Rahm Emanuel on How the Dems Lost Their Way and Trump's Immigration Successes, Plus, Mark Halperin, Link Lauren and Dan Turrentine | Ep. 1112

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Speaker 13 Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on SiriusXM channel 111 every weekday at Noon East.

Speaker 13 Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, coming to you live today from the SiriusXM headquarters in New York City.

Speaker 13 We are only six months into President Trump's historic second term, but that has not stopped speculation about who's going to run for president in 2028. I gave a speech, as you guys know,

Speaker 13 last week out in Vail, and everyone there wanted to know who's the likely next Republican and who's the likely next Dem.

Speaker 13 I don't have a crystal ball, but I keep seeing the same names you guys are seeing. And over on Team Blue, one name keeps coming up is Rahm Emanuel.
Okay, he's the former Chicago mayor.

Speaker 13 He was Obama's one-time White House chief of staff. He certainly has a top-shelf political resume and is deeply connected to the Democrats' massive fundraising operation.

Speaker 13 And unlike some of the loons over on the other side, he's a centrist. He's an actual centrist.
We've talked about his potential candidacy many times here on the Megan Kelly show.

Speaker 13 Is he too centrist for his party?

Speaker 13 He's made a lot of enemies inside the Democratic Party over the years, and we'll ask him about how that might affect his potential chances.

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Speaker 13 Joining me now to discuss his life and career and future potential political career is Rom Emmanuel.

Speaker 14 Ron, welcome. Thank you.
Great to have you. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 13 So what are you doing here on the Megan Kelly show?

Speaker 14 I got a free hour. I thought I'd just come by, swing by.
Yeah. I thought there was lunch.
I thought we were going to have

Speaker 14 brunch or something. There will be.

Speaker 13 We'll have ice cream. We'll have bonbons.
To talk about the issues, talk about things. But you...

Speaker 13 You know, a lot of Democrats won't come on the show because they don't want to talk to somebody like me. So why would you?

Speaker 14 Well, I mean, you kind of started it because you've brought me up before. And I thought, well, if you're going to bring me up a couple of times, I'll come on the show since my favorite subject is me.

Speaker 14 I thought I'd do that.

Speaker 14 No, but to talk about things. And, you know, you say from team blue, which is fair.
I get that. But, you know, I think you would agree,

Speaker 14 and I think your listeners would, there's team USA before there's team blue and team red.

Speaker 13 I know. We see everything through the political lens.
Yeah. Just because that's what we do.

Speaker 14 So that's why. And I, you know, people have opinions.
I'm going to talk about

Speaker 14 what I think and also, you know, kind of just rip the mask off.

Speaker 13 All right, let's start with this because, you know, I came of age as a reporter at Fox News.

Speaker 14 And

Speaker 13 my show.

Speaker 14 There's a 10-step program for that.

Speaker 13 I'm not looking to recover, though. There were some years where I was.

Speaker 13 And my friend Sean Hannity used to refer to you every night as Rom Deadfish Emmanuel.

Speaker 13 And there is a story behind that.

Speaker 14 Yeah. What happened? Okay, so you got a,

Speaker 14 I don't know how much time, but I'll cycle it fast. It's good.
1988, chair, I'm a political director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, political.

Speaker 14 And it's the presidential year, George Washington. Kemp seat upstate New York.
We have this

Speaker 14 Dave Schwartz, candidate,

Speaker 14 clerk of the county. And he said that if he gets within a single digit, he's going to take a second mortgage.
We go from 36 down, 24 down, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 14 And then all of a sudden a poll comes back and it was, you know, five polls in a row. He's just four or five points, six six points, narrowing it, narrowing and nearing it.
And it blows up 18.

Speaker 14 And

Speaker 14 about four, and so he says, forget about it. It's like nine days out.

Speaker 13 Wait, wait, refresh me. Who's winning and who's losing?

Speaker 14 The Republicans winning, but the Democrats closing in consistently over two months. Okay, he's closing.
He goes.

Speaker 14 And

Speaker 14 then goes, blows back out 18 points. And the campaign manager figures out that the pollster

Speaker 14 had pulled the wrong group.

Speaker 14 And obviously, we weren't weren't going to win a lot of races, but to symbolically win in 1988

Speaker 14 Jack Kemp's seat would have

Speaker 14 bigger than a single district. It would have big national import.

Speaker 14 And it was too late then with seven days to go to really impact. Dave Schwartz goes on to lose by a few points in a presidential year.
So myself and a number of people sent the Democratic pollster.

Speaker 14 a dead fish for costing us a seat and i happen to sign it out it was great working with you etc So

Speaker 14 the pollster comes back after two weeks. The dead fish was in a box.
Oh, God.

Speaker 14 And opens it up stinking, da-da-da, sends me this long, eight-page, single-spaced letter of how horrible it has worked for me. And then this moment in time becomes kind of mythological of that.

Speaker 14 So that's where.

Speaker 13 Did you like it? Did you like the reputation or you don't like it?

Speaker 14 You know, like all things, not you, just because you work at Fox doesn't capture who you are, doesn't capture who I am. Uh, when it comes to my kids, I'm quick to a tear.
You wouldn't know that.

Speaker 14 When it comes to other people's kids, I'm also quick to a tear. I get very emotional.
My kids always say, you're not allowed to talk about us, grandpa, or dad.

Speaker 14 And on the other hand, I did it, so I own it, and I did do it because he cost us a seat because he made a mistake. But see, and I'm unmerciful in that sense when it came to winning.

Speaker 14 Well, this is probably why. That was me also, not to interrupt you.
No, go ahead.

Speaker 14 This is your show, after all.

Speaker 14 Is I'm a middle child, and I always joke that middle children wrote a book, War or Peace. We could do either one.

Speaker 13 But I think this is actually to your advantage in capturing this nomination, because I think the country likes a strong man, even though we were kind of pretending we didn't for a while.

Speaker 13 And I think Democrats are in need. of a strong man.

Speaker 13 I mean, I think the too many in the party have gone along with the like, no, we have to be, you know, everyone's toxically masculine and we have to over-correct the other way.

Speaker 14 And then keep putting out. I don't know the words, Tecumba, yeah.
So here's

Speaker 14 my thing: is

Speaker 14 one is when I'm having worked for both President Clinton and President Obama.

Speaker 14 And if you look at, and also an avid reader of presidential history, history, and in general, there are three qualities a president and a presidential candidate have to project: strength, confidence, and optimism.

Speaker 14 Nobody, if you look at history, Kennedy versus Nixon, just go through it. We never nominate the weaker

Speaker 14 or the more indecisive or the less optimistic, just full-blown. Second,

Speaker 14 and that's on a comparative basis. And second,

Speaker 14 winning is important. And I do think there's a currency in our party, and this is my theory of the case at least, where both candor, authenticity, and strength have a currency and have a blame.

Speaker 14 I kind of say that, and then there was an article the other day, and I forgot what paper it was, either the Washington Post or Political, that said Democrats were studying authenticity.

Speaker 14 Well, you can't study authenticity.

Speaker 14 That's such a kind of like, what's wrong? You can't manufacture your authenticity. You either are who you are or you're not, and I'm comfortable with who I am.

Speaker 13 They're studying, too, how to speak to young men.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 13 Yeah. Do you know why they're doing that?

Speaker 14 Well, one is there's a simple, they've lost it with young men for a whole host of reasons.

Speaker 14 And the other thing is because for you date your time there, I said basically COVID forward, maybe even a little before that,

Speaker 14 our party had everybody, including ourselves, walking on eggshells. Like it was so PC, you couldn't even, God forbid, you had to thought privately to yourself, and you were scared and jumped.

Speaker 14 And literally, you had this kind of flinch all the time. And that's ridiculous.

Speaker 14 And people did not, and not just young men, it was also, if you look at the data, even young women were tired of basically just a PC-type thinking and talking about stuff.

Speaker 14 and also this idea that you had to walk on eggshells. But the truth is, Republicans have the same kind of thing where people jump on them all the time, et cetera, inside their own party.

Speaker 13 They're not PC, though. It's for different issues.

Speaker 13 I mean, if you criticize President Trump within the Republican Party, depending on who you're talking to, you're going to get blowback.

Speaker 13 Though I think Republicans are more fractured and always have been than Democrats.

Speaker 13 I feel like Democrats stick together.

Speaker 14 You know,

Speaker 14 we both admire the other party's sense of loyalty.

Speaker 13 So you feel like like Democrats are more fractured internally in general as a group than Republicans are?

Speaker 14 Well, it's kind of Mark Twain's every zone.

Speaker 14 I'm a part of no organized party. I'm a Democrat.

Speaker 14 Look, I think Democrats, as you can see recently, have a little bit of a firing squad in the circle. Take a look recently.

Speaker 14 People, you can say whatever you want, and I have my disagreements, a lot of them, countless with President Trump, but he has brought us a level. of discipline and loyalty.
Take a look at this.

Speaker 14 On the big, beautiful bill, which I have my own criticisms of,

Speaker 14 People have voted for something they criticize, and now, as soon as they've done it, they're trying to earbrush the record. Take a look at Senator Hawley.

Speaker 14 He's now introduced, trying to eliminate all the Medicaid cuts that he just voted for. That was a big question.
So, has the president brought loyalty?

Speaker 14 There's an example A of what kind of loyalty he's brought.

Speaker 13 Do you feel like the Dems have changed on the PC, the over-the-top PC language police? I mean, because that's trickled down. I know you care deeply about education.

Speaker 13 That's trickled down into my kids' single-digit education all the way up through high school.

Speaker 14 Some elements, yes, and some elements, this is what does

Speaker 14 when you get to education.

Speaker 14 I mean, to me, you know, at another point in my life, early before I decided to go into public service or politics, I was going to be an early childhood educator. That's what interested me.

Speaker 14 My dad was a pediatrician. It was something that drew me.
And there is this kind of,

Speaker 14 you know, the fundamentals of education. we have missed.

Speaker 14 We now have the worst reading scores in 30 years, the worst math scores, and we're focused on everything but the most important thing, which is why you have three children, I have three children, why parents send kids to school to support the type of education we also try to do at home.

Speaker 14 And we've gotten focused, as I said, on things like bathroom access rather than classroom excellence. We've gotten focused, and I'm sensitive, to

Speaker 14 one person's pronoun versus the other 35 kids in the class that don't know what a pronoun is. And I'm sorry.

Speaker 14 35 kids not knowing what a pronoun is, having your worst reading scores and math scores in 30 years. We have a crisis on hand.

Speaker 14 Going back to Ronald Reagan's time where Bloom wrote the report, A Nation at Crisis, we're back to where we started, and we better focus on the priority.

Speaker 15 This is tomorrow.

Speaker 14 These are our kids. And I do think not just Democrats, but everybody,

Speaker 14 from the naming of a school to bathroom access, to who's playing in what sports. And the fundament, we've lost sight of

Speaker 14 the forest for the trees. And I think that's really, and we're supposed to be the adults and take care of our kids and nurture them.

Speaker 13 Oh, I don't disagree. We need to work on the basic reading and math scores, but I feel like the Democrats are the ones who introduce things like pronouns and the bathroom access.

Speaker 13 And those of us on what I call the side of sanity stood up to say, no, you're not putting your six foot tall boy in my daughter's eighth grade soccer class or gym, gym class.

Speaker 13 And that doesn't make me the one trying to ignore what's important about math and reading. It's a Democrat-created problem.

Speaker 14 Well,

Speaker 14 let me back you up a little. Not wrong about those examples.

Speaker 14 And we have a, and I want to say one thing here, and I do a shout-out for Mississippi. It's called the Mississippi Miracle.
10 years ago, they started this. Very tough demographics.

Speaker 14 Their reading excellence, unbelievable, Alabama on math. And I would nationalize that.

Speaker 14 I would say we're taking this at large because they've shown with some of of the toughest constituencies, poor kids,

Speaker 14 children from single parent homes, black kids, to make major gains in both math and reading. That's A.

Speaker 14 B, yes, Democrats played a role, but there's also politicization, culture wars by Republicans on what topics we're allowed to talk about, how we're allowed to talk about them.

Speaker 14 Do I think Democrats led that in kind of this whole pronoun debate? No doubt. And that's why they basically, and it's gotten us sidetracked.

Speaker 14 And we're stuck in a cold, not only a party, but more importantly, a country. And it's why, I'm going to be honest, I have my own view on what I would do on education.
I call it turret if I could.

Speaker 14 T for technology, and we should get kids ready with AI capabilities. A for attendance.
We have a massive post-COVID attendance problem. It's triple digits from where it was.

Speaker 14 And I would have a national,

Speaker 14 more than 7%,

Speaker 14 you repeat the clay.

Speaker 13 And absenteeism in a lot of the big cities up to 30% right now.

Speaker 14 You have kids graduating high school with a 20% absentee rate. That means they're not graduating.
They don't have the skills to go on to college and it's going to be remedial education.

Speaker 14 We're pretending. Right.
R for reading and using the Mississippi example to blow it up nationally, take it to every state. And T for truth.

Speaker 14 Parents should know where their kids are every grade level on national standards and where their kids' schools are at meeting those national levels for every grade.

Speaker 14 To me, if you do the type of thing, we can start to focus again on the most important thing, why I as a parent of three, why you as a parent of three, why a parent of two, one, whatever, send those kids to school.

Speaker 14 It's why parents move, like as I say, as a mayor of the city of Chicago, you know how I knew a school was doing a neighborhood was doing well?

Speaker 14 On the real estate form, they would say they're here in this school district. That meant that school district became a magnet for that area.

Speaker 14 And to me, that's the most important thing because we live in a time where you earn what you learn. And we need to ensure that every child has a chance to live up to their potential.

Speaker 14 And it only, it starts at school. But I would also, I used to, I fundamentally believe this and I,

Speaker 14 there are three doors a child walks through

Speaker 14 that will explain their future. The front door of the home, the front door of the school, and the front door of the place of worship.
And if those three doors are aligned, I don't care your zip code.

Speaker 14 I don't care your family background. I don't care your income.
That child's got a future.

Speaker 13 You know, I love hearing that. And I think we need to get back to that kind of a focus.

Speaker 13 I just, I have my doubts because my own experience has been with a, you know, a rising, as they say, about to go into sixth grade, ninth grade, and tenth grade

Speaker 14 errs,

Speaker 13 is there's just been so much ideological nonsense shoved down their throats. And we came out of New York City privates.

Speaker 13 That's where we were up until we fled in 2021 to get away from that and move to Connecticut. But it was so over-the-top, Rom.
I mean, you want them to to focus on reading.

Speaker 13 Now, obviously, New York City private schools are elite schools. They don't have to worry about reading scores and math generally there.

Speaker 13 But my point is, in these schools, my boys' school, they took three weeks to devote to transgenderism.

Speaker 13 Three weeks at an all-boys school trying to get these boys to spend time on whether you're sure you're a boy, might you not be totally sure, raise your fist, five if you're totally sure, four if you're only a little.

Speaker 13 I mean, it was crazy showing them videos

Speaker 13 of men and boys and skirts and dresses and makeup.

Speaker 13 crazy indoctrination and it's not just new york city you know so it's like to me it's so much more than a culture war it's you're messing with a child's mental health

Speaker 14 it's abusive there's look again i'm going to get back the three doors your kids are going to be okay they come from a loving i don't know you they come from a loving home and they have the sport they basically school backs up the education of child, which is my one, if I can take a side note.

Speaker 14 I totally hate this term homeschooled. Every child's homeschooled.

Speaker 14 Every child. It's a horrible term because it assumes that, no, every child's homeschooled.
The school reinforces the capabilities that the home nurtures.

Speaker 14 And the other door, the place of worship, which is important for a child's total character development. Very true.
Okay, now,

Speaker 14 was and is and does it continue cultural wars in economy? Yeah. It does.
I happen to think it happens on both sides. That's the way I look at it, et cetera.

Speaker 14 Things that are like topics like slavery that are totally kind of trying to be earbrushed out of history books. That's a cultural war.
You may not see it the same way. I think you do.

Speaker 14 The fact is, we teach kids, and we should basically focus on the fundamentals and get back to the fundamentals. I do think as it relates to,

Speaker 14 and I did this as mayor 2016, ambassador I worked with,

Speaker 14 you got an issue and you're working through on your pronoun, et cetera. I respect that.
I come from an inclusive kind of culture, but it is not the preoccupation for the rest of the class.

Speaker 14 The preoccupation for the class.

Speaker 13 So you want the schools to stop pushing that stuff?

Speaker 14 Yeah, here's my thing. I get, look, in 2016, I signed and passed an ordinance in the city council as it relates to bathroom access.
But my focus as mayor was on graduation rates.

Speaker 13 But in that, just to be clear, in that, you were on the side of the trans people having access to the bathroom of choice.

Speaker 14 Yeah, we dealt with that. It was an issue.
I'll give you that.

Speaker 13 Trump was also on that same side back in 2016, but has changed.

Speaker 14 Have you changed? No, my position, no, not from an inclusive standpoint. My point is, though, it's not the dominant issue.

Speaker 13 I get it.

Speaker 14 And so to me...

Speaker 13 But to a lot of us, it's really important.

Speaker 14 I get that. And you'll make choices.
Well, that's why I'm trying to. I'm not trying to nail you down on where you are.
I got what you're trying to do, and I'm trying to be the ballet dancer I was.

Speaker 14 I know. But you know, if you're going to really run for this position,

Speaker 14 you're going to have to take a position. Here's the thing.
I'll give you an example. When I was an ambassador to Japan,

Speaker 14 I had trans people working in the embassy. We worked on what our job was.
We didn't, that wasn't the focus.

Speaker 14 I respected what you made a choice, and also they're an adult. You're talking about kids slightly very different.
Very, very different. And a parent has a right to speak up at the school about this.

Speaker 14 My point, though, on this whole subject, though, Megan, we are talking about, let me give you an example.

Speaker 14 We're spending now, I don't know, eight minutes on this. There's 50 million.

Speaker 13 That's only because you won't give me a straight answer.

Speaker 14 We can move on.

Speaker 14 I'll give you a straight answer. Let me give you, let me get

Speaker 14 when kids go to public schools, to schools in elementary education in America. We're talking about 0.01%.

Speaker 14 Okay.

Speaker 13 I get it.

Speaker 14 But I know people. I don't think it died.

Speaker 13 But I know people who have been hurt by the boys who are participating in the sports

Speaker 14 and so on. And they matter.
As a father of both a son and two girls. They are fundamentally physically different.
And we have to understand.

Speaker 14 That's just biology. You get that.
Okay. So as it relates to sports.

Speaker 13 So let me just ask you a couple of things quickly. So do you believe boys should be able to play in girls' sports? No.
Do you believe that...

Speaker 14 Is this the round robin? Yeah, this is what we'll do quick, rapid fire. And then we can move past it.

Speaker 13 Do you believe that kids under the age of 18 should be able to be put on puberty blockers and then cross-sex hormones?

Speaker 14 I think parents have to make that decision themselves. I think that is too, a child is too young at 18 to make that decision.
It has to be made with a family and that choice.

Speaker 14 I think before somebody makes a life decision, they have to think twice about that.

Speaker 13 So you disagree then with the Tim Waltz policy in Minnesota where a child who doesn't get affirmed by his parents can go into Minnesota and get jurisdiction there and get the parental decision overruled?

Speaker 14 Yeah, look, I think these are life decisions and I'm also slightly both. I have two minds, not two minds, but two strains that influence an opinion.
One,

Speaker 14 There's a life decision and a child can't make that decision.

Speaker 14 You have to have some moral development and character and judgment and foundation for that. Two, parents have to be involved in that.
And I think that's for them to make.

Speaker 14 I don't think the public should be in that space.

Speaker 13 What if, I mean, there are some parents out there who are completely whacked in the head.

Speaker 14 There really are. They're not.
Well, that's not news, is it? But it's not just on, no.

Speaker 13 No, it's not news. But to me, it's terrifying because.

Speaker 14 Look, I, and the other, and I left this out, but I want to repeat it is

Speaker 14 I have a son and two daughters, and they are physically different. And that's why, when it comes to sports.

Speaker 13 Why did all the Democrats bail off of that point? The couple came out right after the election, and they said what you just said, and then they got brow beaten, and then they said that.

Speaker 14 And then you got the answers in the question. I mean, that's not ever scared me.
And you know, I used to say this to President Clinton and President Obama: sound is not always fury.

Speaker 14 Sometimes it's just sound. And don't assume just because somebody's screaming at you, they represent more than their own voice.

Speaker 13 Can should we be putting men in female prisons?

Speaker 13 Men claiming they're women? No.

Speaker 13 And all right, here's my last one for you. Can a man become a woman?

Speaker 14 Can a man become a woman?

Speaker 14 Not, no.

Speaker 13 Thank you. No.
That's so easy. Why don't more people in your party just say that?

Speaker 14 Because I'm now going to go into a witness protection plan.

Speaker 13 My money's on you.

Speaker 14 I think you'll be fine.

Speaker 13 No, it's just so nice to hear the truth said.

Speaker 14 We spent too much time on this.

Speaker 13 Without qualifications. Yeah, well,

Speaker 13 it just can't happen let's talk about i'm not saying medically i'm just saying it can't happen i got it all right let's talk about our cities okay um and nafta because i know you were you had a role in nafta and nafta has become so controversial now this north american free trade agreement that had the net result of shipping a bunch of american manufacturing jobs overseas or down to mexico And it's become super controversial with both parties.

Speaker 13 You can look back and find

Speaker 13 in-depth articles in the New York Times and, of course, over on National Review and the Washington Journal about what this has done to American manufacturing.

Speaker 13 My friend Tucker and many others have made this like a central plank that they want in discussions, which is how bad American cities have become.

Speaker 13 How you step out of the train station at Union Station in Washington and you're stepping over homeless people.

Speaker 13 You know, I went out for a premiere of a TV show in LA, literally stepping over homeless encampments just to get to the building, like open-air drug markets in some cities in California and further north in the Pacific Northwest.

Speaker 13 Here in New York City, you know, you've got human excrement on the street. You've got trash cans constantly overflowing.

Speaker 14 And that's why New York needs alleys like Chicago.

Speaker 13 Chicago don't even get started. Listen, Chicago had a heyday.
I lived there. I was there for five years under Mayor Daly.

Speaker 13 Those days are behind it. But this is my principal question to you, okay? Because Tucker and many others will use that as an opening to say, and therefore, why are we giving money to Ukraine?

Speaker 13 And I get that point. But I think, you know, there's another question to be asked, which is,

Speaker 13 does it have to do with federal money at all?

Speaker 13 Is the condition of our cities really to blame on the feds, or is it to blame on Democrat mayors in those cities and decisions like NAFTA that outshipped all the jobs that kept us?

Speaker 14 So let's go. You got like seven questions there.
So let me try to peel through all eight answers. Okay.

Speaker 14 One.

Speaker 14 First, let me give a shout out that's being lost in the national debate to cities.

Speaker 14 We're on course right now, and I talked to the mayor of Baltimore, Birmingham, Lower Rock, and Cleveland in the resume, probably the lowest homicide rate in recorded history.

Speaker 14 Baltimore has experienced the lowest homicide rate right now since 1968. So while there are.
How's Chicago doing? Chicago's also a reduction. Also.
But come on. Wait, no, wait, no, wait.
Look,

Speaker 14 I'm with you on homeless. I get the open drug market.
Nobody's been more outspoken about that. And you can go through my tenure.
But

Speaker 14 that doesn't obscure or brush out, and I disagree with you on this one point, that crime is on both homicide rates, violent, and also property crimes on historic lows. It's a fact that's happening.

Speaker 13 They said that last year, and it was debunked by the FBI.

Speaker 14 No, the FBI numbers, just anyway, you can look at the, we're gonna, we're gonna, you and I are gonna disagree to disagree on this one.

Speaker 14 It is on course for historic low levels. Now, as it relates to

Speaker 14 homeless encampments, I think municipalities, mayors have been way too

Speaker 14 permissive in a culture, as it relates also to drug markets. Way too permissive in a culture, not just for businesses, but most importantly, for families and for children.

Speaker 13 Giving out needles.

Speaker 14 And I think that the example, a mayor in San Francisco, at least what I've read, the mayor in San Francisco, I think, has got now the right approach to how to handle both of these issues.

Speaker 14 And it's also pretty clear, I can say this is, I was ambassador to Japan, came came back for the Asia-Pacific Conference in San Francisco.

Speaker 14 When a city wants to clear out homelessness, all of a sudden it happens when you have a bunch of foreign dignitaries.

Speaker 14 So when their own residents want it, you should actually be as vigilant as you were when foreign dignitaries come.

Speaker 13 Well, and you tell me Japan doesn't have these problems.

Speaker 14 They also have a different type of social system and a different, that's a longer conversation than the show permits. Second piece, and I would just not have a permissive culture in that.

Speaker 14 And Portland has now realized the wrongs of their ways. Parts of Seattle, you cannot allow a zone for open quote-unquote drug markets.

Speaker 14 It then becomes a permission slip to a whole host of other types of social and criminal aspects. So

Speaker 14 that's a massive don't go there.

Speaker 14 Now,

Speaker 14 two things that I think are really important. One is I think there was is the president himself kept basically the structures of NAFTA.
And

Speaker 14 by the end of President Clinton's term, just a fact, there were 300,000 more manufacturing jobs than when he came in. Now,

Speaker 14 I think there was a mistake made and no doubt about it. You can't leave Peoria, Battle Creek, Racing, Kenosha to confront on their own.
There was not enough support, not enough investment.

Speaker 14 America has always succeed,

Speaker 14 always succeed when you invest both in America and Americans. That's why I'm big about education, big about the investments in technology and in our strengths.

Speaker 14 The bigger challenge, I would say, is not so much NAFTA, but is what happened with China.

Speaker 14 That's where you really had a fundamental and

Speaker 14 big swaths of America were left basically to fend for themselves against the PRC, the Chinese Communist Party, and their strategy. And that's where you've seen the devastation.

Speaker 14 Now, do I think everything should be cleaned up? You've learned certain things after a certain point, vis-a-vis NAFTA, et cetera. I do.

Speaker 14 Both parties have kept it in place, the basic structure, because it's better to have, as Ronald Reagan said, two neighbors that are allies working with you, because that's a large economy and also brings

Speaker 14 capacity to focus on other parts of the world. Second, though, China coming into the WTO

Speaker 14 with all of us hoping they would stay as strategic competitors, not realizing that President Xi in 2012 decided that China was going to become a strategic adversary.

Speaker 14 And that unchecked, as you can see right now, both with the United States and the European Union dealing with China, that is where we've had a major devastation to the United States.

Speaker 13 So what would you say to men in those cities like Detroit wondering where their manufacturing job went? What's the Rahm Emanuel plan to bring it back?

Speaker 14 Well, one is build, baby, build.

Speaker 14 And my basic point is when we are short right now, not tomorrow, not looking to the future, which we are also short, massive amount of investment in carpenters, electricians, plumbers, operating engineers, the whole building trade.

Speaker 14 You can't AI that away and you can't get it to China.

Speaker 13 How do we do that?

Speaker 14 I'm going to tell you one thing. High school level.
Yeah, I'm going to tell you one thing we did in Chicago that I think should be a national program. And you have to hire career counselors, etc.

Speaker 14 You cannot get, we made it a requirement, starting your freshman year, we gave you support.

Speaker 14 You cannot get your high school diploma without showing a letter of acceptance from either a college, community college, a branch of the armed forces, or a vocational school.

Speaker 14 You had not just the Kelly children and the Emmanuel children, but every child had to have a post-high school plan. We changed the high school from a diploma-driven to a career-college-driven.

Speaker 14 And what comes next? There, you ensure that every child can invest. And let me say one side note.

Speaker 14 If you look at the American history, there are three great periods of economic growth, all underpinned by one thing.

Speaker 14 There's the land-grant colleges under Lincoln. There are the universal high school education at the turn of the century, and the GI Bill.

Speaker 14 You could also add to probably a fourth, NASA, in the science and engineering and basic STEM as a challenge to Sputnik. When you invest in Americans, America succeeds.

Speaker 13 Just to be clear, just to be clear, because there's a lot of my audience understandably has questions about whether the modern-day college education is a worthwhile.

Speaker 14 I didn't say college. I said college, community college.
I know. Branch Army.

Speaker 13 Let me finish the question.

Speaker 13 So I I wanted to pick up on the last thing you said, which is vocational education. So what would that look like?

Speaker 13 Like how to fix cars, how to

Speaker 14 community school. Everything from carpentry, electrician, IB, operating engineer,

Speaker 14 bricklaying, painting.

Speaker 13 Can you do it in high school? Like in my high school in upstate New York, we had the BOSES program, and you could actually do that in your 9th through 12th grade education.

Speaker 14 We created a high school in Chicago for exactly that. And you also, one of the things we did in our community colleges, we had dual credit, dual enrollment.

Speaker 14 So So we brought community college classes into high schools and kids went from high school back to the community college. A lot of the community colleges had carpentry.
They had electrical

Speaker 14 loading.

Speaker 14 But it's a requirement to get your own high school diploma. Your kids are going to know because they grew up in your home.
High school is just one step.

Speaker 14 They're going to know where you, if you ask your children, where you're going to be in four years or whatever, they have a plan.

Speaker 14 I just got to be honest, in the city of Chicago, which is true across the country, not just Chicago, some kids,

Speaker 14 four weeks is their plan, not four years.

Speaker 14 And making them think past high school, making it a requirement, stepping in where it's not happening at home, socializing this idea starting your freshman year is essential. That's number one.

Speaker 14 Number two,

Speaker 14 I happen to think investing dramatically in the most promising technologies of tomorrow ensures that America stays competitive.

Speaker 14 And so that's part of not only build, you got to build these data centers, you got to build the submarines that we need to confront China. And we don't have that capacity.

Speaker 13 We're not even really thinking about it.

Speaker 14 No, we're not thinking about it. We're not investing in it.
And the truth is the mistake of the last decade. The best thing I can say about President Xi is he woke us up about a decade ahead of time.

Speaker 14 Now, are we making the most use of the time? Absolutely not. We have to start investing quantum computing, AI, biomedical.

Speaker 14 take alternative energy, take all the promising technologies of tomorrow, massive investment in the research side, what I call that the brains part, and massive invest in the broad side so we have the capacity to make the most of this.

Speaker 14 And if you start with AI technology education in school, every child, every student will have the basics and fundamentals to succeed as you look around the corner.

Speaker 13 Unless the AI has already eaten us all by the time the children get this program.

Speaker 13 Let's talk about immigration because this is another issue in schools and elsewhere that kids are dealing with. I mean, in New York right now, it's crazy.

Speaker 13 The number of translators they have to have in the public schools, what the kids kids who are American-born are having to deal with.

Speaker 13 Why do you think Joe Biden let between 10 and 20 million illegals into the country?

Speaker 14 Yeah, so there's one is, let me start with what I think the challenge is.

Speaker 14 And I'm not sure why Biden did that or the Biden White House.

Speaker 14 You're also, and I want to preface, because not your audience knows this, my father is an immigrant. My grandfather on my mother's side, 1914, comes to America.

Speaker 14 We're a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants. That's who we are.

Speaker 14 And we're clear about the law. You break the law,

Speaker 14 the law is going to follow you. That should be simple.

Speaker 14 And we're also a nation immigrants.

Speaker 14 We want people from around the world who want a better tomorrow, people like from Asia, from Latin and America and Africa who want to come here and start a better future. Legally.
Yeah, legally. Now,

Speaker 14 that's number one. Number two,

Speaker 14 and I just note is recent recent Gallup data all about how the numbers on immigration have flipped on Trump.

Speaker 14 People reacted to the chaos on the border. Now, President Trump went from basically being the voice of order to the inspiration behind disorder.

Speaker 14 They do not like what he's doing in Los Angeles and around the country. They see him now the inspiration behind disorder.
And I think if I was for the Democrats,

Speaker 14 We have no disagreement on confronting illegal immigration. We should be for, let's have a discussion about legal immigration because there's a break.
You didn't answer my question.

Speaker 13 Why did Biden let 10 to 20 million illegal immigrants in?

Speaker 14 They were not focused on what they should have been focused on. The border should never allow to be out of control.
Now,

Speaker 14 you're also talking to the person that, for President Clinton, was responsible for Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego, Operation Safeguard in Nogales, Arizona. The border should be secure.

Speaker 13 So you disagree with what Joe Biden did?

Speaker 14 I disagree with allowing chaos at the border where people can flaunt the laws. As again, my North stars on immigration.

Speaker 14 We're a nation of laws and we're a nation of immigrants. You have to honor both.
You can't allow disorder at the border and assume there's going to be any respect for the rest of the process.

Speaker 13 Do you think, would you change any of President Trump's border enforcement mechanisms if you were elected president?

Speaker 14 The border enforcement,

Speaker 14 no. I do think it's a mistake to call out, you know, I say this, five years, President Trump's you know, first term, the first six months of his, the only place he's ever called out U.S.

Speaker 14 troops is on an American city. And I think that's absolutely wrong.
I do not, I, you have a prisoner who's illegal? Pick them up. If they're in the orange jumpsuit, take them.

Speaker 13 We'd love to, but the sanctuary cities don't allow it.

Speaker 14 No, no, but here's my point. That's a lot of states, all the states basically participate in making sure if you have a criminal element who is illegal, fine.

Speaker 13 No, they don't. The sanctuary cities don't allow that.

Speaker 14 You know that's true. Megan, let me then go farther.
You have people

Speaker 14 going to Home Depot to get a job. That's not the problem here.
You have people trying to go to a place of worship at the Catholic Church. That's not the problem here.
Border stuff, I said it.

Speaker 14 Problem is, and this is why President Trump's also numbers have flipped on this in the country, not only Republicans and immigrants. I've seen the numbers.

Speaker 13 The latest Gallup shows

Speaker 13 shows a shift in support on President Trump's deportation program.

Speaker 14 Yeah, and that's what we're talking about. That's right.

Speaker 13 You've endorsed the border policies, but not the deportation.

Speaker 14 No. And I'm also, to then get back to where I was, there is a split in the Republican Party on legal immigration.
Yes, there is. Chamber of Commerce, Republicans still want.

Speaker 14 And if Democrats were smart,

Speaker 14 we're good with you on illegal as it relates to the border. Now, let's talk about legal because that's where the wedge is in the Republican Party.

Speaker 13 They haven't, though. You know, they haven't.

Speaker 14 Well, I'm aware of that.

Speaker 13 That's what makes you a little different. And some would say, therefore, not electable by Democrats.

Speaker 13 Like, I can see Rahm Emmanuel, if he gets past the primary, appealing to some more centrist independent types. But that, you know, I had Mark Halperin on the program recently.
He's coming on next.

Speaker 13 And he was saying, you know, your biggest problem is going to be getting past the primary because with the Democrats who have moved to the left, who are endorsing Democratic socialists like Mondami and this guy in Minnesota.

Speaker 14 Well, look, that's what primaries,

Speaker 14 you know, President Clinton wasn't. who we know him to be, President Obama.
Primaries will prove something and we'll prove something.

Speaker 14 As I like to say, given the fields, we're all stuck at that big number, 3%. Okay, that's where we are.
I'll have to prove something.

Speaker 14 But, you know, sometimes when you say on the, let's say, just say, quote unquote, the progressive left,

Speaker 14 who,

Speaker 14 as you noted, or as Mark has noted, have a problem.

Speaker 14 Was it the free community college if you earn a B average in high school that you have a problem with? Was it the pre-K? It was the Laquan McDonald tape. Sorry, was it the minimum wage? Yeah.

Speaker 14 And the Inspector General said that and

Speaker 14 did a report on it. And look.

Speaker 13 Just the audience. See, let me just tell the audience what that is.
So when Ron was mayor of Chicago, there was an officer involved shooting of a black man named LaQuan McDonald.

Speaker 13 And there was a tape of the incident that was kept quiet, kept not accessible by the public by a decision by you for a year. And then ultimately, you can correct me when I'm done.

Speaker 13 And then ultimately, you released it, and it did show that the officer was to blame and that he shot when he shouldn't have.

Speaker 13 And then there was an immediate drop in polling in support of you by especially the black and Hispanic communities in Chicago. And some have never forgiven you for not

Speaker 13 releasing the tape earlier.

Speaker 14 You can correct me.

Speaker 14 As you're a lawyer, you know what the rules are as it relates in the middle of an investigation. So one, let me go all the way to the back.

Speaker 14 Laquan's uncle, who's a pastor on the West Side, big supporter of mine. And there's not a day or a week that goes by that I don't rethink what-ifs.

Speaker 14 And you don't get a do-over in politics. You only get lessons learned, applied forward.

Speaker 14 And I thought I had fixed the system beforehand. And clearly, the problems are much deeper.
And I own that. That's why, and I take responsibility for that.

Speaker 14 And the responsibility not only to fix it, but to also get the place of the city in a better place. There were seven attempts at police reform before I got there.
This one is finally sticking.

Speaker 14 And the other thing is, you know, Joe Ferguson, the inspector general, went through it and said I followed. The problem was I did follow the procedures.
That's the problem.

Speaker 14 Is they were put in place and you have kind of two tensions. On one side, if you got the FBI, U.S.
Attorney investigating, cities investigating, state is investigating.

Speaker 14 If you unilaterally make a decision, you hamper a criminal investigation. That officer went served three years.

Speaker 14 If you don't do it, you only drive the wedge between the police and the community even further. And so you're caught between this Solomon-like choice.

Speaker 14 Either one, one, you break the law, the other one doesn't.

Speaker 14 What I hear you saying is you think it's explainable you think you think this is not a deal breaker for you and democrat primary voters look i'll i have the responsibilities i did when i got senate confirmed for and for ambassador japan i will explain it i own it and if you're looking for a hundred percent nobody is but i learned my lessons uh going forward and that's going to be true for anybody who's a chief executive we tying together the the possibility of you as the Democrat nominee with our previous discussion on illegal immigration.

Speaker 13 You may be aware that Hunter Biden has some thoughts on you

Speaker 13 shared with a podcaster I do not know and have never heard of.

Speaker 13 Hold on a second. I'll tell you who he is.
His name is Andrew Callahan. Okay.
He's a three-hour long interview. This guy's a comedian and journalist and YouTuber.

Speaker 13 And Hunter had some thoughts on you, among other issues, including illegal immigration. Here he is.

Speaker 15 And he's somehow convinced all of us that these people are the fucking criminals? White men in America are 25 more times likely to commit a fucking violent crime than an immigrant.

Speaker 15 And the media says, well, you got David Axelrod and, you know, Rom fucking Emmanuel,

Speaker 15 so fucking smart, Rom Emmanuel. He said, we got to understand that these people are really mad.
And we got to appeal to these white voters.

Speaker 15 Ron, the only people that fucking appealed to those fucking white voters was Joe Biden, 81 years old. And he got 81 million votes.

Speaker 15 And he did because not because he appeased their fucking Trumpian sense, but but because he challenged it.

Speaker 15 And he said, you can be an 81-year-old Catholic from fucking Scranton that doesn't understand it, but still has empathy for transgender people and immigrants.

Speaker 15 And nobody said, oh, Joe Biden's going to turn us into a socialist state, no matter how much they said it. But these guys think that we need to run away from all values in order for us to lead.

Speaker 14 I say, fuck you.

Speaker 15 How are we getting those people back from fucking El Salvador?

Speaker 13 He's got a potty mouth. Neither you nor I have failed to utter that word in our past.
I know this.

Speaker 14 But we went 50 minutes here clean. He's a big fan of it.

Speaker 13 I don't know. I kind of like ROM fucking Emmanuel.
I could see that on a sign, like a lawn sign for you. Your thoughts on his thoughts about you.

Speaker 14 I'm kind of feeling for Axelod right now. He got thrown down in the gutter with me.
I've got a empathy.

Speaker 14 I don't. I think we're giving this more time than it's due.
That's my own view. Yeah.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 14 A little empathetic. You have a

Speaker 14 son who's blinded by his own love for, in effect, and loyalty for his father. And I get that, but

Speaker 14 not the first phone call I'm going to make for strategy.

Speaker 13 Good to hear.

Speaker 13 He's also been out there and said it there in part that saying the only reason that the Dems lost the last presidential election is because they weren't loyal to his father.

Speaker 14 Yeah, Megan, as you probably know, there's a lot of stories about Dems have to now start swearing to look like they're normal or something like that.

Speaker 14 I was 30 years ahead of my time. I'm like a good bottle of wine.

Speaker 13 Still not normal?

Speaker 14 I mean, I don't, I just, it's not, we spent two minutes way too much time on that.

Speaker 13 I'm not, this isn't about Hunter, but I know your brother Ari, according to the Jake Tapper book, was very outspoken about getting Biden off the ticket, saying he cannot do it. We need a plan.

Speaker 13 Come up with a real plan.

Speaker 13 You're not your brother's keeper, but you're Joe Biden's ambassador to Japan. Did you share those feelings?

Speaker 14 I was appointed by Joe Biden. I was America's ambassador to Japan.

Speaker 14 And that's how I took the role.

Speaker 14 But I was honored that President Biden selected me.

Speaker 14 So here's my thing: look,

Speaker 14 one, everybody said, oh, there was a cover-up or whatever.

Speaker 14 83% of the American people issued a judgment. If there was a cover-up, the American people were in on it because they had their own opinion.
Number two,

Speaker 14 does this look like subtle? quiet, reserved? No. Okay, so

Speaker 14 number three, I have a general rule. I mean, just look,

Speaker 14 oval offices are very seductive. Been in and out of them with two presidents for eight years.

Speaker 14 White houses, one of the challenges they have is not to be as insular as they become. It's pretty clear that both of those qualities played a role here.
Now, I slightly disagree with other Democrats.

Speaker 14 I actually think this was a winnable race.

Speaker 14 And

Speaker 14 it's pretty clear if you look at the data, it was a winnable race. And the real challenge, in my view, is why Democrats failed.
It was not going to be a blowout race, but you could,

Speaker 14 the data was there, and the capacity was there to win. And the Democrats fumbled it.

Speaker 13 You think it was winnable with Joe Biden?

Speaker 14 No, I bet it was a winnable race.

Speaker 13 Okay. No.
If there had been some sort of a reset.

Speaker 14 Look, 70% of the country thought it was heading in the wrong direction. That's kind of architecturally built in for a challenger.
But

Speaker 14 the day Kamala Harris takes over, the Democrats are down, Biden-Harris are down eight.

Speaker 14 By the time you get to her debate with Donald Trump, she's up three. That's not a statistical error.

Speaker 14 She was running on the economy, running on what I think is the most important issue, that the American dream is unaffordable. It's inaccessible to the American people, and that is unacceptable to us.

Speaker 14 This shouldn't be that hard. Owning a home.
has become a struggle.

Speaker 14 The system is stacked against people. It used to be

Speaker 14 okay. That's the fun.
And we went off on all these other tangentiers. They're telling you what the core thing is.
And when Kamala Harris spoke to it, she goes up plus three. After the debate,

Speaker 14 she wanders off into this democracy thing. So in a weird way,

Speaker 14 when she makes a break with Joe Biden and says,

Speaker 14 I'm going to be the future,

Speaker 14 I'm going to be change. She,

Speaker 13 I don't distinguish my agenda at all.

Speaker 14 Basically, debate or from the view performance. She basically, I'm going to be continuity.
She goes down. So to me, it tells you that, no disrespect to

Speaker 14 Hunter Biden's analysis, that this was winnable. Now, I do think there are

Speaker 14 below that surface, forget 2024 for one second.

Speaker 14 I think the Iraq war,

Speaker 14 the financial meltdown of 08,

Speaker 14 China into the WTO unchecked, and COVID have

Speaker 14 fundamentally not only upended our politics, upended our economics, upended our schools, and we haven't yet recovered from the totally agree with that. And every word.

Speaker 14 One,

Speaker 14 Iraq was built on a lie and a deception, and people responsible for it have never been held accountable.

Speaker 14 As somebody who in the Obama administration argued for Old Testament justice, the bankers should have been slap silly on the South Lawn, line them up and just beat the limb and crap out of them.

Speaker 14 And they weren't. They were arguing for their bonuses and people lost their homes.

Speaker 14 Number three, what we talked about China earlier still applies in this conversation, which is they were cleaning our clocks and we left America basically unilaterally disarmed to face off against China by themselves.

Speaker 14 And COVID also,

Speaker 14 and this is where I think Democrats have made a mistake, We donned the jacket of the establishment, follow the science, follow the science. Well, it's pretty clear, like take schools.

Speaker 14 COVID, as it relates to young kids, wasn't what it was related to people that were either both ill or much older. They're still suffering.

Speaker 14 And now we have an absentee rate of 20%, and we look at our shoes and we don't want to talk about it. So when you look at those four things,

Speaker 14 that is to me the biggest structural challenges of our society, our economy, and our democracy.

Speaker 13 Here's the thing I have to ask you: How

Speaker 13 is it possible for a cisgender heteronormative

Speaker 13 male who happens to be Jewish to get the Democrat nominee for president in 2025 America.

Speaker 14 Well, that's going to be up to the Democratic voters, but I'm going to make the best cut. Yeah, I got the number.
Don't worry about that.

Speaker 14 Look, let's just state like Jewish. Yes, I do, because I will say one thing.

Speaker 14 When I ran for Congress, my predecessors were Dan Rosenkovsky, Roma Paczynski, Frank Annunzio, Rob Mukovich, Flanagan, and along comes Ron Miserable Emmanuel.

Speaker 14 Same thing. There's only 2% Jewish in the district.
But the Dem Party has changed on this. I'm going to get right there.
I I want to say, I've had Nazi insignia

Speaker 14 sprayed on our fence. I've seen it.
And I've seen, I still don't know, somebody go clean it up. So I've seen the best of people.

Speaker 14 I've seen people look past, not past faith, or more importantly, not past my faith. Because it is who I am.
My name is Rahm Israel Emmanuel, not according to Hunter Biden, but it is who I am. Okay.

Speaker 14 So I look at that. And

Speaker 14 my faith and my Jewish education is what led me to public service. And I'm very proud of it.
Now, by the way, I am the only person who's ever gone toe-to-toe with Bibi Detenegu.

Speaker 14 He called me a self-hating Jew publicly.

Speaker 14 So I support the state of Israel. I support its existence.
I support it as a Jewish democratic

Speaker 14 nation, a sovereign nation. But I am willing, when I disagree, speak about that.
And I've said that, but do I think so? I do because in the end of the day,

Speaker 14 our party believes in both economic economic kind of equality and also equality in a political system. And this country,

Speaker 14 this idea, and I say this, I want you to hear, my grandfather came here from Ukraine with nothing.

Speaker 14 That his grandson, that he used to call a schmuck,

Speaker 14 could be both a chief of staff to a president, a senior advisor, elected to Congress, the mayor of the city that we called home, and then represent America over.

Speaker 14 This is the greatest country in the world.

Speaker 14 Not because of my success, but because of the story and the permission that it has allowed somebody whose own grandfather didn't have a bucket to spit in and a window to throw it out of could provide that opportunity.

Speaker 14 And I'll close on this because we didn't get to this about family.

Speaker 14 My parents

Speaker 14 in our family room had my grandmother's purse. with her and my two great aunts passports.

Speaker 14 And on either side of that purse were the black and white photos of my aunts, uncles, cousins, on mom and dad's side who never made it to this country. There's nothing subtle in a Jewish home.

Speaker 14 You are given a gift. It's called the United States of America.
You respect that gift and you honor that gift. And that is what I live with.

Speaker 14 And I think the country, as a father with two kids in the armed forces, will respect that.

Speaker 13 Thank you so much. I think your children are wrong.
You should talk about your dad and your grandpa and your kids.

Speaker 14 You nailed it.

Speaker 14 Thank God it was only a minute because I was close to tears there and I see the Kleenex right there.

Speaker 13 Rob Emmanuel, thank you. Thanks, Brad.
Come back, will you? Yeah, sure. All the best to you.
And we'll be right back with Mark.

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Speaker 13 Okay, we've got some friends of the show joining me now to recap what we just saw and talk about all the latest headlines as well.

Speaker 13 Let's get to it with two of the hosts on the MK Media Podcast Network, Mark Halperin, host of Next Up with Mark Halperin. And Link Lauren's here too.

Speaker 13 He's host of Spot On with Link Lauren, along with former Democratic strategist Dan Turntine, a co-host of the Morning Meeting on the Two-Way YouTube channel with Mark. Guys, welcome.

Speaker 13 Great to have you.

Speaker 14 Thanks for having us.

Speaker 13 So fun. I didn't know which hour to look forward to more, but I'm excited.

Speaker 14 It's like game post-game.

Speaker 13 All right, so let's start. Let's pretend we didn't talk about the Ram Emmanuel interview during break and give me your fresh impressions.
Dan, you go first.

Speaker 15 I thought he did great. I mean, I think considering this is like early in the game, no one's going to be perfect at this point.
He had good answers.

Speaker 15 I thought when you asked him about the workforce and the economy, I thought even on immigration, right? You heard the echoes of Bill Clinton.

Speaker 15 We're a nation of laws, a nation of immigrants. He kept coming back to that.

Speaker 15 He, you know, when you tried to talk to him about the border and everyone coming in, he said, I don't know why they didn't do it, but they shouldn't have.

Speaker 14 I thought he did well.

Speaker 15 I thought the one issue where he was a little bit was the transgender. That's obviously a touchy issue in the party, but I thought that he did very well.

Speaker 15 And when I think about people who understand what you need to do to win, that is somebody who understands what it takes.

Speaker 14 Yep.

Speaker 17 I think for me, maybe it's a generational difference, but half the electorate is going to be Gen Z and millennials by 2028.

Speaker 17 And when you think of Rahm Emmanuel and you Google him, every picture is him cavorting with the Clintons, the Obamas, the Bidens.

Speaker 17 He looks like politics as usual, and he looks like the embodiment of the swamp. And even in the interview, I felt he came across a little smarmy trying to control the interview.

Speaker 17 He was wishy-washy on some of the trans stuff. And it's like, you're a 65-year-old man.

Speaker 17 You've been in politics for decades, the upper echelons of politics, and you can't give straight answers on these questions that we want.

Speaker 17 And you kept asking about men in women's restrooms and in girls' bathrooms. He said, oh, it's not a dominant issue.
Let's move on. It's not a dominant issue.

Speaker 17 But then Kamala Harris, part of the reason she lost were those swing state ads on taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for inmates. These might not be the dominant issues to use.

Speaker 17 to you and you might think they're culture war issues, but they're still going to galvanize voters. So I just didn't find him that likable.

Speaker 13 Okay, so he did not get Link's vote, Mark.

Speaker 14 No. And they're both right.

Speaker 14 I've known Ram since your senior year in college. So I've known him a long time.

Speaker 14 Dan is right that Rahm graded on a curve against some of these other people who were talked about.

Speaker 14 His level of sophistication, his level of confidence, his level of understanding the intersection of politics, politics, and the press, it's light years ahead of almost any other Democrat, not just thinking of running for president, but almost any Democrat active on the national stage.

Speaker 14 Link's right too. There are so many issues related to Rahm that make it almost impossible to imagine him actually being the nominee.

Speaker 14 Not only because he's at, as your question's teased out, he's crosswise with the base, but he's yesterday.

Speaker 14 He's a longtime political figure, made millions in investment banking.

Speaker 14 He's not on paper what the party is currently looking for. So I think he showed his best and his worst with you.

Speaker 14 And I think you asked him about all the right issues that teased that out and put it in sharper.

Speaker 13 It was fascinating. So from my perspective, but I'll say one thing about yesterday before I get to my perspective.
So was Joe Biden. He was yesterday.
And he won.

Speaker 13 I'm talking about the first time around.

Speaker 13 So there is the possibility that even though you've got baggage and you've got party affiliations and you've got all the connections for 50 years,

Speaker 14 you could be the mayor. Walter Mondale was the nominee too.
But we're in a different time, I think. And even from even from four years ago, we were.

Speaker 13 Yeah, we've got Mom Donnie now as likely our next mayor here. So they're really going.

Speaker 14 Maybe. Let's hope not.

Speaker 13 But my own impression was... So I thought we had a very cordial first 48 minutes together.

Speaker 13 And that's good. I mean, and we kind of laughed about it after the fact that we're sure meeting number two will be a little bit more exciting.

Speaker 14 Is that your first time with him?

Speaker 13 Yeah, that was my first time interviewing him. Got it.

Speaker 13 No, people like Ram Emanuel did not come on Fox News.

Speaker 14 We did not have access to him.

Speaker 13 Yeah. So, but I liked it.
You know, we touched on some hot button issues, but we kept it cordial. And I think that's good.
I really wanted the audience to get to know him.

Speaker 13 And I wanted to see if he would say normal things to me without me like beating him over the head or him beating me over the head. And I was amazed at some of his direct answers.

Speaker 13 Like, yes, he wiggled on the trans thing for quite a while, but in the end, when we did our little lightning round, he did give me a couple of points. Like, the men in prison, we have it cut.

Speaker 13 Here's, here, watch.

Speaker 14 I have a son and two daughters, and they are physically different. And that's why when it comes to sports.

Speaker 13 Why did all the Democrats bail off at that point? A couple came out right after the election, and they said what you just said, and then they got browbeaten, and then they said that.

Speaker 14 And then you got the answers in the question. I mean, that's not ever scared me.
And, you know, I used to say this to President Clinton and President Obama. Sound is not always fury.

Speaker 14 Sometimes it's just sound. And don't assume just because somebody's screaming at you, they represent more than their own voice.

Speaker 13 Can, should we be putting men in female prisons?

Speaker 13 Men claiming they're women? No.

Speaker 13 And all right, here's my last one for you. Can a man become a woman?

Speaker 14 Can a man become a woman?

Speaker 14 Not, no.

Speaker 13 Thank you. No.
That's so easy. Why don't more people in your party just say that?

Speaker 14 Because I'm now going to go into a witness protection plan.

Speaker 13 Izzy?

Speaker 14 I mean,

Speaker 13 listen, you guys know, I realize that wasn't like hugely

Speaker 13 like a huge breakthrough. We all talk about what's true and what's real every day, but for a guy who wants to be the Democratic nominee, that was pretty bold.

Speaker 17 Well, I think the overarching thesis and takeaway from the interview is just how broken the Democrat brand is. That a guy goes, men and women are different.
And we're like, hooray! Yay!

Speaker 14 He's like, oh my God, men and women have biological differences. We're going, yes, amazing.
This is groundbreaking for a Democrat.

Speaker 17 It's like, that's how broken the identity is.

Speaker 17 But he's going to have a hard time in the primary because the Democrat Party has been co-opted by this loud, progressive, vocal minority, and they just keep capitulating to them.

Speaker 17 So I don't really think he has a prayer. He might have some good ideas and he seems strong on some issues, but I don't think he has a prayer.

Speaker 13 Does that come back to haunt him?

Speaker 15 No, I mean, I think, look, the interesting thing.

Speaker 13 It does not come back to haunt him?

Speaker 14 No. And I'll tell you why.

Speaker 17 Even hanging out with you might come back to haunt him.

Speaker 14 You're right.

Speaker 15 There's two things going on. The first is the party after the election said, we know we need to make change.
Now, anytime anyone's attempted to do it, as he said, the bass has yelled.

Speaker 15 Rahm's issue is going to be both two things. He's going to have to do these sister soldier moments.
The party needs to do sister soldier moments.

Speaker 14 And he's got that, right? I don't worry about that.

Speaker 15 Rah's other challenge is he's going to have to throw some bones to the base. And where he chooses to do that, because the problem for Rahm is the energy is in the base and the base can't stand him.

Speaker 15 You asked him about it. You asked about a very sensitive issue that he has with the black community.

Speaker 15 He's going to have to figure out, and I have no doubt he's thinking about this, where am I going to lock arms with them and unapologetically charge against Donald Trump and J.D.

Speaker 15 Vance and everybody else? Other candidates, it's the complete opposite. They're inching up to that sister soldier moment.

Speaker 15 Gavin Newsom on the podcast with Charlie Kerr flirted with it, took so much heat, he then, you know,

Speaker 15 and was really kind of struggling until the immigration thing propelled him forward within our party, maybe not the general electorate. So, I mean, Rahm's got two things.

Speaker 13 But again, he thinks about that stuff.

Speaker 15 He'll be smart about it. He'll be strategic.
And I have no doubt doubt when he does, he'll move forward aggressively.

Speaker 14 Let me be honest about Rahm.

Speaker 14 Rahm likes to be honest. Rahm's talented, right? He's one of the most talented appa's.
He's not Bill Clinton. He's not Barack Obama.
He's not George Bush, and he's not Donald Trump.

Speaker 14 He's not in their league. He's a super talented staffer, which he once was.
He was a super talented candidate for mayor, super talented

Speaker 14 D triple C head.

Speaker 14 He's talented, but he's not their category of talented.

Speaker 14 So can someone less talented than those four guys, all of whom stood up to their party and appealed to the base, right, simultaneous, make people in the base feel good and stand up to people in the base?

Speaker 14 That's really hard. I just don't know that Rahm is talented enough to do that, except he's running against a bunch of people who are less talented.

Speaker 14 So he might be talented enough to do it, but he's not in their league.

Speaker 17 But I will say the people he's running against, let's say it's like AOC, Gavin Newsom, they have some star quality and charisma. That's what I was missing.

Speaker 17 Maybe if I watched it, I would get a different feel. But listening to it, it was kind of like low energy Jeb Bush, kind of like that sort of slow.

Speaker 14 I don't think he's low energy. But it's just like that gear.

Speaker 17 Yeah, where's the other gear, though? I guess in this interview, it just felt kind of like low to me. And he's kind of like, yeah, I'm thinking about that.

Speaker 17 So I don't know if he has the star power and charisma to tap into this sort of like populism on the left that the right has had for so long.

Speaker 17 And then to go to what you mentioned, the reason President Trump caught fire in 2015 and 16 is because he was willing to call out the elites and the establishment in his own party, these neocons and who have been running the party for, you know, 15, 20 years.

Speaker 17 I don't know if Rahm is going to be able to do that because the left likes, but the left, yeah, he is one, and the left likes to cast purity test way more than the right.

Speaker 17 You said one thing we disagree with, or we don't like this one little thing. So I think he's going to have a tough time.

Speaker 13 He doesn't sound woke. I'm not sure whether any Democrat who's not woke is going to get nominated next time around.
The party just does, they're captured by it. It's a cancer.
It's metastasized.

Speaker 13 There's no excising it. I know normies like you, Dan, would like it to be, but I just don't think it can happen.

Speaker 15 The only thing is our party's history, we flirt with these very progressive candidates, Howard Dean, you know, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Sanders in 16, and both of them in 2020.

Speaker 15 Our history is we back off and go with the safe candidate.

Speaker 15 Now, our party is more left than we were in the past. And at some point, that may come to an end,

Speaker 15 that pattern. But as a party, we tend to value victory and who we think has the best chance way more than people, I think, kind of give us credit for.

Speaker 14 Here's what's cautionary for me. What was the most obvious question you were going to ask him? What was the thing he should be prepared for more than any other?

Speaker 13 About how he's going to win over his

Speaker 14 trans.

Speaker 13 Oh, you mean from me, May?

Speaker 14 Oh, yeah. Yes, yes.

Speaker 14 So he basically tried to avoid answering until you wouldn't let him, right? Yes. That to me, I mean, how he could have been relevant.

Speaker 14 Maybe he thinks that was the right way to do it, but to me, that seems unprepared, not just mechanically unprepared. But if he's not ready to confront that issue with you,

Speaker 13 what's he waiting for? Yeah, you know for sure I'm going to be asking about that.

Speaker 13 He also

Speaker 13 he did, for the record, endorse minors getting puberty blockers into cross-sex hormones, meaning they get sterilized for life, they lose sexual function, as long as their parents agree, which is not what the side of reason believes at all.

Speaker 14 And his bathroom answer wasn't great either.

Speaker 13 No, because he'd already allowed it.

Speaker 14 Well, but he could say on reflection, I think it was a bad idea.

Speaker 15 And you gave him your opinion without Trump having evolved.

Speaker 13 he did not abandon that yeah but he did not say that a man could become a woman and he said men shouldn't be in women's prisons and he seemed to say men shouldn't be in women's sports he's kidding himself if he thinks i i believe he can say that's not the focus the focus is on the that's that's never going to fly with me or anybody else like i'm sorry whether it's hubris we'll decide what the focus is like that's the one advantage of having this job the base will decide too yeah but i mean i'm saying like literally having done all these presidential debates i'm sorry i will decide it is up to me.

Speaker 13 Correct.

Speaker 15 I'm the one to win back to the working-class voters for whom that was a bigger issue than we thought it was.

Speaker 15 It's just, it's the cultural, do you understand us, right? We started losing them culturally in the 90s. We then lost them economically in the last 10 years.
We got to win them back on both fronts.

Speaker 14 And I don't want to just be negative about it, about him. Because again, I think he's more talented than almost anybody else who might run.

Speaker 14 What he gave you was a bunch of tactical replies. Megan's going to ask this.
I'm going to say this. I'm going to try to change the subject.
She didn't change the subject. Now I got to answer.

Speaker 14 Did you feel as hard on any of those issues?

Speaker 13 I liked the last answer about America.

Speaker 14 I'm saying

Speaker 14 on the top issue, the American stuff's easy. He can do hard on that.
There was no, you know, again, don't go back to the question of authenticity. It was all tactics.

Speaker 13 Well, I think the education thing is legit to him. Yeah.
I mean, that's sellable. It's a real issue.
Exactly.

Speaker 13 On the easy ones, he's great.

Speaker 14 On the hard ones, I thought it was all just tactical.

Speaker 15 The one place I disagree with you, though, Mark, is on the vocational training stuff, I do think he believes in it.

Speaker 14 It's is easy. No one's against vocational training.

Speaker 15 Well, but we've fumbled over what we want to do in the economy, like to no end.

Speaker 14 Sure, but he just, to me, he's not trying to show his heart on those things. He's just trying to get through it.

Speaker 13 I wonder whether he'll have it improved to the point that he can sell it. Because, look, Gavin Newsom suffers from a different problem.
And he was saying we're all at 3%. That's not exactly true.

Speaker 13 Kamala Harris is at 12%.

Speaker 14 My God. Good luck, Dan.
Titan.

Speaker 14 Let's go back to Ron.

Speaker 13 Right after Kamala is Gavin, who's up there, I think singled, like maybe nine. And then everybody else is down lower.
AOC is up there, but

Speaker 13 it's not going to happen. So he's right that, like, there's no real frontrunner, and we don't think Kamala Harris is actually going to run for president again.

Speaker 13 So it's really him and Gavin maybe looming up there. And Gavin Newsom, I don't know.
He may be formidable.

Speaker 13 To me, he's just such an obvious snake oil salesman who will say anything depending on who's across from him.

Speaker 13 I just think people will be able to see through that from a mile away, and they might like like the steady Eddie with a couple sharp elbows, rom fucking

Speaker 14 Emmanuel, rom deadfish, whatever it is.

Speaker 17 Well, my thing with Gavin Newsom is he can't even call his wife his wife. She's like his partner and she's given the man multiple kids.

Speaker 17 And then he was against men and women's sports for a minute in the Charlie Kirk interview. He's gone back.
Now he's fighting with the DOJ. Gavin Newsom stands for nothing.

Speaker 17 So if Rahm Emmanuel can have black and white straight-up answers for things, just be straight with the American people.

Speaker 17 And to go to your point, Dan, the left and the mainstream media constantly like to tell Americans what issues are important to them. Oh, trans is a culture war issue.
It's not a big deal.

Speaker 17 Well, these millions of moms turned out for President Trump because it was a big deal. Oh, we don't care about seed oils.
This is food isn't going to decide this election.

Speaker 17 Those Maha moms came and turned out. So every issue matters now, especially with social media.
I think Rom's got to fine-tune some of these answers.

Speaker 13 The other thing is, can I tell you, I was thinking about this last week.

Speaker 13 You know, right before the fall of the Roman Empire, the culture completely imploded with debauchery and no connection to faith or something bigger than oneself and all these, you know, not caring for the weak or, you know, for unborn babies at all.

Speaker 13 And that's why the culture wars do matter.

Speaker 13 Like we're right, we're back there in some ways with like thruples and people trying to normalize pedophilia with the minor attracted person label and the cutting off of children's genitals in the name of like equity and inclusion, dividing us by race, trying to make little girls boys when they're not.

Speaker 13 Like all this stuff, you can dismiss it as culture wars, but I actually think it's the degradation of a cohesive society it's what happens when you remove faith as a guiding guiding principle of any society and it really is the road to end times like it's fine to just dismiss it as like oh you're sweet little culture no it's the road to end times right so like if we don't fight back against it we're gonna completely lose everything that's dear to us i don't know if he knows that or if he's just part too too much of a democrat to really see that yeah he travels in circles where these things are not as big a deal.

Speaker 13 He just does. What do you make of Gravin Newsom, though, against him, those two on a stage? Picture that.

Speaker 14 I still think Newsom's not going to run. I'm the only one who does.
You really do. Why?

Speaker 14 Because in the interview I did with him on the MK Media Network, he talked about his daughter being upset that she had to, you know, be followed around by one security person when she went out.

Speaker 14 And when are you going to leave? She said, he said, his daughter said, when are you going to leave office so I can stop this? If he runs for president and wins. He's not.

Speaker 14 She's not going to be on friends. He doesn't even know the daughter's damn name.
He He doesn't. Who the hell is this daughter? Oh, please.
I also don't think his wife wants him to run. You don't?

Speaker 14 Jennifer Kennedy will do some

Speaker 14 partner does not want him to run. I may be wrong.
Maybe he'll do it, but I don't. If he does run and it's him against Rom, then I think

Speaker 14 you will see an elevated debate. I don't, I don't, I think those two guys will have a serious conversation about the party.

Speaker 17 With all due respect, this is a guy who sleeps with his campaign manager's wife. He's an alcoholic who kind of lied about going to rehab and we're suddenly like, who's father of the year.

Speaker 17 His daughter really doesn't want him to run for president. Oh, please.
He's going to run if he wants to.

Speaker 13 And they'll still make his daughter play against a boy,

Speaker 13 even though he gives lip service that he won't when he's interviewing her.

Speaker 15 I mean, I don't know how he can't be thinking seriously about it and leaning towards it, given the last month and a half that he's had.

Speaker 15 I mean, we can all debate whether what he advocated for with the LA riots was smart or not. But he's had a moment in the party.

Speaker 15 I don't think anyone's had a better last month as a Democratic candidate for 2028 than Gavin Newsom.

Speaker 14 Wow.

Speaker 17 His bar is low.

Speaker 14 Agreed. 100% agreed.

Speaker 14 Seventh ring of hell.

Speaker 15 But the party now, like, if you read articles when he went to South Carolina, you look at focus groups, what does everyone say?

Speaker 14 He's fighting.

Speaker 15 Oh my God, he fights. He stood up to Trump.
He now has this communications team where he's trolling J.D. Vince.

Speaker 14 He's trolling.

Speaker 13 He's doing better on social media.

Speaker 14 He's employing a lot of the technology. Yeah, he's not speaking our language, but you have to acknowledge that he's out there swinging.

Speaker 15 He is speaking the language of Donald Trump, which is non-stop front foot in your face. I'm going to troll you.
I'm going to hit you. I'm going to mock you.
I'm going going to do everything.

Speaker 15 And our base, just as the Republican base craved it in 15 of like, oh my God, he's not apologizing on immigration or any of this stuff. We can, again, we can debate good general election strategy.

Speaker 15 But I don't know how you go to South Carolina and Jim Clyburn says, I like this guy. He's got a bright future.
I think, and go home and say, well, hon, I'm hanging out.

Speaker 14 Yeah, all right.

Speaker 15 That was nice.

Speaker 15 I would have won.

Speaker 14 There's four factors that I think get lost in the conversation about running for president that I don't know that he'll do as well in.

Speaker 14 And I'm very bullish, more bullish than you, Torah, on his skills. One is, what are the early states they're going to vote? We don't know.

Speaker 14 But if the early states are, include Iowa and South Carolina, let's see how he does. Gavin, we're talking about that.
Gavin. Number two, raising money.

Speaker 14 He should be able to raise a ton of money as governor of California. He's got the best digital list to raise money.
I want to see if he can raise serious money. Okay.
Number three is effort.

Speaker 14 Is he wanting to get up every day with his young kids and living on the West Coast and do the 10 things it's necessary to do to run? And then the last thing is, how do you handle a crisis?

Speaker 14 How do you handle political political crisis when they come at you? I don't think we've seen him handle political crisis particularly well.

Speaker 13 Or real crises.

Speaker 14 There's nothing rebuilt in LA whatsoever.

Speaker 14 Not a single home, it's rebuilt. Look at when he's been, like, remember that thing where he was on the cell phone and a lady was trying to talk to him.

Speaker 14 Like, yeah, yeah, oh, that's, you know, look at look at how Bill Clinton's laundry. Look at how Donald, look at how Donald Trump handled Access Hollywood.

Speaker 14 Look at how Bill Clinton handled Jennifer Flowers in the draft. Look at how Barack Obama handled Reverend Wright.
Like, I just don't see in him someone who digs deep when that stuff happens. So

Speaker 14 in those four areas, he's not as great as he's been in some of these other things, as Dan pointed out. And I just think there's reason to be skeptical that he's going to play at that point.

Speaker 13 I'll tell you something about Rahm that we didn't get into today. He's as vicious on Trump as Gavin Newsom is.
Like, we didn't get into Trump today.

Speaker 13 He won't be running against Trump, notwithstanding what Steve Bannon says.

Speaker 13 But every Democrat is still going to run on Trump, right? Like whoever it is, whether it's J.D. or Marco or it could be Tulsi, who knows? It's going to be all about Trump.

Speaker 13 So I think he'll also appear as a fighter because he'll be out there saying the nastiest things possible about Donald Trump. And I do wonder, though, like, how's that going to go?

Speaker 13 Because I don't think Ram Emmanuel or Gavin Newsom or anybody else I've heard of on Team Blue has the oratory skills of J.D.

Speaker 13 Vance or Marco Rubio, who are, I just think, going to eat their opponents alive. And either one of those guys will kill them unless unless they increase their game by the time they get out there.

Speaker 17 Well, even Gavin Newsom, they thought he was going to do great in that debate with DeSantis. They're like, DeSantis, they're going to wipe the floor with him.

Speaker 17 Newsome's this snake oil salesman, greasy guy, talker. And he goes out there.
Ron DeSantis holds up like a poop map.

Speaker 17 He just wipes the floor with Newsome in a way where people, yeah, I don't think people were expecting. And Newsom kind of floundered and flailed.

Speaker 17 And I think that's what happens when you press Newsome. And we saw that in the Sean Ryan interview.

Speaker 17 He was pressed very delicately about eight-year-olds transitioning and cross-sex hormones for kids, couldn't give a straight answer.

Speaker 17 It was a lot of this sort of air traffic controller, Bob Fossey, jazz hands, and he couldn't give an answer.

Speaker 17 And so Gavin Newsom, I don't even think it's a guarantee Gavin Newsom makes it out of a primary. Could you put him on a debate stage? He crumbles so quickly.
Like he seems unwell.

Speaker 17 Like something's off with him. Like he's going to crumble really fast.

Speaker 13 I know what you mean. Like, why does he gesticulate so violently?

Speaker 17 More than Tim Walls.

Speaker 13 It makes me distrust him, really, because I've said this before, but my

Speaker 13 CIA guy, Phil Houston, invented the deception detection program there. They still use all over the world.
Hands above the midline is a tell if coupled with another sign of deception that you're lying.

Speaker 13 It has to be two signs of deception within five seconds of asking the question. This is not voodoo.
This is real. He's a human lie detector.

Speaker 13 He's outed bad guy terrorists who we thought were working for us.

Speaker 13 He's found double agents within the CIA who we thought we were using against another country, but really they'd been turned against us. Phil Houston is the man.

Speaker 14 And he's ready to arrest Gavin Newsom.

Speaker 13 He says he's no,

Speaker 14 no, he hasn't weighed in on Gavin.

Speaker 13 But just FYI, hands above the midline, can be a tell if it's coupled with another.

Speaker 14 I've really never done that, by the way. Like this.

Speaker 17 I do it all the time, but I'm not a real blonde.

Speaker 14 Watch out.

Speaker 14 I'm not deceiving you.

Speaker 13 I'll do it when I'm like making a point. It has to be coupled with something else, like

Speaker 13 a verbal attack. Like, how could you ask me that kind of a question? That's, I'm lying.

Speaker 14 Like Nathan Thurm on Saturday Night Live. Who's he? He's a character who would say stuff like, no, maybe, maybe someone should interview you.
Maybe someone should investigate you.

Speaker 14 Are you asking me all the questions?

Speaker 13 All right. So, that's enough about Robin Emmanuel and Gavin Newsom.
This is a long way off, although kind of it's not. It always starts early.

Speaker 14 It's underway.

Speaker 13 I don't know. It's too soon.
Okay. President Trump has been in there for six months.

Speaker 14 Can I say one more thing about the very first question you asked him? Why are you here? I thought his answer was abysmal. He just kind of joked about it.

Speaker 13 You didn't like it.

Speaker 14 He should have said, I want to reach every American. You have a huge audience of people who have been trending Republican, and I want to win them back.
Not, I had nothing better to do. I don't know.

Speaker 14 I just thought that was,

Speaker 14 it set set a tone if he's serious about reaching your audience I just thought that was kind of discouraging

Speaker 14 come on bended knee with a bouquet of flowers yeah yeah yeah that's a good point and say and say we got to fight for every vote we can't let people who voted for Donald Trump vote Republican in four years

Speaker 14 and again I'm not I'm not against I'm not I'm not against joking I just think I just think the reason that George Bush and Donald Trump and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all won is because they ran simultaneously appealing both to their party and to a general election electorate.

Speaker 14 And he just seemed to me just missed the opportunity to do that.

Speaker 13 He told me before the interview, and I don't think he would mind if I repeated it because he seemed to suggest he might tell the story himself,

Speaker 13 that he was here in part because his sister-in-law listens to the show and heard me say something nice about him.

Speaker 17 Yeah, should have said blessed family could have done it.

Speaker 13 Yeah, so he was like, well, maybe she'll give me a fair shot and I'll go over there. And I did.

Speaker 13 And so listen, when he comes back, we'll see if if he does better if he takes these pieces of advice to heart. But I want to talk about Trump because there's been a very interesting development now

Speaker 13 within the Intel community around Trump. Tulsi Gabbard late on Friday, and I just want to say,

Speaker 13 as on all things, I am a truly honest broker on this. I'm still trying to figure out what's real.
I don't know.

Speaker 14 Like who she is accusing of what, for instance.

Speaker 13 No, whether she's right and Matt Taibbi, who I love, is right, that this is a bombshell bombshell and it's terrible and people really could go to jail, or whether Andy McCarthy at National Review, who I love and respect and who's a totally honest broker too, is correct, that this is a complete nothing burger and she's totally off and apparently hasn't read her own CIA director's release of last week.

Speaker 13 And that he would suggest she hasn't really been following the Russia Gate scandal because everything she just told us is old.

Speaker 13 And so I'm really trying to figure out, but just to set it up for for the audience, because it's very complex.

Speaker 13 On Friday night, Tulsa Gabbard went on Fox News and said that she'd found documents that she was releasing that show,

Speaker 13 in some substance,

Speaker 13 that one day the intelligence community under Barack Obama was ready to come out and say that the Russians did not interfere. in the 2016 election and really had no part in it.

Speaker 13 And that whole thing was kind of bullshit. Then Barack Obama pulled them all into the White House.
They had a big meeting. And then literally the next day,

Speaker 13 they were like, Russia interfered to help Trump and leaked it to all the reporters, Washington Post.

Speaker 13 And the suggestion is that Obama turned to them and said, I'm not having a report coming out of you guys saying that they didn't interfere.

Speaker 13 Our whole narrative is that Hillary would have won had it not been for the Russians. Now, give me a report that says that.
That's the implication.

Speaker 13 And that then the Intel community did it, and the subservient Washington Press Corps ran with it. And that's how the narrative really took off that the Russians had gotten Trump elected.

Speaker 13 Okay, so Andy McCarthy's point in response is,

Speaker 13 okay, you're talking apples and oranges. What they said prior to the Obama meeting was, we've seen nothing to suggest the Russians hacked election machines,

Speaker 13 even though they tried in a couple of places, but that they didn't, they were not able to do anything technical, technologically that would have altered the outcome of an election with a raw vote.

Speaker 13 Then they have the Obama meeting, and then they come out, and it's true that their report that they issued then was all about the ways Russia did interfere. Like

Speaker 13 fake articles about Hillary,

Speaker 13 bots that circulated negative news about her, and they hacked the DNC mail, which is how we have a lot of the admissions we have from her and her terrible family.

Speaker 13 Anyway, he's saying it's apples to oranges. And while she is producing now emails that do show

Speaker 13 they were ready to say no interference when it comes to election machines prior, that we kind of knew everything that she's saying already. I'm going to show you her announcement.

Speaker 13 I think we have it, guys, don't we? On Friday night.

Speaker 13 Yeah, it's at nine. Let's play it.

Speaker 18 Spells out in great detail exactly what happens when you have some of the most powerful people in our country directly leading at the helm, President Obama and his senior most national security cabinet, James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, and Susan Rice and others, essentially making a very intentional decision to create this manufactured, politicized piece of intelligence with the objective of

Speaker 18 subverting the will of the American people.

Speaker 18 The list goes on and on about the consequences of President Obama and his senior cabinet members politicizing intelligence once again, and I say these words very clearly, to enact what was essentially a years-long coup subverting the will of the American people.

Speaker 13 One of the other points Andy made was that he's not a fan of Tulsi. He wasn't behind her confirmation.

Speaker 13 But he's also saying it's not a surprise to him that Tulsi Gabbard would try to exonerate Russia entirely and instead blame America, right? Like sort of say Russia didn't do anything whatsoever.

Speaker 13 And his point is she's overstating it. Russia did do some things, but it didn't cost Hillary the election.
Andy doesn't contend that.

Speaker 13 But that we're now sort of manufacturing something for press clicks and possibly indictments that may not be there. Anybody want to take this?

Speaker 14 I mean, look, I'll say this.

Speaker 15 I am with you. I'm not sure what she's doing because I think what she's trying to argue is it wasn't determinative to the outcome.
But there is no debate Russia tried to influence the election.

Speaker 15 As you say, they bought ads on YouTube. They bought ads on Facebook.
They had chat bots. They hacked email.
They wanted Donald Trump to win. Now, the question was, did the Trump campaign collude?

Speaker 14 Robert Mueller ruled there was no definitive proof that they colluded.

Speaker 15 But I'm not sure what, I almost get the sense that what she's saying is like they didn't try to interfere in the election.

Speaker 15 And what's also fact is the Obama administration, the last month of the campaign, was aware of what was going on and struggled. Do they go public with this? Do they put it out?

Speaker 15 If we do, it's going to look like we're trying to tip the scales.

Speaker 15 After the election, they huddled and said, we need to get out, both as like a PSA, hey, Russia, you tried to do this and we're aware of it.

Speaker 14 And then they said, was there collusion?

Speaker 15 Was there perhaps something more there? I think that latter part they wanted to put out into the kind of, you know, mainstream to be like, someone needs to go look at this, right?

Speaker 15 And obviously that enraged Trump and he didn't want, you know, he wanted and he wanted everyone to know that he did this. But I'm not sure what she's implying.

Speaker 15 If there's real signs of crime or now, then by, you know, goodness, put it out and let the public see it. But I'm very skeptical.

Speaker 14 I know.

Speaker 13 Have you looked at this? And it's, it's very smart people who I normally trust are in diametric on it.

Speaker 14 If she sees a crime, she's got to say who and what law they broke. It's all, it's just too vague.

Speaker 14 I'll pick up on a point Dan made, which I know because I did a lot of reporting on this. They really did struggle with what to say.

Speaker 14 They didn't want to let the Russians go uncalled out in public, but they also didn't want to be accused of trying to make it seem like the Russians were doing something.

Speaker 14 They were pretending the Russians were doing something to help Hillary. I actually think there's 19 things you could list that say cost Hillary Clinton the election, and this is one of them.

Speaker 14 It was very close. You don't know what would have happened otherwise, but I think Russia helped Trump win substantially, not through collusion, but because they wanted Trump to win.

Speaker 14 And that is something she's playing down. What she's playing up is that they somehow broke the law in trying to protect Hillary Clinton.
And again, I just wanted to say that.

Speaker 13 She's suggesting they manufactured it. She's basically suggesting this is the same thing as COVID, where the scientists went from, this looks like it came from a lab.

Speaker 13 We've never seen such a virus from an animal. And then after Fauci and Collins browbeated them, they came out and they were like, it's definitely not from a lab.

Speaker 14 It's from a pangolin.

Speaker 14 They're people associated with Barack Obama who leaned into collusion, without a doubt. And that wrong.
I don't know if it's against the law. It was dirty pool.

Speaker 14 But mostly what they said was the Russians interfered with the election, and they did.

Speaker 14 I think this is a little bit of cosmic karma.

Speaker 17 Everything comes full circle because Tulsi was accused by Hillary Clinton and the Obamas, I believe, of being like a Russian asset. And then she went on the view and said she's owned by Russia.

Speaker 17 She's a Russian puppet. And Tulsi was coming out saying, I'm nobody's puppet.
I've served this country. You know, I'm a woman in uniform, as she is, and she's a rock star.

Speaker 17 But yeah, no, I think this is a little bit of cosmic karma. She gets to now come out and say, ha, look at what we've just uncovered in these files.
But I think it's Monday.

Speaker 17 Maybe by the end of the day, we'll have more information because I read on the way over here, she's now given something to the DOJ or people.

Speaker 13 She said it's going to come out this week. We're going to see leave.

Speaker 17 I think it's weird Friday night to make the announcement with everything going on.

Speaker 14 I know. Why?

Speaker 13 Why? They put out news that's bad for them heading into a weekend after a holiday. They put out news that's good for them a Friday night.

Speaker 14 Hannity will be here Monday, so I don't know if they're probably going to go on time.

Speaker 14 That might have been an Epstein survey. I was just going to say maybe.

Speaker 13 I'm not sure that's going to work either. We'll talk about that when we come back.
Let's take a break and then we will discuss where we are in Epstein-Palooza. Stand by.

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Speaker 2 We all take good care of the things that matter.

Speaker 3 Our homes, our pets, our cars.

Speaker 1 Are you doing the same for your brain?

Speaker 6 Acting early to protect brain health may help reduce the risk of dementia from conditions like Alzheimer's disease.

Speaker 4 Studies have found that up to to 45% of dementia cases may be prevented or delayed by managing risk factors you can change.

Speaker 9 Make brain health a priority.

Speaker 10 Ask your doctor about your risk factors and for a cognitive assessment.

Speaker 11 Learn more at brainhealthmatters.com.

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Speaker 13 I'm Megan Kelly, host of the Megan Kelly Show on Sirius XM.

Speaker 13 It's your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal, and cultural figures today.

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Speaker 13 So you were saying before the break, it's fancy here, isn't it?

Speaker 14 Something I can steal. Yeah.
Like a ashtray. Do I have ashtrays?

Speaker 13 You know what's funny? I don't think anybody does anymore.

Speaker 13 The same guy has been driving me and my family for like since I started at Fox. Super nice man.

Speaker 13 And he was dropping me off today and he said, you know, Megan, you've been coming to this same location because the series is right across from Fox and right across from NBC.

Speaker 13 He's like, for like almost 20 years now.

Speaker 14 As long as you can spit a watermelon seed far enough to hit the other building, that's good for you.

Speaker 13 You know, it's like, this is media central and it does bring back a lot of memories. Anyway, so we were saying before the break that possibly

Speaker 13 the Tulsi Gabbard thing was a head fake to change the topic of conversation from Epstein. Did it work?

Speaker 14 Well, it's hard to know, right? Because what the

Speaker 14 two intervening things that seem bigger around Epstein. One is the Wall Street Journal story, which rallied MAGA back towards the president.

Speaker 14 And the other is the announcement of the filing to release, that's the grand jury transcripts to be released.

Speaker 14 I think those two things did the most to take the steam out of it for the media, even though the New York Times now seems obsessed with reviving it.

Speaker 13 So I want to say two things. I don't think think we're going to learn much from the grand jury

Speaker 13 files at all. And I think the Trump administration knows that.
So, he says, oh, nothing I do will ever satisfy them, which is true, but this definitely won't. Like, this won't even come close.

Speaker 14 It's not a good faith effort to say that. It is definitely not a good faith effort.

Speaker 13 But, secondly, on the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal hit piece, it was so lame, it was the best thing Trump could have asked for.

Speaker 13 And I realized he came back swinging, but even if he had it, like, there's nothing we on the right hate more than the left's fake news hit pieces on Donald Trump. We've seen so many of them.

Speaker 13 The guy literally took a bullet. He's been put through hell.
Like, we have all had it up to here with the false attacks on Donald Trump.

Speaker 13 And so, the best thing that the left, and I include the journalist's report in that, could have done was just be quiet and let it stay a Trump slash influencer problem.

Speaker 13 Don't help because that only makes people on the right want to drop it and defend him. And that's kind of where I am.
Like, it was such a lame, I'm very interested in what the truth about Epstein is.

Speaker 13 Very interested. You try to tell me the whole scandals about Donald Trump.
Fuck off. I'm out.
Like, that's a lie. We know that we would know that by now if it were true.

Speaker 13 I will not be your truth warrior on that because I know it's not right. But I do want real answers in the underlying scandal.

Speaker 17 Go ahead, Link. You know, I just feel like the left really wants to tie Trump to Epstein more closely.
And I think that's what the Wall Street Journal really was about.

Speaker 17 I mean, I just have a hard time believing he's sitting there drawing and doing this.

Speaker 17 The whole thing sounded really silly to me. And then there's also still this narrative online that, you know, maybe Trump visited the island.

Speaker 17 I'm like, the guy doesn't even stay in hotels that don't have his name on it. I certainly don't think he visited the island, but they want to keep tying Trump to Epstein.
I think J.D.

Speaker 17 Vance is still looking like a winner because he doesn't seem as mired down in the Epstein stuff. J.D.
Vance, I don't think he's spoken about it as much.

Speaker 17 He's now rallying around the president with the Wall Street Journal story as he should. So I think going into 2028, I don't see this Epstein stuff having really any bearing on the election.

Speaker 13 He brokered the peace between the FBI guys, Cash Patel and Dan Bongino, and Trump. Right.

Speaker 13 And because Trump was mad at them after the like, she goes or I go thing with Dan and that reportedly J.D. Van stepped in.

Speaker 14 Yeah, go for it. Do it.
Okay.

Speaker 14 Trump is making these decisions about what the country learns, about something people are really interested in.

Speaker 13 Yes.

Speaker 14 And he's got a conflict. He was close friends with the person at the center of this.
How close? I think the Wall Street Journal story, if true, speaks to that. You say.
He stays in his own hotels.

Speaker 14 I've never heard of Donald Trump flying on anyone else's plane ever. Flies on his plane.
He flew on Epstein's plane. That suggests something.
Again, I'm not assuming facts, not in evidence.

Speaker 14 I'm not saying the president broke any laws. I'm not saying he did anything improper, but he was close friends with the guy.
For 15 years. Yeah.

Speaker 14 And so he should really be recused from this in terms of the public interest and confidence in the decision-making.

Speaker 14 So any story that illustrates or claims to illustrate their closeness, I think just speaks to that. You think about it.
He shouldn't be the one deciding these things because

Speaker 14 they're about his good friends.

Speaker 13 That's a pipe. So let me tell you something.
My own feeling is not that Trump has something to hide in these files. I really don't believe that.

Speaker 13 But I do believe Trump probably has some powerful donors and or friends.

Speaker 14 Which is why he shouldn't be deciding. But I think that's

Speaker 15 that the question, it dies down if there's nothing, if there's no more new oxygen. But I think we've all probably heard there are more stories in the works.

Speaker 14 Now, they may not ever see the light of day.

Speaker 15 There may not be anything there. But I think to Mark's point, they were close friends.
New York and Palm Beach are small worlds. We're sitting in one of them right now.

Speaker 15 If there's another story and it starts to get closer to them, then I think this continues to have more oxygen and people start, you know, it brings it back in front of the public. People demand stuff.

Speaker 15 And to Mark's point, people start thinking, is Trump hiding something about his friends or about him or what is it?

Speaker 13 Trump brought that piece of it on himself.

Speaker 13 If Trump had just stayed consistent with the base, and this had never been Trump's issue, he really hadn't been touting Epstein on the campaign trail, though his son touted it many, many times.

Speaker 13 And so did his top deputies and his emissaries out on the campaign trail.

Speaker 13 But if Trump hadn't done that weird answer at that cabinet meeting and then gone on the attack against the MAGA base, nobody would be thinking this is like a Trump scandal.

Speaker 13 They just, he's making it, he's so defensive on it, it's making people be like, 100%, whoa, there's the target right there.

Speaker 14 Go ahead, Linda.

Speaker 17 Is there a simpler explanation here? When I look at President Trump, I think, is he bored? Right. Sometimes I look at him and go, is he bored by something? That's sometimes an explanation.

Speaker 17 And I think President Trump, because he doesn't live on X, because he has Fox rolling 24-7, that's what he watches, they're not really covering Epstein that much.

Speaker 17 And I don't think he really gets everything that's happening on X in the podcast space with the discussion around Epstein.

Speaker 17 I think President Trump is also frustrated because he had weeks of just consistent winning, right?

Speaker 17 When it came to the border, the Iranian nuclear facilities going down to Texas with the grieving families. I know because I was there.
But President Trump had weeks and weeks of winning.

Speaker 17 And then now he's like, you guys want to talk about Epstein, this loser?

Speaker 13 His attorney general should now put out that memo. Right.

Speaker 17 But here's he is going to stand by Pam. She is not going any freaking where.
Even what's so funny to me is at that FIFA soccer game, Pam Bonnie was in the box. So was Rupert Murdoch.

Speaker 17 And now he's stealing Rupert Murdoch five days later. But yeah, I think Pam Bonnie's not going anywhere.
She's Florida. Susie Wiles likes her and she's good on cable.

Speaker 17 And so I don't see her going anywhere anytime.

Speaker 13 I don't know if I agree with that. I really don't because it's, I believe Trump likes her and doesn't want to switch out his AG and Susie Wiles likes her, but the base has turned on her.

Speaker 13 They will forgive the big man.

Speaker 13 They're not going to forgive her.

Speaker 17 I think it'll take some time, like with the Mike Waltz situation. I don't think he's going to give a dog dog a bone right now and give you the body and the head that you want.

Speaker 17 Could I see her going and being moved and shifted down the road? So I don't see it happening now in the dog.

Speaker 13 My information is that she's miserable anyway. I don't think she's happy anyway.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 14 with the status quo. Yeah.
It's so remarkable too because he's so culturally deft.

Speaker 15 He so has his finger on the pulse of his base, of what's being talked about around the country. This is the first time in 10 years that I've just seen him on the wrong side of this repeatedly.

Speaker 15 To your point, he's dug in about it. And that is surprising, right?

Speaker 15 You would just think he's so smart and so clever that he would see this, he'd shift other than, you know, throwing out something like the Russia with Tulsi Galbert.

Speaker 15 When does he make that move, right? And how does he do it? Because as a Democrat, I just am like, whoa, you're so on your back foot, you can't get off it.

Speaker 14 I know this is a weird place to go with it, but

Speaker 13 in a way, it kind of reminds me of what happened at Fox with the Gretchen Carlson investigations. She filed this lawsuit.
Nobody liked Gretchen. No one really wanted to deal with her.

Speaker 13 We all knew she got fired because she had terrible ratings and she wasn't popular.

Speaker 13 But then she dug up this Me Too allegation, which we were all like, oh, sure, whatever.

Speaker 13 Even I was like, there's no way that's why she got fired.

Speaker 13 Even though I knew what Roger had done with me, to me, not with me, years earlier. But what was happening in that case was

Speaker 13 Roger had managed to limit the investigation into Gretchen's allegations to only the team that worked with her on her show, which would mean he would never get that the investigators, Lachlan and Rupert and their lawyers, would never get to the women who actually had stories.

Speaker 13 And this grand jury thing has that feel to me.

Speaker 13 Like, I don't think we're going to hear anything from those grand jury files regarding any Trump friends, any super rich New Yorker or Floridian who, because, you know, Julie Kay Brown, as annoying as she is, was on,

Speaker 13 was it Ross Do Thoughts, whatever his last name is, Douthitz podcast over the the weekend. And she was once again reminding us all that there

Speaker 13 he is believed, Jeffrey, to have trafficked girls to third parties, to other rich men.

Speaker 13 And she was naming some very rich men. I'm not going to name them here.

Speaker 13 You can listen to the podcast if you want to, as like having made Jeffrey super rich, super fast, other than just Les Wexner, the Victoria Secret guy, other than him.

Speaker 13 And it just really got me thinking again about the fact that there really are reports there are women out there who can point the finger at a third man or a fourth man or a fifth man.

Speaker 13 And I got dollars to donuts that those names probably aren't in the grand jury. Yeah.

Speaker 14 But the point of it was to just say we're doing something.

Speaker 14 We're for disclosure and see where the story goes. And from their point of view, hope it goes away.
Which it could.

Speaker 17 I'm also never really into file jumps. Like people said, we want JFK, we want RFK, we want all these files.
And then they made noise for like six hours online. And we didn't really learn that much.

Speaker 17 There was no big bombshell. The earth didn't come to an end.
Nothing shattering happened. So I don't really lose sleep over it.

Speaker 17 Like if we learn something new, we learn something new, but I don't find it all that interesting.

Speaker 13 Well, let me ask you this. What's the net effect of all of this?

Speaker 13 Because, you know, my own feeling is I didn't like how Trump handled this, especially last week, but it didn't change my feelings about Trump. You know, I still support him.

Speaker 13 I still think he's incredibly good for the country. He's, he is chalking up so many wins.
So like you look at the fact that Trump is getting. boys out of girl sports.

Speaker 13 He is stopping the mutilation of children. He is closing down the border.
He is deporting dangerous illegals. All that matters way more to me than about Epstein.

Speaker 13 But there are people in Coromaga for whom, you know, this is a very big issue.

Speaker 13 And it speaks not to just like their conspiratorial nature, but like the system that protects corrupt rich guys and shits on the little people. And that could be an ongoing problem.

Speaker 15 I think it's huge because, look, the last three elections have been games of inches. 2-3%, right? Trump barely wins in 16, barely loses in 20, barely wins in 24.

Speaker 15 As you just said, for the first time in 10 years, Trump

Speaker 15 and his movement have been defending the status quo, defending institutions, right? You had Charlie Kirk saying, I trust the government.

Speaker 14 We haven't heard that in a decade.

Speaker 15 And for these younger people, and I give Trump tons of credit to get all these young people to buy into him, to buy into MAGA, to believe in him. They're saying, wait a second.

Speaker 15 This is no different than what we kind of heard during COVID. You know, some people go back to the Iraq war and Rahm kind of touched on all these different things.

Speaker 15 That's where I say he's tone deaf a little. How does he fix that? Not that they're rushing to us Democrats yet because we have a huge trust problem with them.

Speaker 15 But for the first time, we've been about change. We've been about transparency.

Speaker 14 And the Republicans are just...

Speaker 13 That's where you fell off,

Speaker 14 Dan.

Speaker 17 But also, Dan. Did you guys start somewhere?

Speaker 13 Maybe Elon Musk and his America Party, maybe they'll get a couple, but they're not going Democrats.

Speaker 17 Here's my thing. If I'm President Trump, right, he's looking at these polls that even CNN is running that he's gone up the last week or two, even with all the Epstein stuff.

Speaker 17 And I think one of the takeaways is even if there are really loud voices on X and in the podcast space, they might not have as much effect on these polls and in the broader electorate.

Speaker 17 And I think for President Trump, because he's not living in those online spaces, he's like, I'm winning, I'm killing it. We've got the most secure border.
Why aren't you talking about this?

Speaker 17 I'm bored with Epstein. I think it's really that for me.
I don't think it's so much the friends or there's some secret thing he's hiding. I think he's like, I'm bored.

Speaker 17 Why are we talking about this guy? He's dead. He's gone.

Speaker 13 Some piece of Trump genuinely believes this is a Democrat conspiracy, that like this was, this is like a long trap that's been laid by Democrats somehow.

Speaker 13 I haven't totally figured it out, but I think he there is a piece of him that does genuinely believe this is like some sort of a thing that's been laid for him. And I reported this earlier.

Speaker 13 I was told by a few people that there is a belief, this is not confirmed, that there's a belief that there were some like poison pills put in the files by the Biden team before leaving office that that would make it such that Trump wouldn't want to release the files.

Speaker 13 I have no idea whether that's true, but now I've heard it from a couple of people and even the Trump, even President Trump intimated it.

Speaker 14 Credible.

Speaker 17 I want them to put out the credible documents, is what President Trump keeps saying now when he's gaggling. She can put out anything that's credible.

Speaker 17 And so I think he's just worried there could be some stuff in there that's supposed to paint him in a negative light. And he's like, I'm winning so much.
My polling is great.

Speaker 17 Why are we talking about that?

Speaker 14 Why don't you just love me the way I deserve it?

Speaker 14 I think he's bored with it.

Speaker 17 I think he's so bored. And the news that he's watching isn't covering Epstein at all.
And his aides might be coming to him saying, this is really big online. This is big online.

Speaker 17 And I think he's like, I'm sick of this.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I don't like online. So, Mark Halperin, does it affect him in any way, shape, or form, or no?

Speaker 14 I don't think so. I think it's the 485th lesson that we all should be humble and remember that Donald Trump understands MAGA better than we do.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 And politics in general.

Speaker 13 The guy's instincts for it have been spot on. Yeah.

Speaker 14 Spot on.

Speaker 14 Trademark hopper.

Speaker 14 And he can do stuff and say stuff that other people can't.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 17 I think it's also July. I was talking about this with someone yesterday.
I'm like, it's the middle of summer. It's July.

Speaker 14 I think a lot of people are at home.

Speaker 17 I think by a couple of weeks, we won't even be discussing it.

Speaker 13 Well, maybe that's why they released it when they did, you know, because it's summer.

Speaker 13 I was just amazed that they released it during such a slow news time when the media is always looking for something to chew on. And this has been such a juicy story.

Speaker 14 If they're super sophisticated, maybe they figured out he can burn out over the summer.

Speaker 13 Same way BBB is going to burn out by the time we actually get to the midterm.

Speaker 14 It's happening.

Speaker 13 All right, guys, a pleasure.

Speaker 14 Thank you for watching. Thank you all for being here.
We never get to be in the same room.

Speaker 13 Yeah, that's wonderful. Okay.

Speaker 13 Tomorrow, we've got another MK Media star, one of the EJs, Emily Jaszynski, will be here for the full show. Don't miss that.

Speaker 13 Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

Speaker 2 We all take good care of the things that matter.

Speaker 3 Our homes, our pets, our our cars.

Speaker 1 Are you doing the same for your brain?

Speaker 6 Acting early to protect brain health may help reduce the risk of dementia from conditions like Alzheimer's disease.

Speaker 4 Studies have found that up to 45% of dementia cases may be prevented or delayed by managing risk factors you can change.

Speaker 9 Make brain health a priority.

Speaker 10 Ask your doctor about your risk factors and for a cognitive assessment.

Speaker 11 Learn more at brainhealthmatters.com.

Speaker 13 What if thousands of deals were waiting for you? Black Friday is here at Best Buy, where you can find huge deals on the coolest tech.

Speaker 13 Get deals on smart TVs, the latest in gaming, sleek headphones, and more that are perfect for everyone on your gift list. Plus, find new door busters for even more savings.

Speaker 13 But hurry, Black Friday deals and Saturday, November 29th. Shop now at bestbuy.com.
Best Buy, imagine that.