATO.
Literally. Let's Okay, let's get to that.
No, he's not joking. That's not an exaggeration for a bit.
Okay, let's keep going through the article. Okay, because my hat is off to you, reporter Chris Whipple.
You did a great job. I can't wait to read your book.
Okay, here's more. As described by Klain to Chris Whipple, at one point, again, I'm quoting you from The Guardian piece, at one point, Biden had an idea.
If he looked perplexed when Trump talked, voters would understand that Trump was an idiot. Klain allegedly replied to Joe Biden, sir, when you look perplexed, people just think you're perplexed.
And this is our problem in this race. Now, now who knows whether that's true i've got questions whether he really said that to joe biden okay there's more um uh okay the the uh whipple told politico last week in an in an interview about his book i happen to think that to call it a cover-up is simplistic i think it was stranger and way more troubling than that.
Biden's inner circle, his closest advisors, many of them were in the fog of delusion and denial. They believed what they wanted to believe.
They go on to talk about how even after the disastrous debate, according to Klain, to Whipple, Klain believed Biden should stay in the race. And then after he quit, that he should have stayed in the race.
And they talk about, OK, this is the juicy part, the prep for the debate. At his first meeting with Biden in Aspen Lodge, the president's cabin, according to Whipple, Klain was startled.
He had never seen him so exhausted and out of it. Biden was unaware of what was happening in his own campaign.
Unaware. Halfway through the session, the president excused himself and went off to sit by the pool.
That evening, Biden met again with Klain and his team. Biden aides Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed.
We sat around the table, said Klain. Biden had answers on cards, and he was just extremely exhausted.
And I was struck by how out of touch with American politics he was. So out of touch with American politics, the sitting president of the United States.
He was just very, very focused on his interactions with NATO leaders. And here it is, Moynihan.

Klain writes Whipple, quote, wondered half seriously if Biden thought he was president of NATO instead of the U.S. He just became very enraptured with being the head of NATO, he said.
Oh, my God. He thought he was the head of NATO and not the president of the United States.
That's according to his chief of staff for two years who prepped him for the debate that happened in June of this past year. We pulled a thought from Ron Klain from July 29th of this past year when he was on with that tough, I get to the bottom of all stories reporter, Kara Swisher.
Watch. Whether he was in good health or not, whether he was in good mental health.
Obviously, top advisors got blamed for this, the preparation itself, and also not being transparent, that he wasn't able to campaign effectively. How do you answer those critics? Well, look, what I say is look at what he did after the debate.
His speech in North Carolina the next morning was powerful and effective. He did an interview with George Stephanopoulos, I thought was very good.
He did a foreign policy press conference I thought was superb, a tour de force about foreign policy. He then went to Michigan and laid out an agenda for the first 100 days of a second term that I thought was a powerful agenda.
Got a great response at the NAACP convention. And so I think the proof that he could campaign was that he did campaign and campaigned very effectively.
The idea that somehow people weren't transparent about the state of his health or the state of his acuity,

I think is belied by the fact

that the president did events all the time.

And I understand there was a lot of viewership,

but he went to the Roosevelt Room a couple of times a week,

would make a policy announcement,

would take questions from the press corps.

A couple of times a week.

Listen to that guy.

The idea that people weren't transparent about his mental acuity is belied by his behavior. The same guy who just sat down, just sat down with this reporter.
And by the way, they sat down in September, according to The Guardian. He gave the interview in September.
So that's him on July 29th. The idea that people covered up his poor mental acuity is a lie.
You know, he did all it's belied by the tour de force. He said he did after that debate and literally within two months, he is admitting to Chris Whipple.
We wondered half seriously if he thought he was president of NATO. Can I retract my earlier statement? It's just duplicitous.
Yeah, that's the liar. And I love what it's like.
Is he president of NATO or president of the United States? It's like he's's neither actually. But there is actually not a small deal.
I mean, like decisions were made from that. And we don't know who did him.
And one of, one of the decision makers was exactly wrong claim. And allow me Matt to know to kiss up to our, our host who loves Kara, Kara Swisher so much, she's a great journalist that she is, um, is that there's two things here in that thing you just read there, the Whipple says, and I actually, I think this is actually a pretty smart analysis.
He's like, you know, it's actually darker than just a coverup that there was a delusion. And that strikes me as probably true.
I mean, just from, from his reporting, but there's two tiers of this. There's the delusion from within the white house, but there is a cover-up and it's from people in the media.
That was where the cover-up was. And remember all of these quotes from people like, uh, on morning Joe, like, Oh, I saw him do a pole vaulting yesterday and he cleared like eight feet.
And I was like, wow, he's the top physical health.

Kara Swisher asked that question and does it, by the way, in the, you know, some critics say, not me saying that some critics say. And then he gives this bullshit answer to which there's a thousand examples of what he just said not being true.
and you're not ready with those on a sheet of paper saying,

yeah, but Ron, X, Y, Z, all the things that happened in the past month that showed that he didn't know where he was and just wasn't being responsive to me. I'm like, the problem with Trump in a way is that you can't get him away from a camera like 40 hours in a 24 hour day.
I don't know how he does it. But,'s the opposite of biden's true yeah yeah all right so here's more uh because he's not done clane um and jeffrey katzenberg and others tried to get biden into shape two mock debates were organized focusing on domestic policy because not neato he no for love of God, they must have been like, for the love of God, please don't ask him about NATO.
Don't talk about NATO. Oh, my God.
Ask about NATO. Okay.
The first was scheduled to last 90 minutes, but Klain called it off after 45. The president's voice was shot and so was his grasp of the subject.
All he really could talk about was his infrastructure plan and how he was rebuilding America and 16 million jobs. He had nothing to say about his agenda for a second term.
Klain says Biden grew irritable, saying he would not make promises as he would be criticized for failing to deliver. So he knew he knew right there he wasn't going to be delivering.

Klain said he tried to persuade Biden to run an unfinished business, including his attempt.

Listen to this.

This is the best, including his attempt to subsidize state and local efforts to do child

care and bring down the cost to twenty dollars a day.

And you ought to try to fight for it again.

Whipple goes on, quote, Biden seemed befuddled, quote. Well, that just seems like a big spending program.
Wow. Amazing.
It's like these truths, you know, it's like they come out when the filter goes with with elderliness. Yeah.
Klain said, no, sir. No, it brings down costs for people.
It's responsive to inflation. It will bring more people into the workforce.
It's good economics. And, you know, this is something you're for.
I'm quoting. That is the weirdest.
That is the weirdest moment. Like, I mean, as Matt said, there were real consequential decisions being made and it's not clear who was making those decisions and this highlights and underscores that biden did also have a moment like this though back when he was vice president where he's publicly talking about um uh student loans and federal subsidies for higher education and he just kind of candidly acknowledges in public in full view of everyone in front of a battery of cameras.
Yeah. I mean, they, they, they raised the prices of college.
I'm sorry. Federal subsidies raise the prices of college.
So every once in a while, the truth just slips out there. Um, but apparently other people are just telling no, no, no, this is, this is what you actually believe.
It can happen when you're overtired. It can happen when you're drunk.

And it can happen when you're elderly and dementia is setting in.

Right?

Like you just kind of lose the filter.

You get, I mean, Brit Hume once told me as you get older, your give a shit meter just changes.

And I think that's true.

But also your ability to like even filter it at all.

And I think that's what Joe Biden's suffering from there.

Like, no, that just seems like a big spending program. It's your program.
You're for it. No.
Yeah, no. I like that Joe Biden, who cares about big government? That's amazing.
Dementia Joe Biden is the best Joe Biden. Dementia Joe Biden is like a Hayekian.
It's unbelievable. I don't know if I misheard this, but you said he was getting debate prepped from Jeffrey Katzenberg, right? Yes.
Yes. So this is a claim fellow aides and visitors, including the film mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, tried to get Biden into shape to mock debates organized because here's domestic policy.
Here's a problem. Don't trust the guy who had a media organization that wasted 1.1, what, two or $3 billion in seven months and went out of business.
The last thing that we need is Quibi. Yeah, the short form thing that we all want.
It's like- Five minutes. Yeah, because everybody wants five minutes.
Joe Rogan just did an episode for three and a half days and people are still watching and they love it. But we need five minute videos.
Thanks to Jeffrey Gatzenberg. We live in a TikTok

world, Boyne Han. He was just the head of his time.
Yeah, it's just out of touch. You get a 70

year old media mobile who just pissed away a billion dollars. That'll save it.
Talk about

missing the moment. All right, here's the last part of it.
Okay. After he explains to him,

you are president of the United States, not NATO. Don't talk about NATO.
And also you are for

I don't know. After he explains to him, you are president of the United States, not NATO.
Don't talk about NATO. And also you are for this policy on subsidizing state and local efforts to do child care.
You're for it. You've been pushing it for many years, sir.
This is something you support. OK, it's not not a big government spending program.
Not Biden, quote, didn't want to talk about it. And, quote, 25 minutes into the second mock debate, the president was done for the day.
I'm just too tired to continue and I'm afraid of losing my voice. And I feel bad, he said.
I just need some sleep. I'll be fine tomorrow.
And he went off to bed. The president was fatigued, befuddled and disengaged, writes Whipple.
Klain feared the debate with Trump would be a nationally televised disaster. It was on 27 June.
Biden arrived at the Atlanta venue with just minutes to spare because Klain said he was the president of the United States. They weren't going to start without him on stage for two hours and six minutes.
Biden stumbled, stared and mumbled. As described by Whipple, Jill Biden praised her husband's performance.
She was like, there is no way I am leaving this White House, people. This is the nicest place I've ever lived.
I feel important. I love being on Vogue.
I think I'm secretly the president. And he did fine.
It was great. But all others around the president.
She didn't want to go back to her medical practice, Dr. Biden.
Her medical, right. A real doctor.
Yes. All others around the president could see, quote, something was terribly wrong.
Whipple quotes an unnamed close friend of Biden who took a call from Valerie Biden-Owens, that's the president's sister and longtime advisor, who was, quote, so angry she was practically incoherent, runs in the family. And then the same friend reports later, this friend spoke to Joe Biden, who was laughing at his predicament and sounding like the senator and vice president of old.
Where did that voice go? The friend wondered. Where did that guy with that voice go? What the F happened to this guy? To Whipple, that was a question on which the political fate of the nation would turn.
Eventually, Biden bowed to reality. Klain took a call from Jeff Zients on 21st of July, his successor, a chief of staff.
Biden was out. Despite the debate disaster, the news was a gut punch to Ron Klain.
Jeff, that's too bad, Klain said, I think that's a mistake. I think this was an avoidable tragedy.
How, how is it avoidable? Well, honestly, what is Ron Klain trying to do here? Go ahead, Matt. It's avoidable if your chief of staff, who is one of the only people in your inner circle, along with Dr.
Jill for two, three years, if that chief of staff, instead of protecting, encasing the president of the United States in bubble wrap, says to people in 2021 that this is happening because it is happening in 2021. He is witnessing it.
It was not a surprise. It suddenly came down from the heavens in the summer of 2024.
This is something that has been long gestating that we've all noticed and that certainly he noticed more than Kamala Harris also noticed and then pretended not to. It didn't really get many questions about it until like 88 days into our presidential campaign.
So the way that you avoid this is that you tell people ahead of time, you note that he's the oldest president in history and that he said he was only going to really run to forestall Donald Trump. And you start looking for alternatives.
Ron Klain chose not to do this. His tears are delicious.
Yeah, I mean, it's also the other thing to, I mean, Matt points out something that we tend to forget, because if you asked me early in the morning, I probably wouldn't even remember who ran against Donald Trump in the previous election. This Kamala Harris is so forgettable.
But imagine this when you have a party that's putting forward presidential candidates in the main idea of the campaign is avoidance. Right.
You know, Joe Biden is avoiding interacting with the press, interacting with people like, you know, every time there's a Joe Biden interview, people are like, you know, biting their fingernails. Is he going to just, you know, tank this one too and show people who he really is in the state of his brain, to be honest.
And then what happens with Kamala Harris? She becomes the nominee and she avoids the media for how many days? I mean, it's just like you have a party who's like, we don't want to interact with the American people or the media, right? And the media is on your side. The media is high-fiving you, trying to push you back into the White House, the party back into the White House.
And on the other hand, Donald Trump, love him or hate him, think he's doing a great job or a terrible job. He's constantly interfacing with people and with

the press. And sometimes that's going to produce some bad results.
But people like that. And they

also don't like a party that seems like they have constantly something to hide and are openly lying.

I mean, for Kamala Harris, Joe Biden's cognitive decline was pretty much her January 6th. Like,

she could never admit the truth about this publicly. Obvious political reasons.
But still, you are actively lying to the American people as you're running for office. And you're lying about one of the most transparently false things imaginable.
My boss is always great. He could totally do this job.
He should be running. I mean, he's great.
He could totally do this. There was never any problem.
No. To the extent that's true, you believe that's true, you're only demonstrating that you do not have the judgment to be president of the United States.
To the extent it's not true, then you are, again, just another duplicitous liar who is willing to say just about anything if it means that you get elected and get to stay in power. I think, Camille, this guy, Ron Klain, is worse.
He's worse than Kamala Harris on it, right? Because it's like Kamala Harris was you have to give her in a very tough position, only the nominee because he gave it to her. And, you know, running around being like, he's mentally infirm.
We all knew it. Yes, I saw it.
Is a way to win and not be then undermined by the guy who gave you the baton. But Ron Klain, as chief of staff, had more than enough opportunity to get this on record with powerful Democrats inside, outside the White House and to get it on record with media and to make sure the public knew before it was too late for them to switch horses.
And maybe that's why he feels the need to say now, no, it was never so bad. I didn't think he could do it.
It was never so bad. I thought he should step down.
And he gave this interview before Kamala officially lost, but let's face it, by September, we all knew the likelihood was that she wasn't going to be able to pull this out. So that may also be playing a role like I I was right.
Joe Biden could have done it. You know, there were there were some bad days.
And I admit that to this reporter, but he wasn't so infirm. In any event, what this says to me is they're liars.
They they stole a presidency. And I don't mean that in the sense Donald Trump means it from 2020.
I mean, Joe Biden wasn't president. He might have been president of NATO, but he was not president of the United States.
It appears that Ron Klain was and Jeff Zients was and Jill Biden was. And we really don't actually know who was president for most of the time or making all these calls.
And it's truly outrageous. And now bit by bit, they want to be returned to power.
No, they lost those two special elections in Florida, but that's Florida, which is very red. I realize they tighten the margin a little, but all right.
I mean, Republicans won by 15 points, right? It wasn't 30, but it was 15. But they did win that Wisconsin state Supreme Court election last night pretty

easily. They won this special election in the state of Pennsylvania at the state level, not a federal election.
And bit by bit, we're seeing Democrats put, well, voters put Democrats back into power because Trump is controversial. Trump's doing a lot of controversial things.
And it's just it's such a good reminder of what this party did to us for four years. They started dishonestly and they were dishonest all the way to the end.
Yeah. Interestingly, in Wisconsin, voter I.D.
manages to win pretty easily as well. So, you know, that's it's the sort of thing about that, Camille.
Yeah, go ahead. As much as I would love to say to our audience, and I'm sure there are a lot of Republicans and conservatives.
I know people want to celebrate that as like the silver lining. I saw Elon tweeting.
It was all about that. The truth is, that's not right.
That isn't true. The law in Wisconsin already was that you had to show a photo ID when you vote.
That was a law on the book signed into law. And Wisconsin voters had to show a photo ID this past election.
What they were doing here was writing it into the state constitution so it can't be changed more easily in the future. So that is another layer of protection.
But let's be honest, this was not all about the photo ID, which is it's already law in Wisconsin. This was about trying to maintain control of the state Supreme Court so they couldn't redistrict, bless these new redistricting lines that the Democrats want and capture two additional seats in the U.S.
House of Representatives. Right.
So just I believe me, I had a lot of people try to spin me on Twitter today about how, yeah, no, it's a real victory. I was like, OK.
And I was I was actually underscoring it for the other reason. I mean, I think you had Elon kind of just sky.
What is it? Skydive in. What is it? What do we call it? I don't know.
Helicopter. He helicopters it.
Parachute. Parachute.
Parachute. Like Scrooge McDuck.
He shows up and he tries really, really hard to move the needle in this election. And to the extent he did move the needle, it seems like he probably moved it in the wrong direction.
Like he energized Democrats in Wisconsin and that doesn't bode well. And I think that it's interesting.
I would completely agree. Republicans won handily in Florida.
They should have won more handily. And for Democrats, they definitely won in Wisconsin.
They kind of managed to bloody Republicans in Florida in an obvious way that is hard to deny. And for Republicans, I mean, eking out that win in Florida, it certainly could have been worse for them, but this isn't really good.
It wasn't an eke. And they won by 14 points and 15 points respectively.
That's, listen, the Democrats were outspending them almost 10 to one. It was literally almost 10 million to 1 million in one of those races.
And the Republicans, first of all, the Democrats, they're probably not going to have that kind of dough on every single House race on the next midterm election. And the Republicans will be more engaged and start donating and it'll be a bigger deal.
But they I think they knew at some level those two seats were not really in danger and they didn't really care about slimmer margins. They just wanted to keep it.
And they did. There was some kind of unnecessary panic about it for a minute.
And I don't think the Stefanik decision was more about New York than it was about Florida. But, you know, those margins, they don't surprise me at all.
And I don't think they mean anything because, you know, these are seats that Republicans won by, you know, 30 points and they win them by 15. That's meaningless because they're two people who no one had ever heard of.
They don't have any name recognition. They're special elections.
It doesn't mean anything. This purple state that is now a solidly red state in Florida.
And, you know, what the takeaway from this stuff is, oh, and by the way, about a voter I.D., that's a bipartisan issue, actually, not not when it comes to elected officials, but a bipartisan issue. When you ask the average American voter who's like, I'm a liberal, should you show ID? In Wisconsin, however, I think I looked it up last night, they had like 24% of Democrat support.
They had 77% of independent support and something like that. That's surprising.
So that's why it passed so easily. Yeah, that was surprising that there was that that low amongst democrats i hadn't seen that number the thing that that i've been saying this for years i mean i think this is like the like the steroid issue it's like in baseball it's like you know just if people take steroids they just hit home runs all the time it's like no you have to be a very good baseball player too that's the same thing with money and politics people yeah you you give you can give bazillion dollars.
The American people have a certain amount of wisdom in them. They're not dummies.
They vote for things. It doesn't, I mean, Elon Musk put in, I mean, George Soros, by the way, put in money to the other campaign too.
Forget about that. And Reid Hoffman.
And Reid Hoffman and, you know. We never hear about their billions they dropped into that Wisconsin State Supreme core base.
they're different. Nothing.
We only hear about Elon who does. It does look like he net net.
He outspent them. But like when you're talking about, well, 10 billion from Soros and Hoffman and 19 from Elon, like, OK, please.
Yeah. And Randy Randy Fine was outspent 10 to one and he won.
You know, I mean, I think Elon and I've heard this from a lot of Republicans that they worry about him as a messenger in person. I mean, he's not the most magnetic person.
He's a big odd. Well, let me ask you something.
He did. He flew out there.
He was there Sunday night. He put the cheese head on and he gave away a couple million bucks to people who would register for his super PAC to support judges in a certain way.
Yeah. I actually don't think that was it.
Um, this is my own belief. They, if you listen to the Wisconsin ads on, you know, leading up to this election, you would have thought that that woman, Susan Crawford was running against Elon.
Yeah. Democrats used Elon's donations and ultimately, yes, probably visit on Sunday night to turn him into the opponent,

you know, to try to say, like, he's buying the election. And, you know, Republicans have never been as good at the ad warfare and the messaging.
And the difference here, I think, is that even though Trump won Wisconsin, Big Daddy was not atop the ticket. And without him on the ticket, Republicans in swing states must learn how to win anyway.
Something which they haven't yet proven, you know, that they can win without Trump. And I think another problem they have is Trump is probably fine with that.
You know, he's like, yeah, sorry. You know, he didn't campaign for that Brad Schimmel.

And that guy had been critical of Trump in the distant past.

He was losing in every poll.

I only saw one poll toward the end.

I think it was by Trafalgar that showed him maybe up one or dead even.

And there was one other by Rasmussen, which, you know, both of these are more right leaning

polls.

I like Trafalgar, but I'm just saying every single other poll, the entire race here showed her up by a lot. So I think Trump accurately read the tea leaves and said, he's going to lose.
And I'm not going to put my name on the line and was fine sending Elon, who's already been taking a beating, probably for the president. You know, Elon probably doesn't enjoy this, but is willing to become the, you know, the poster boy for evil, even though he's saving the world in many departments because it takes some of the heat off DJT.
Yeah, he's the lightning rod. And it does make one wonder, like what would happen if Elon wasn't around to Trump's numbers? What happens in Wisconsin if Elon isn't around? Who gets sent as the surrogate

there? Is it J.D. Vance? And I don't know that that's much better for him, although he's also a bit of a lightning rod for the president.
But you do have to wonder if at some point in the not too distant future, Elon becomes more of a drag on the administration and its approval ratings and its attempt to try to get things done. I've said plenty of very complimentary things about Elon and his prowess

as an entrepreneur. I will easily defend him against allegations that he is a Nazi, but it is hard to argue that he isn't belligerent.
It would be hard to argue that all of his kind of operations and conduct with respect to Doge have been clearly above board and maximally transparent and conducted in a way that is clearly is deft and and sophisticated. It's the opposite of that.
And some of that is definitely on him and on the administration for not demanding more from him. So in a lot of respects, while Democrats are running against Elon, they're running against him because he's made it kind of easy for them to run against him.
No one's running interference for Elon. You know, he's running interference for everybody else.
He's taking the bullets so that Trump doesn't have to. Metaphorically speaking, of course, Trump's actually taken a bullet this very year.
But no one's protecting Elon. You know, he needs his own comm staff.
And by the way, he he he doesn't have one. Can I tell you something? It's alarming how unprotected administratively Elon is.
He does have physical security. He's got some resources.
Yeah. No, but I don't think anybody's going to mind me saying this, but I saw him at that All In Summit last September, and I went with Abby.
She goes with me to most places that I go and handles these administrative headaches that I don't have to deal with. He didn't have anybody.

And it was funny. Somebody was saying, like, if you want to get Elon, you know, like to book him, you just have to text him.
Yeah. Like you have to know him.
You have to DM because there's no assistant. So there's no question in my mind he doesn't have some massive comm staff that's trying to protect his reputation and make sure that the media is being fair to Elon, which they're completely not.
But that all of this, I think, has led to him becoming this like, I don't know, he's becoming, what's the word? He's a hate figure. Yeah.
No, but like when you're the battering ram, when you're the one who keeps getting battered on behalf of everybody else. I can't think of it right now.
The punching bag. Thank you.
He's the punching bag. Yes.
I got there eventually. But wait, here's Harry Enten on CNN talking about what he's saying on Elon Musk and the polling.
If you are a Republican candidate running in a swing state, you don't want Elon Musk anywhere near you. Yes, maybe you like the money, but you do not want his presence in your state.
Why is that? Elon Musk simply put is an unpopular guy. He is political poison.
Look in Wisconsin, his net favorable rating minus 12 points, 12 points underwater. That is an even worse number when you look nationally.
Look at that. It's minus 17 points.
So if there's one big lesson to take away from Wisconsin, Elon Musk does not help Republicans when he shows up. If anything, the data suggests that he hurts him.
I love his body language. Yes.
The bigness. He's the best.
You know, this is so entertaining. He's the best.
Harry Enten. I love Harry.
Don't come over, Elon. Just send a Venmo.
Can you send a Venmo? I accept those data points as real. He's not, you know, he'll give it to you straight, this guy.
But to me, it's so unfair because we had six weeks of he's a Nazi. He did a Nazi salute.
And now we've had another however many, well, two months of blaming, of course, everything related to Doge on Elon. But that all has Trump's blessing.
And by the way, Trump ran on finding these government efficiencies and was very clear that Elon would come on and a bunch of people in the federal government were going to get fired. It's been stopped at every turn by federal judges, but he's trying, he doesn't have to be doing any of this.
He doesn't have to do any of this. I really think he's been unfairly demonized.
There's nothing unfair. Oh, all three of you guys want in on that one.
That's a rare one, all three. We'll go around the horn.
We'll start at Moynihan and we'll go around clockwise. Go ahead.
I will say this. I don't know how many people who are being polled, the average American, Twitter is not real life, who is watching Elon Musk on Twitter.
We defended him for a very long time against like very scurrilous and unfair attacks. We are the type of people that Doge was created for.
We talk about the, you know, waste and inefficiencies in government and how they can be gotten rid of. But, you know, my estimation of Elon has plummeted because of Twitter.
It's like the guy just tweets stuff constantly that isn't true in his own AI grok. People do this all the time.
They say, scan Elon's Twitter feed. And is he like saying things that aren't true? They're like, it's like, yes, lots of stuff is not true.
And I think that's the thing about Elon. The other thing is that he's not Donald Trump.
Donald Trump can bullshit you and you're charmed by him. He's funny.
He's a TV guy. He knows how to play it.
I'm not saying you should do it, but he knows how to play it. Elon just does not like you have to have the personality for this.
Yeah. Going out there and the reason he's on stage is because he's rich, not because he has a personality.
And that personality that Donald Trump has would really help him. And I don't think those numbers would be underwater if he was like Donald Trump.
I don't worry. I don't worry about the fairness that is afforded to people who are exercising power, which is to say that it's not to it's not that you remove yourself from critiquing people who are being unfair to him.
But for me, the arena, the the locus of of you know doing political journalism and commentary is that you're critiquing people who were being unfair to him. But for me, the arena, the the locus of of, you know, doing political journalism and commentary is that you're critiquing power right now.
Elon Musk has power. He is worthy of critique.
As Moynihan points out, you know, he is he is polluting the informational ecosystem on a rather daily basis. And pursuant to the thing that we all care about, which is actually making government work better and make it smaller, we're about ready to ratify a $1.8 trillion year-on-year deficit year after year under Republican management regardless.
The Republicans are about to pass a continuing resolution that keeps funding the Department of Education. That thing that we're supposed to get rid of via Doge, that is the stuff that matters in a big, chunky way.
A lot of what Elon is focused on, sometimes correctly and sometimes incorrectly, is marginal stuff that doesn't even come close to mattering as much. So all of that says to me, pluses of low popularity, that the gains from Doge are going to produce a pendulum swing that's going to make the next person who holds power use it in a different way.

And then suddenly we're going to wake up and we still have this $7 trillion government

with a $2 trillion deficit.

Well, I will say, I mean, look, we'll see what Trump does when we actually get to the

budget, probably the end of this year.

But that continuing resolution was just like, let's just, we're going to kick this can down

the road and we'll deal with it all in one bill.

And I think that was smart. They just didn't, they didn't want to do that right up front as their first most divisive thing.
They had a lot of other divisive, important things to do, especially along the border. So I understand why even budget hawks voted for that continuing resolution.
Just like, we'll get there. Just give us six more months.
We will get there. Go ahead, Camille.
Yeah, I'll say briefly, and actually I'm going to say something else because this notion of fairness, I actually think, Matt, you probably do endorse some idea of fairness. Not so much that we're going out of our way to be polite to people and certainly not the kind of motivated journalism that we've become accustomed accustomed to where there's this almost coordinated effort to put out a really negative message about someone on the right the most nefarious possible reading of things but with elon he's just chosen really silly battles like the the aspiration of like getting all of the justices impeached and insisting that at every single turn when the courts try to stop something or ask even practical questions about the use of a rather novel legal law in order to try to accomplish something pretty dramatic like taking people disagree them to a country they didn't come from like at a minimum it requires like some scrutiny is defensible here and insisting that we should disagree you're talking about judge bos totally wrong.
No, I just mean, I love you. Keep going.
Well, I'm giving one example.

And I'm just saying that it's something that merits scrutiny, whether or not the decision

was right. Elon responds to every single one of these decisions, insisting that justices need to

be impeached. Maybe it's true.
It's not really practical. So if you want to make this a priority

messaging wise, that's a mistake. Trump does that, too.
And his his approvals. It's good for him.
I mean, it's not great. It would.
Yeah. It might be worse.
But it's higher than it's been in Trump's entire presidency, counting the first term. So they're not holding any of this really against Trump.
And I do think Elon's out there. You know, I remember at Fox News, whenever one of us would get in trouble for something dumb, we said, or really didn't say whichever, but if we were all over the news, Roger would go out there and do something controversial.
He would, he would draw fire away from his favorite anchors, his top anchors. And that was a loyal boss and somebody who knew, you know, how to be a sort of, how to run cover for somebody, how to help you when you're in trouble.
And I think that in part is really what Elon is doing right now for Trump. And I think Trump appreciates it.
I think Trump is loyal to Elon until he's not, you know, until Elon's run his course and is no longer, you know, is more of a drag than he is a help. And I think at that point, Elon probably will willingly step to the side.
He's got a lot to take care of. I want to play this one other soundbite.
That's pretty remarkable because to me, it's like the Democrats are the masters of these deep pocketed billionaires in politics, the masters. And the one who you see on the Republican side is Elon Musk.
You know, like that's, that's the main one you see. And he's become this larger than life figure in the world, not just in America, and certainly not just in American politics.
He's one of the world's greatest figures and will be one of the few people on the planet right now who will be remembered for generations in the way that Albert Einstein was, you know, in the way that Tesla was in a way that all these great inventors were. In any event, here are back back to Kara Swisher, sitting with Jake Tapper talking about the battle of the billionaires.
Listen to how they frame it. You heard anytime anybody brings this up, a Republican will say, well, what about J.B.
Pritzker? And what about George Soros? And what about this? What about that? And I guess the answer is, you don't see George, first of all, you don't see them out there talking. No.
Right. I mean, they might be giving money to organizations, this and that.
And people can criticize that. They all want.
But but the idea that like, oh, no, I am going to tell these voters, forget like hiring Scott Walker to do it or somebody on the Milwaukee Bucks. I'm going to tell them.
Right. No, he has to suck up all the oxygen.
There's only one other person that needs more attention is Donald Trump. OK, so it's it's all about Eli.
You can do it. You can give millions, 20 million if you want.
You just can't show up at a rally. That's that's what it boils down to.
I don't believe that. Where's the wall to wall negative coverage about any of these Democrat donors like J.B.
Pritzker or George Soros, for that matter? You only see that on podcasts and sometimes Fox News. And that's a silly standard.
Yeah. Yeah.
And like creating organizations like Soros has done over the years is a lot more influential than just showing up. of thing.
The Kochs got a lot of pushback over the years for creating organizations. They didn't go on stage much either.
Right. There's breaking news on Elon Musk.
I'll leave that as a tease. We're going to take a quick break.
Thankfully, the guys from the fifth column, as they always do, such gentlemen, stay with us for the full show. Don't go anywhere.
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That's L-A-T-T-I-C-E dot com slash no regrets. So the breaking news is that this is via Politico.
The headline is Trump tells inner circle that Musk will leave soon. Now, keep in mind, Elon Musk basically told the same to Brett Baer in his interview last Friday, where he said, just so you know, he's been hired as a special government employee.
That's a special role you can get as a top advisor to the president. And you only have a term of 130 days.
It's basically a way to end around Senate confirmation requirements. Joe Biden did this to Anita Dunn, that monstrosity.
She's a horrible lady. She was one of the key people over at the Time's Up organization that loved to go after any man who was a Republican.
But if you were a woman like Tara Reid seeking their help, it was a big middle finger because Anita Dunn was close to Joe Biden. So screw you, Anita Dunn.
In any event, she was a special government employee for Joe Biden. And the thing is, to be honest, at the end of that 130 days, they can just renew it.
So they can keep it rolling. You actually don't have to leave right after the 130 days.
But Brett Baier saw, we are, I don't know, a month or two away from hitting that point. He asked Elon about it.
Do we have that soundbite? I don't know if we have the soundbite. We don't have the soundbite, but here's what he said.
I'll tell you what Brett said, then I'll read you the political thing. He asked Musk on Thursday whether he'd be ready to leave when his special government employee status expires.
He essentially declared mission accomplished. Quote, I think we will have accomplished most of the work required to reduce the deficit

by one trillion within that timeframe.

And then this past Monday night,

Trump told reporters that, quote,

at some point, Elon's going to want to go back

to his company and added he wants to.

I would keep him as long as I could keep him.

On the heels of that comes this piece in Politico

that Elon Musk will leave the administration soon. Trump told his inner circle, including members of his cabinet, Elon Musk will be stepping back in the coming weeks from his current role as government partner, ubiquitous cheerleader in Washington, Hatchet Man.
President remains pleased with Musk and his Doge group, but both men have decided in recent days it will soon be time for Musk to return to his businesses and take on a supporting role, according to three Trump insiders who were granted anonymity to speak. There was a headline over in the Daily Mail that he has stepped down as the head of Doge.
That does not appear to be the case. That is unconfirmed.
It feels like, at least as of this hour, that's only the Daily Mail who's reporting that, and that's not in Politico, So we'll wait to see whether that's also true. But I think, look, if it's true that he's going to be stepping down from his responsibilities like right now in the weeks before he hits 130, there's a reason for that.
And my own guess, without having spoken to anybody on Team Trump, is this has been very hard on Elon. His Tesla stock is down, his company's being attacked.
Nobody wants to buy a Tesla now because they're worried their car's gonna get vandalized, keyed, that the place they have to go to recharge it is going to be set on fire with Molotov cocktails. They've been walking to a Tesla dealership that could be burned by some lunatic.
It's insane. We have hate crime charges now that the DOJ is trying to file against people doing this.
But other than, you know, yes, legally he's being protected by the attorney general, but like the left is celebrating this. You had Tim Walsh, the vice presidential nominee for the Democrats out there, talking about how joyful it was to watch the Tesla stock fall.
I'm sure Elon would love to get back. He got a president elected, or at least played a big part, get back to just trying to solve paralysis with Neuralink, trying to colonize Mars with SpaceX, trying to continue the fight for free speech on X, running the boring company where he's boring big tunnels underneath the earth to get people faster from A to B.
And I've missed one. I've missed one of the big ones.
I can't keep track. And Tesla, I guess, trying to improve our world for our children with more green energy cars, something the left should like.
In any event, what do you guys make of it all? I mean, a couple of things is that, you know, he should have anticipated this. I mean, this is not going to work for Donald Trump in the way that he did is not the same, obviously, as going to work for Mitt Romney.
I mean, it inspires a different level of hatred and bile from people. Look, I have a Tesla.
I was sitting in my car the other day because there's street cleaning in New York and I was moving in and a guy came up and knocked on my window and I rolled down the window and he said, you got to get rid of this car. And I was like taking a backlight.
I was like, so every time I go out, I look to see if it's been keyed. I mean, I live in a neighborhood that I think in, if it was like in the center of Caracas, people would be like, it's a little too left wing.
So I'm like expecting the thing to go up in flames at any point. But you're right.
I mean, look, in the break, we were just talking about, I saw this number and, you know, year on year, I think it was January and February in Europe, Tesla's sales are down 43%. I mean, they're down not as much in the US, but they're down considerably.
You know, the idiot, worst person in the world, Brad Lander, who, if you know anything about New York politics, I know Matt hates him with the passion that I do. He's going to sue Tesla on behalf of shareholders, like because of the pension fund and what he's doing to the share price, et cetera.
So yeah, he's being, he's being rounded on in every possible direction. And I think that, you know, you got to get back to your, your company.
I mean, you're the richest man in the world, but for how much longer, if you make a product become, and look, it's just, it's just a fact of politics that divisive. I mean, it's, it's, it's going to be a divisive thing.
I mean, I, I, where we do the Moynihan report show for two way, there's a Tesla dealership right around the corner. And I went outside yesterday and there was a huge protest in front of it.
I mean, it's like pretty unrelenting. And if you are a stockholder, I mean, you've lost a significant amount of money on this stock, depending when you bought it, you know? Yeah.
Yeah. Definitely depending on when you bought it, because the big drop in the stock, like it's still doing pretty well if you bought it a year ago.
But yeah, I mean, Elon's problems here with respect to Tesla are very complicated. I, too, own one.
But I, on the other hand, discovered that like my loan to value is absolutely terrible. So I just park it in Oakland overnight and I'm hoping that someone will actually set it on fire.
But I'll tell you, once they destroyed that car, I would go buy two new cars. Dude, you could park a Hyundai and it would be set on fire in Oakland.
No, you should be in Brooklyn. You should be in Park Slope.
You're in the wrong neighborhood now to get your Tesla. I don't know.
In Oakland, we get it in. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, it's just not political. Never you mind.
I think they'll get around to me. Maybe I just have to wait another week or so.
That's your. Yeah, I will go buy two new Teslers as the president.
Yeah, I love Teslers. Describing them.
They at least won't be impacted by the 25% tariffs that are coming. So that should make things a little easier.
What do you mean? It's a day of liberation. You sound like you have a judgment about it, my libertarian friends.
This is the third Juneteenth coming for us now. It's not time to be liberated from world crisis.
Well, look, I think it's sad. It's like, imagine living in the time of Albert Einstein, you know, or Thomas Edison, and having them say, I will help solve the nation's problems.
I'm happy to pitch in. And saying, no, we hate you.
That's what the left is saying. We know we hate you.
We don't need your brain to help us solve problems. I realize he's a controversial guy and he doesn't speak or opine with a velvet glove either.
He's not like super sweet. And I don't understand how people are having a negative reaction to him.
It's not like that. But I just think we're so lucky to have someone like that willing to touch government with a 10-foot pole.
It's not like Swift. She got booed at the Superbowl because she got political and she alienated half her fan base and half of the country.
And when I saw it, did I feel sorry for her? Not at all. You know, you put yourself out there.
You didn't need to get political, but in her case, it was utterly pointless. You have no political sway.
You just want to feel like you're more important. It's not enough for you to have a billion dollars before you're 36.
You want to feel like you have more influence than you do. And you found out the hard way that you don't.
With Elon, he actually is a very important person to have in the world and in this country. And on top of it, he did help get President Trump elected.
He actually did move the needle. I don't think there's any question about that.
So it really was valuable to us as a nation to have him get political, unlike Taylor Swift. So he did it.
I think he did it for his country. He did it because as a businessman, he saw all the red tape and the regulations we were drowning in and realized the average man could never fight this fight, never fight this fight.
So he decided to do it and he's paid a real price for it. And I think the nation should be in his debt.
Okay. Listen, I stole the last word on Elon.
That's that let's, let's move on. Cause there's so much other stuff to get to.
Let's spend a minute on Spartacus. Uh, I mean, Cory Booker, who, but he, this truly was like his, he, he held a filibuster.
I it's not technically a filibuster. And why isn't it technically a filibuster? Because he wasn't filibustering anything.
He just got up there and sent it well and talked for 25 hours without stopping. He didn't go to the bathroom.
He didn't eat. He didn't sit down.
You weren't allowed to, or it would be broken, but it wasn't a filibuster. He he wasn't trying to stop anything he was just up there to make a point that he's Spartacus I mean really it was about him and here he is after the fact now literally to this moment I have no idea what he was protesting I have zero clue I don't care but here he is talking about the sacrifice this required of him Saud 18.
But I really spent time dehydrating myself beforehand, so I did not have to go to the bathroom. You didn't have to go to the bathroom at all for 25 hours.
Again, my challenge was that my strategy was to stop eating. I think I stopped eating on Friday and then to stop drinking the night before I started on Monday.
And that had its benefits and it had its really downsides. And so instead of fighting or figuring out how to go to the bathroom, I ended up, I think, really unfortunately dehydrated myself.
Really, doesn't he remind you exactly of this guy. Specific incident.
What was the worst thing that happened to you in prison? It is easy to forget the past. And I cannot answer your question because I frankly do not remember.
It's Nelson Mandela for the listening audience. Not me personally, but many of my colleagues were bitten, but the experience was a very harsh one and jail is never good, especially when one has a family.
Hope was always there and This is what saved us. Same man.
It's the same thing. It's a new version of the same guy.

Yeah. is when one has a family.
Hope was always there, and this is what saved us.

Same man.

It's the same thing.

It's a new version of the same guy.

Yeah.

He's Nelson Mandela.

Still get a chill when I hear Mandela

talking about that stuff.

And also Cory Booker, Camille.

Please have some respect.

The Seinfeld of the Senate

giving his filibuster about nothing.

It just did not land all that well for that. He got dehydrated, sir.
Yeah, I don't believe you hear Chuck Schumer after he decided that 25 hours was quite enough. And he was like, the American people owe you the greatest thanks.
You know, the world Mars owes you thanks. You are the best.
And it's like, why?

Because he just rambled for 25 hours?

If no one says that to me, I talk nonstop.

No one, like for nothing too.

The exact same thing as him.

And I never get accolades for it.

Jesus.

No, it says anything.

I love the fact this is the Democratic Party now.

Like the conversation that everyone's having,

which is the right conversation, is that there's no policy, that you you guys have screwed things up how are you going to recalibrate and the idea is to have cory booker the most insufferable person in a building full of insufferable people talk for 25 hours i would literally vote for like american communist party before that for the democrats after watching that tried to watch some of it. I just had no idea what he was talking about.
What's going on with these deportations? We have that. Let's watch.
Do we have the Schumer? Here it is. For a question.
Chuck Schumer, it's the only time in my life I can tell you no. I just want to tell you a question.
Do you know you have just broken the record? Do you know how proud this caucus is of you? Do you know how proud America is of you? Yes. I got that top, though.
I had Chuck Schumer for you, Moynihan. But I have Frank Luntz for me.
Watch. What Cory Booker did over the last 24 hours may have changed the course of political history.
I watched a lot of it. I listened to words.
I listened to phrases, how he presents himself. Did he criticize Donald Trump? Of course he did.
But he struck the kind of tone that grassroots Democrats are looking for. He gave them a reason to fight.
He gave them a reason to stand up and say, this is my country, too. Okay, Frank Luntz, who, FYI, predicted Trump would lose in 2024 after the devastating September debate against Kamala Harris.
Okay, he's the same one who said the GO, the GOP would win the house in the 2022 midterms by huge margins that the GOP would win the Senate in 2022, uh, that in 2021, he said, Republicans are more pro immigrant than elites realize. And Democrats are more pro border security than elites realize.
He said in 2021, the GOP shouldn't use the term border wall. Um, it's, it's that they, they should use the term barrier.
It's more accurate and less ugly. This is the same man who wants you to know now.
Cory Booker just changed the world. Yeah, I'll probably charge you four hundred thousand dollars for all of those things to be wrong.
Can I confess something I've never said to anyone? Oh, please i vomited in uh his house i'm not joking i interviewed him i was so i interviewed him and i got sick afterwards i don't know why and i think it might is actually true it might have been because of the content of the conversation i'm not sure but yeah yeah i've never talked about that but that's a replica of the white house or something like that correct yes in the lincoln the lincoln bedroom and he has a replica? I've never talked about that, but that's true. Doesn't he have a replica of the White House or something like that? Correct.
The Oval Office. Yes, in the Lincoln bedroom, and he has a replica of the Monica Lewinsky dress hanging.
What? Were you in there? It's just like Kid Rock. Yeah.
Yeah, no, you have a lot in common with him, Camille. He's a big sneakerhead.
So, yeah, that's what else I found out, too. I mean, that's not a lot in common.
Does he know you vomited in his house? He does now. He does now.

No.

No.

It was 2016. Yeah.
Oh, my God. He makes his face off of C-SPAN and starts paying attention.
Shout out to Cory Booker for reminding us that the Senate exists because I haven't seen any news of that for years. But I was thinking back to the last time that I remember someone being captivated by an actual filibuster.
It's when Rand Paul filibustered 12 years ago, and very rightly so. It was an actual filibuster.
I want to stop a thing from happening. What was the thing that he wanted to stop from happening? John Brennan being nominated to the head of the CIA.
That was a good one, Rand. Li liar um and it was a good one and actually kind of it was sort of unplanned and more people joined as they went on and it became a critique of uh nsa surveillance and the ability for the obama administration to drone american citizens without due process due process um is something that we should uh champion regardless of who is president uh and uh and us of that.
But Corey Pugger could have, if you think of what is happening this week in the Senate, in American politics, in American life today on National Liberation Day, which is an absolutely comically ridiculous way to describe the imposition of import taxes in a nearly unprecedented sense. But the Senate right now has a bill on the floor co-sponsored by Rand Paul.
And just as we were talking now, endorsed by Mitch McConnell, very interestingly enough, to un-declare a national emergency, which is the fake reason that Trump is using to do tariffs against Canada, the national emergency of the 19 kilograms of fentanyl that came across the border last year. So he could have been working with Republicans who are defecting right now on a bill that would actually limit the president's power in a meaningful way, in a way that also would be have some symbolic resonance because you would see for the first time, really any Republicans showing any spine in opposition to Trump.
And instead he gave a 25 hour speech and talked about his water tablets and whether he like pooped on his own shoes. It's not as effective.
Look at me. It was a lot of detail about like how he hadn't eaten in a certain amount of time before.
And then suddenly you're thinking about Cory Booker's colon. And it's supposedly supposed to be inspirational to you.

Wow.

You're like, that's where you go.

Come on.

You know exactly what you're walking you through.

I thought my puking in Frank Luntz's house story was bad.

But that, you know.

He's trying to tell us I didn't want to get backed up.

I didn't want to have to run out of the Senate floor because, you know, I had to empty the poop chute.

That's really what he's trying to say.

It's not me.

It's a U.S. senator.

Same U.S. senator who said this nonsense when he tried to stop the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.
He literally said this. Watch.
And I could not understand, and I violated this rule knowingly, why these issues should be withheld from the public. Now, I appreciate the comments of my colleagues.
This is about the closest I'll probably ever have in my life to an I am Spartacus moment. God.
Yeah, that's it. This is all about Corey.
He lacks tact in the most profound way. Like that's that is actually the thing that makes him uniquely annoying and frustrating.
And I think Matt is exactly right. Like he could have used this in a way more tactical way if all he's trying to do is engage in this kind of project of self-aggrandizement and strengthen his bid for supremacy in a leaderless party that apparently was being drug around by the nose by Jasmine Crockett for about a month and a half.
So at least that moment seems to have passed for now. But I will say, if I could say one positive thing, it's that he broke Strom Thurmond's record here.

And Strom Thurmond's record.

Yes. who have passed for now.
But I will say, if I could say one positive thing, it's that he broke Strom Thurmond's record here. And Strom Thurmond's record from the 1960s is when he was filibustering.
When he tried to stop the Civil Rights Act from passing. The Civil Rights Act, yeah.
So, you know, along the grounds of states' rights, defending the rights of the states to actively discriminate. And of course, the Southern way of life, as Strom described it as the time.
Strom seems to have found religion on these matters later in life. So I don't, you know, whatever, hold it against him.
But I'll give him points for having at least dislodged that record. This is a slightly less embarrassing thing for someone to have done publicly.
For the record, I want it to be known and I want it to be quoted that Camille Foster does not hold the segregationist views of Strom Thurmond against Strom Thurmond. That's good to know.
I'm nothing if not generous. I care about people.
I want the best for everyone. Yeah, but crossed it off my list.
I was waiting for the day. I'm glad.
I'm glad it finally happened. We love you.
There's a lot to get to. We've got to spend some time on the deportation

of the guy who's El Salvadorian.

He's Salvadorian.

But if you read The Atlantic,

you'd probably think he was a U.S. citizen

who'd never done anything wrong.

I came to the story late because I was off on,

I was traveling yesterday.

And then later on Monday,

I went out to California to speak with a lovely group of people. In any event, what appears to have happened here, very long and involved story short, is this guy sneaked into the country illegally in 2012 from El Salvador.
He did not claim asylum or any of that nonsense. He ultimately got arrested.
And in response to that arrest,

wound up in an immigration court where he said, or where others said about him that he was a gang

member and that a judge, an immigration judge found there was credible evidence and that he

was in fact, a part of MS-13, a dangerous gang. Then it went up to a higher appellate court judge within the immigration system who said, yep, I see it too.
The guy's a danger to society and no, we will not be releasing him. And he still did not claim asylum.
And it wasn't until he was on the brink of being deported, we were saying, get out, you have to go back home. And he had already in that time that time met an American, married her and, uh, his two brothers came, they got green cards.
He, they had a baby. He's like, Oh, I really don't want to go.
And suddenly it was an asylum claim. Suddenly he claimed I need asylum.
It's very dangerous in El Salvador. There's this terrible gang.
It's not MS 13. It's a different gang that I never heard of.
And, um, if I go back home, I'm going to be killed. They're going to kill my whole family.
we've been making some sort of food in my mom's house that has led to death threats against my mom and me and everybody. And you can't send me back there.
It was on the eve of deportation, which does undermine the claim entirely. And instead of saying, you know what, you can have asylum because the statute of limitations had passed on that.
You have to assert asylum claims within one year of getting here. And he didn't, he was well past it.
The judge said, all right, I'll give you temporary protection from removal. And all this judge said was, you may not be removed to El Salvador from the United States.
And that is the only blanket of protection this guy had over his head that we couldn't remove. But at any point we could have removed him to Canada.
We could have removed him to Mexico. We could have removed him to Colombia.
And what happened since Trump is now doing immigration crackdowns is they arrested this guy looking at that underlying history that I just laid out saying he's part of MSF 13 and a higher court confirmed it and said, you got to go. And if they had deported him, even without a hearing to any other country, including Colombia or, you know, take your pick, they would have been fine.
But instead, they deported him to the one country he's not supposed to go to under that non-removal blanket, which was El Salvador. However, Trump is allowed under the law even to remove him there if the threat that existed when we gave him the temporary protection has abated, if it's been lifted, if something's happened in the country.
And there's a real argument. I guess the president, Bukele, of El Salvador has cracked down on this other gang.
It ends in 18. I can't remember.
There's MS-13. Then maybe this is MS-18.
I can't remember, but it's 18. He's completely apparently eradicated this gang in the intervening years.
So even then, Trump would have had an argument that, you know what, the circumstances that led to his temporary removal have abated. And under the law, I'm allowed to say they've abated and he's out of here.
But he should have had a hearing about that. And they didn't give him one.
So they did commit a violation of procedure. And that's the story.
It's not great. But I will tell you up front, I view this the same way I view the death of Palestinians.
It's all on Hamas. It's all on Hamas.
That's really how I see it. Hamas committed a terrible, atrocious terror attack, and they invited this unleashed violence into their region that wasn't there.
Israel had no choice but to eradicate Hamas and gave warnings and tried to tell everybody we're about to do it. And this is where the bombs are going to fall.
Hamas uses its fellow citizens as human shields. And so I blame them for the violence that has happened there thereafter.
And that's how I see this. I think this too is the Democrats fault.
You opened the borders. You created a national crisis.
You let someplace between 10 and 20 million illegals flood into the United States, many of whom got social security numbers, many of whom we're now seeing actually voted, many of whom are taking our social services that we can't afford for our own people. Get out.
Finally, Trump is getting them out of here. And will there be some small, minor administrative mistakes in the process? Yes, that too is on the Democrats.
You created this problem. Trump is trying to solve it.
That he doesn't solve it perfectly on every day and in every way is not on him. It's on you.
You created a firestorm of immigrants that we're now trying to get rid of, and it's not going to be perfect or pretty. Okay.
So that's where I stand on it. My libertarian friends, I have a feeling you feel differently.
I agree with most of the explication of the situation. And it's one of the things I love about you, that you get all of the details with respect to the kind of nuances of the case, and that's totally appropriate and important.
But I want to draw a quick analogy to free expression. And I'm on the board of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, America's premier, perhaps the planet's premier civil liberties organization.
And people like us, and I mean us collectively, all four most of the people watching i'm sure are rabid free speech defenders and what that means is that in many instances you find yourself defending people who are saying awful things or awful people who are saying things that are just fine and ought to be okay and it becomes a difficult circumstance when most of the time that's greeted with a kind of disingenuous, well, you think it's a Holocaust denial is great. And it's not that at all.
We know that the procedure matters. We know that the marginal kind of edge cases matter a great deal.
And here we have a somewhat edge case, like a guy with a somewhat dodgy record, an uncertain circumstance with respect to the kind of his legal status and situation, but an admitted mistake on the part of the Trump administration, at least by the Justice Department, that there was a clerical error of sorts and they probably shouldn't have done things the way that they did it, which is at the core of much of the consternation about these deportations. It's easy to kind of talk about this in apocalyptic ways that are perhaps too absurd, but it's also important to just acknowledge what is happening here.
We do have a circumstance where people who work for the U.S. government will show up.
They will tell you what agency they're from, but sometimes they're in masks. Sometimes they're in unmarked vehicles, and they will kind of spirit you away.
And they'll move you around to different facilities in order to make it hard for you to kind of marshal, mount a legal defense for yourself. And then they'll ship you off to a country where we have very credible reports of systematic human rights violations and all sorts of other bad things.
Is that the kind of America that we want to live in? Is it better that they're going into the prison there as opposed to just wandering in El Salvador? I don't know. There are all sorts of nuances here.
And I think just in general, all I'm trying to underscore here is at a minimum, it's relevant that there are technical issues here. It's relevant that there are court objections.
And it's relevant that there are kind of public relations issues. But at the core is this idea that there are certain principles that we defend in this country.

And sometimes we have to defend those principles, even in contexts where there are people who are perhaps a little noxious when there are circumstances that make this less than ideal.

And one of the things I get it, I get it.

I can't disagree with it in principle.

Is like J.D. Vance's response to this.

No, I can't disagree with it in principle.

It's just we're at an emergency level here. You know, Americans are getting killed.
They're getting gutted and murdered by these animals, like the guy who killed Laken Riley, the guy who killed Jocelyn Nungare, a 12-year-old girl who got bound, sexually assaulted, and thrown off a bridge. F these guys.
I don't give a shit about their hearings. I don't.
I have to be honest. We're not deporting American citizens.
Nobody has said, oh my God, there's an American in the El Salvadorian prison. They are screening.
And the vast majority of these folks are already under a removal order, have already been adjudicated. And it might be all of them.
I'm trying to figure this out right now, whether everybody who gets on board one of these planes is actually under an order of removal that's already been handed down by a judge. They just then, what Biden was doing was, you get that order, and then he send you right back out in America.
Now, Tom Homan's actually trying to find them. But I'm pretty sure it's either the vast majority or it's all.
So they have had, in the vast majority of these cases, some due process, some hearing afforded to them way more than they, yeah, way, way more than you get in any other country. It's not like we've totally abandoned our principles.
And then there's that group under the alien enemies act, which was treated differently. And that's playing out in the courts.
And I'm on Trump's side on that too. But the left would have you believe we're actually just rounding up literally like we joked about at the top of the show, the Linda Kelly's of the world, you know, because they have a tattoo and a FUBU shirt, which is not exactly the same as being a member of MSM 13, which apparently they all love Michael Jordan and they wear red and they wear Michael Jordan sweat clothes in addition to a certain set of tattoos.
And I'll say one other thing. I realize you can have tattoos, whatever, but, and they say, and it can be ambiguous.
They say like a crown and there are certain other ones. But if you look at that photo behind Christy Noem, which I was very critical of her for doing, I did not appreciate her using human beings as props for her little photo op.
Um, they all have the same tattoos. It is like a uniform that screams trend that Aragua.
Um, okay. So anyway, you guys keep going on why I'm wrong.
Anytime that you say that, you know, I'm normally a favor of due process, but, you know, there is an emergency. My brain goes like, yeah, I remember 9-11 too.
But you don't see a difference on illegal immigration. I mean, we're not, on illegals.
You understand they get some measure of due process in the United States, but they are not entitled to anywhere near what a U.S. citizen would get.
Right. And I understand that in this particular case, the administration acted in defiance of a court order.
And I just can't get with that. You know, there's.
Would you care if he had been deported to Colombia? I don't think I would have cared if he'd been deported to Colombia, to be honest with you. OK, it's the technical violation of the hearing.
That's fair. Well, I mean, it's also this this administration and J.D.
Vance in particular, they've been cruising for a bruising. They want showdowns with the judicial branch.
They like this stuff. J.D.
Vance, who has misrepresented this case on several occasions, I think. He said the guy was convicted of being part of MSNBC.
It's worse than MS-13. It's MSNBC.
Now we're all in favor of him going. He said he'd been convicted, and that's not right.
He was adjudicated by an immigration judge, and then that was upheld by an immigrant. But it's not the same as as being convicted and he said that when he got into all this trouble with the courts it was 2019 under the biden administration and that was trump in 2019 but he also said it's gross for a gang member um for us to be more worried about gang members than victims of violent crime which is profoundly disingenuous i mean no it's true the But maybe the left is, but I'm not.
Like, and I don't know that I would make that claim about the left. But he's speaking to the Atlantic.
Like, that is the response to kind of categorically from J.D. Vance.
And I get it. Again, he's a politician.
I expect them to make these kind of... Where was the in-depth piece by the Atlantic on Jocelyn Nungare.
Where was that?

I can't speak to that.

You know, maybe The Atlantic isn't getting it right. That's because he's right.

They care more about these illegals who very much look like they're members of MS-13

than he does about the little girls,

than The Atlantic does about little girls getting sexually assaulted and murdered at 12.

If he'd said it about The Atlantic, he might be able,

he might be on slightly better footing. But he made a categorical statement and suggested anyone who has the Atlantic.
He started it off by attacking the Atlantic. It was in that same thread.
Ted Cruz made a very similar and very similarly sweeping argument to Ted Cruz, who once self-styled as a constitutional conservative. This is not a constitutional way to act in defiance of a judge's order.
And that's why the administration acknowledged its error is that you do have to at some point say, whoops, did a bad one here. So that type of broad sweeping language, again, is something that as a civil libertarian, I've been hearing for 38 years.
Anytime the other team, and for me, it's always another team, has the presidency, it's always an emergency. And so therefore we have to go through TSA.
We have to invade Iraq. We have to do this.
We have to withdraw this procedure that we used to have beforehand. And as someone who is married to a naturalized citizen, I remember very specifically the layers of procedures that were taking away in the 1990s.
Bipartisan signed into law by Bill Clinton when there was a big anti-immigration push in the mid-90s from both parties. That made it possible for there to be border guards at points of entry who, if they didn't like your look and you had not gotten your protected status yet, hadn't got a permanent green card, they could just stamp do not entry on your passport.
And you were screwed for five years. Those are the good old days.
Yeah, we're not doing this to U.S. citizens.
You're fine. If you're an American, you're good.
This is being done to illegals. U.S.
citizens. But the thing is, it's always done to people who have protected status.
Every time you crack down on illegal immigrants. Protected status still means you're an illegal.
It doesn't mean you're a citizen. It does not mean you're like they treat you like you're a citizen.
You're not illegal if you are a legal resident. You're not illegal.
You're just illegal. You have protected status.
You have temporary protected status, which is not the same as being a citizen. I'm talking about I'm just saying you're at the lowest nader of having due process rights.
And the media won't acknowledge that they do not get the same process as you or I would get if they wanted to get us out of here. Be really hard.
It's an edge. Yeah, it's an edge.
Exactly. It's an edge case.
And that's why I no sympathy. I think I speak for most people when I say, I don't care.
Get them out. Get them out of here.
And if they raise an objection, we find that there was a mistake. We can take care of it after the fact.
And we should take care of it after the fact. I mean, all it's going to take is Trump saying, let's move this one to Colombia.
That guy seems to be willing to take our prisoners or our illegals. I like go enjoy Colombia, sir.
Fine. You think you'll do better there? We'll see.
We can't take this care of this one after the fact. They said, oh, he's in a prison.
We don't know where he is. They've washed their hands of that mistake.
He's in that prison. We know where he is.
The Trump administration needs to clean up that piece of it. Like when we send the wrong people there, there has to be a clear procedure for getting them off to where they need to be, whether it's here or another country.
And there's one thing that I personally am struggling with in the deportations to El Salvador, which I'm looking into right now with my team. And that is why do they have to go to jail? You know, like we generally are not allowed to sell it, send anybody to jail unless they've had a trial on criminal charges.
So I don't, I totally get the plane loads to Columbia. That is the biggest problem.

Yeah, I'm less- It's also, by the way, not just the jail. I don't understand how we can just send him to jail.
Go ahead, Moynihan. Yeah, well, it's not just a jail.
I mean, I appreciated you having Glenn Greenwald on and having a debate about this stuff and kind of stuff around these cases. And I disagree with Glenn on a lot.
I'm on his side on this one, but like, the reason those gangs have disappeared in Bukele's El Salvador is because there's, you know, no civil rights that are left in El Salvador, right? No civil liberties. And that prison is the, I think, the largest prison in the world.
It has something like 45,000 people and 44,000, some insane number for such a small country. And they basically look, I mean, if you like that kind of living and it's a North Korean in its way, because there's no crime in North Korea, is that the murders have just fallen off to zero basically there because they put everyone in a prison.
The problem is, is it's not just some sort of holding cell. It's one of the most dangerous prisons on earth.
And it is one of the largest prisons on earth. And sending somebody back to the country from whence they came, I have no problem with.
Sending somebody to a third country and then depositing them in a prison should bother the conscience of everyone. And I don't think that's, you know, should they be here? No, of course not.
I've been gotten much more hawkish on certain immigration questions as the kind of number of people swelled and you saw it everywhere in New York City. And you're like, wow, this is this is actually a problem that the people are being incentivized to come here.
And obviously that incentive has been removed, but you can do that. And a disincentive created by showing Salvador on the, on the television.
And this is where we're going to send you. Yeah.
And that's wrong in my, in my estimation, because it would also be a disincentive. We shot them in the middle of the street.
We can't do that either. We shouldn't do things that are good disincentives that are themselves immoral.
I mean, putting people in prison or un-American, it's un-American. I just think it's like sending somebody to a third country that they are not from and into their prison system without a trial is just mind boggling to me.
Yeah. See, like this is where like if you've committed a crime here in the United States, in addition to crossing the border illegally, like an actual crime, and we just ship you off to El Salvador after you've had you because, you know, whatever you you you committed a crime and somehow you weren't you got out or, you know, some local sanctuary state let you out with a slap on the wrist.
That's a different story to me. Like you've had your due process because like when it comes to you, you're going to be imprisoned and you're going to lose your liberty.
That is a higher standard of due process. It's much higher than I will say.
One's kicked out of the country. And I will say one final thing about this that I wouldn't object to.
Laken Riley's killer was given due process and convicted of murder. On his criminal charges.
Well, I mean, either way, whatever the charges are, that if you sent that man to a prison in El Salvador, I wouldn't lose a moment's sleep. You know, a hairdresser.
Because we do have a general policy of providing the same due process to anyone, citizen or not, who's been accused of a crime, whose liberty we're going to take. They will get the same due process you or I would in a court of law.
They would. That's why this guy, Jose Arbera, who killed Lakin Riley, had a whole trial.
We devoted all sorts of resources to proving that he was her killer. That's who we are.
That's what we do that makes us very different than the vast majority of countries. But what's happening with these other guys is something else.
We're not necessarily accusing them of crimes. We're saying you committed a crime, one crime, by coming here illegally, and then you were adjudicated here illegally and told to leave, and you didn't.
So now we're getting rid of it. You won't leave on your own terms.
We will get rid of you. And so far, I'm fine with it.
Ship them to Columbia, ship them to El Salvador for all I care. It's putting them in prison where I start to get wobbly.
And again, I'm looking into whether that, what the legal justification is for that, because I actually haven't taken a hard look at it. All right, stand by.
We've got to take a break. More with the fifth column hosts straight ahead.
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Offer details apply. Guys, you mentioned it at the top, and the audience has heard plenty about it.
But as you know, I sat down with the New York Times, and they released an in-depth interview on Saturday, and then the piece hits in the New York Times Magazine this weekend. I'm told you have thoughts.
What are they? Well, one, that you did a great job. I mean, just in general, did a great job.
And it's funny, I was talking to your wonderful producer. Oh, you have many wonderful producers, but Steve Krakauer.
And I said earlier, you know, it's funny, like folks at the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets have spent so many years now just kind of demagoguing anyone on the right that when they actually have to talk to them face to face and engage in a sober conversation, they really don't know what to do. They either turn into Gavin Newsom and are kind of falling all over themselves to deny that they ever held the positions that they actually held, or they're kind of befuddled that the person I'm talking to isn't actually a monster who wants to rip my face off and say terrible things.
And you kind of got that dynamic. Like, Meghan is just being her usual self and acknowledging facts.
I criticize Donald Trump all the time. Like, I've done it in context where he was mad at me months before I went and showed up at a press event.
I'm candid about my actual views on things. Like, this is utterly defensible.
And it is all consistent with the things that you've been doing publicly. But for them, this is all kind of new territory in some respects.
They kind of have to sit down, take you seriously and soberly, and it doesn't make them look particularly great in every instance. But I thought you handled yourself very well in that particular interview.
Thank you. Not that you need my approval or anything.
No, no, but I'm curious because we had such a battle about media, you know, what the future of media is, where the lines should be drawn in today's media environment. You guys are in the same environment I'm in.
And, you know, she really seemed to be struggling with getting more opinionated to the point where you would endorse a candidate and still calling yourself a journalist. Yeah.
I mean, you can do that. I mean, I've been doing it for years and sometimes I separate those things when I do reported pieces and go all over and shoot things and they're not opinionated pieces.
And then I can come back and be opinionated. Right.
Lula Navarro, Garcia Navarro. Garcia Navarro.
She is now on CNN shouting at Scott Jennings or whoever's shouting at everybody around her. And she's being an opinion person all the time.
I mean, she just has the right opinion. I'd like to mention the Times endorses candidates.
The Times, most of these newspapers up until this past November, when they realized she was going to lose and they didn't want to piss off Trump, they almost all endorse candidates. And yet they still do journalism.
It's like having an opinion side, they have a news side and they

endorse. And that's the same as me, but all in one person.
Everybody has opinions. I mean,

the right does it, the left does it when you say, well, this judge was appointed by somebody. The

judge always has to be disappointed by somebody. You have to do this on a case by case basis

because everybody has politics. Everybody has opinions.
Every journalist who says they're

straight down. Matt's magazine reason has always been the most admirable that everybody has to confess who they're voting for in every election in the pages of Reason and show your cards.
That's the way you do it. Or to say that they don't want to tell you, but whatever.
We ask our staffers. We actually don't do endorsements at Reason.
The last endorsement they ran was in 1976 or something like that. But I tried to do this when I was at the LA times too.
Like, all right, you know, let's just list all of this. Cause one thing, it kind of takes away that as a cudgel, but another, if you pull your own, if you pull your own news organization, right.
Uh, imagine Megan over at, not just MSNBC, but an NBC news or also at Fox, that would be interesting. Pull all of your journalists.
Maybe you don't even have to make it public. If you have 99 percent voting for one party, you've got a screwed up news organization.
Why don't you want that information? Well, Fox would definitely have the most diverse employee base. Definitely.
There are tons of Democrats working at Fox. Young people who get in the news are all leftists.
They're all leftists. At Fox, some of them can be massaged out of it.
But when you first get into the business, you are. Go ahead, Matt.
Sorry. One of the only other outlets that do this is Slate.
I don't even know if they did it this past year. But as they went on, it would be like 55 Obama won Gary Johnson.
Like the numbers were always Jack Shaver. That's useful information.
And it's also like showing that you are, you have faith in your audience. You can handle this information.
You don't have to run scared from the LA times. And I was there was terrified that people would discover something about them.
Like, why don't you show it to the world? So like faith in your audience. It doesn't matter.
Yeah. Something has to be falsifiable.
Right. I mean, if there is a study that says, you know, uh, vaping is not going to kill you and they say, well, it was, it was paid for by the vaping industry.
It's like, well, can you replicate the study? I don't care who paid for it. Is it true or not? And that's ultimately the case with politics too, is that ideologically motivated people break some great stories on the right, on the left.
I mean, you know, the Pentagon Papers, there were people that broke that story because they wanted an end to the Vietnam War. And that was one of the most consequential pieces of journalism of the past 50 years.
Who cares about somebody's politics, provided they are they are giving you accurate, smart information that you wouldn't get anywhere else? I mean, I'm tired of this idea that we're all pretending to be above the fray. And, you know, European newspapers don't do that.
There's right-wing newspapers, left-wing newspapers, and they report from that general drift. That's fine, as long as it's true.
And just let me filter it, though. Like, if you're a hard partisan, I would love if you would just share that with me, as opposed posing as an objective journalist, who's just going to give me the straight facts.
And then, and then I can take it for what it's worth. You're right.
When you say it takes away a cudgel, Matt, that's the New York times would stop being this punching bag for the rest of us. If it would just say we are a left wing organization, we are going to report through our liberal bias.
Like we own that, take it for what it's worth. It may not be worth anything to you.
They wouldn't lose a single reader because all of their readers already know this, but it's just the reputation. They would stop getting battered as much by those of us on the right because they're pretending they're fakers.
And that's what's such a turnoff, right? It's like, why wouldn't you just take away the battering ram we've been using on you for all these decades? Because the jig is up. We already know anyway.
I mean, that was, wasn't that the first 10, 15 years of Fox News? Every time there was something that looked like it drifted towards Republicans, it'd be fair and balanced, eh? Yes. Just acknowledge what you are, and then that's fine.
No, that's right. And then they changed it.
Then they changed the slogan. Fair and balanced.
I don't know what the new slogan is. It happened.
We report. Well, you see, we report you decide, right? Well, that was always it.
No, but they got rid of fair and balanced. I think they, they, I don't know if it was because they wanted to lean more into like owning what they do, but I actually think fair and balanced worked because it was really like it provided balance to the rest of the news media, which was true.
And they did it in a fair way. It worked for me.
In any event, you guys, you also have worked very much for me today, both in fact and rhetorically. Thank you, as always, for being here.
Thank you, Megan. Thank you, Megan.
All right. Tomorrow we're going to have Michael Knowles and Anna Kasparian.
And then later this week, we're bringing back Mike and Dave, Mike Davis and Dave Ehrenberg,

and they are going to help us hash out,

and I mean hash it out,

some of these big legal disputes

that are coming down the pike

and have been getting fought

in the courts this week.

You're going to love that.

Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.

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