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๐จLIVE with Reps. @MattGaetz & @LaurenBoebert: TRUMP vs. DESANTIS
Recorded: May 25, 2023 Duration: 4:39:58Space Recording
Short Summary
The discussion highlights significant political developments, including DeSantis's fundraising success and emerging trends in voter sentiment. The conversation also touches on the growth of Trump's loyal base and the decline in public trust due to controversial actions during the pandemic. Additionally, the unique format of Twitter spaces is recognized as a dynamic platform for political discourse.
Full Transcription
How's it going today, Slay, man?
It's going really well, Nick.
The problem is, I don't like doing this chit-chat business, so, I mean, can you bring a few more people out?
I know, but...
But you've got a big...
At least you're honest about it.
Yeah, yeah, just boring, isn't it?
Congressman Matt Gates coming in here in a couple of minutes.
Maybe three or four minutes.
That should be interesting.
Let's see here.
Yeah, so we had that space last night.
That was kind of a marathon space.
That was...
That was ridiculous.
That space was immense.
Like, just think about it.
Like, I mean, look, we all, I do think that DeSantis didn't do a great job, right?
But irrespective of that.
It was a massive, massive win for Twitter.
Just to look at the level of viewership,
both on that other stream as well as our stream,
and combine it together.
What is it?
It was just those two streams are about 9.7 million.
If you add the fails to your stream,
you got basically almost 11 million people.
That's immense.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, absolutely crazy.
So very quickly here, right in the beginning, we have Congressman Matt Gates.
Thank you so much for joining the panel, Congressman.
Oh, thank you.
I thought I'd begin with a boring 20-minute speech of a warmed-over stump remarks,
and then have you ask me a bunch of pre-screened questions from my existing supporters only.
Okay.
I understood those are now the rules of spaces that only your friends will ask you questions.
And you can start with a 20-minute sedative monologue.
Is that what we're doing?
Yeah, absolutely.
The sedative monologue, that was great.
You know, we had a lot of people that were like, oh, my God, you know, we tuned out of that space, you know, so quickly.
Just because, I mean, so it was supposed to be.
Decline is a choice, Nick.
Decline is a choice.
Don't make it in this space.
Yeah.
I thought there were going to be audience questions, right?
I thought it was going to be, you know, people would be able to come up on stage and ask some, you know, maybe some tougher questions.
But it really seemed like it was almost just, you know, maybe DeSantis, you know, making a campaign ad.
So I was a little disappointed in that, but yeah, no, I want to say for the audience, like, you came in on the fly here.
This wasn't pre-planned, I think.
It was like 10 minutes ago maybe when you agreed to jump in here.
That's what makes it fun.
We haven't had.
Right.
Absolutely.
But so I'll jump in here a little bit.
I want to ask you, what are your initial thoughts here?
You have Ronda Santis jumping in against President Trump.
You know, I don't really, like what is his, is this like a backstabbing move?
I know we've heard that a lot.
You know, what's going on here?
I think when someone decides that they believe that they need to be president of the United States,
like loyalty is a very diminished part of the calculus.
And that's not just in the 2024 presidential contest.
I think back to even when Rubio and Jeb were both eyeing the presidency,
Jeb Bush went down to Biscayne Bay and molded Marco Rubio out of clay in the early portion of his political career.
He was Marco's benefactor in every conceivable way and mentor.
And then, you know, when Marco decided that he thought he had the skills to be president, it didn't matter that Jeb was running too.
And I see a lot of corollaries here.
The one thing I didn't expect was that the universe would actually give Donald Trump two different Jebbs to run against in different election cycles.
Yeah, so we actually saw Ron DeSantis came out and started attacking Trump today, especially.
I believe he did an interview where he was saying that Trump actually handed the country to Dr. Fauci in March of 2020.
I mean, is that a fair criticism?
Well, how would you respond to that?
at the time, the first, you know, Surgeon General in the DeSantis administration, it was someone
who was largely parroting Dr. Fauci. So, you know, if there were people in the Trump administration
saying things that we didn't like, there were also people in the DeSantis administration saying
things we didn't like. But I think the fact that this is the opening salvo against Trump
fundamentally misunderstands the race on the part of the DeSantis camp. Here,
He's not running against Trump in 2021 or 2020 where lockdowns are the principal feature of our politics.
This is going to be an election about who can get the economy moving again.
And in Florida, I don't want to come across as a DeSantis critic in this space.
I actually think highly of the governor.
I've worked closely with him for many years.
And I wish him only safety and happiness on the trail, though I'm supporting Trump.
Like, DeSantis inherited a Florida that was on a meteoric economic rise and had
benefited from unified Republican control of the government in Florida for an entire political generation.
Like, there hasn't been a Democrat legislative leader in Florida since I was like 14.
That gave DeSantis that that tailwind.
And I think that as we evaluate who can bring us out of the morass and malaise that we're in now,
Trump has proven that he can do that before.
And that's why a lot of people who think highly of Governor DeSanis are steadfast for President Trump.
I would also observe that those who have seen both up close,
know who is particularly cut out for this job and it's trump like when ronda sanis first announced for
governor of florida in 2018 he could have had any american introduce him that was supporting his
candidacy and he chose brian mass and then when he was elected governor he could have chosen
anyone to lead the transition and help him build out his government and he chose me i was his transition
chairman
And then even after it was pretty clear that he was going to run against Trump for the presidency, he chose Byron Donald's to introduce him following his reelection.
And like, so DeSantis chose Gates, Donalds, and Mast, and we all chose Trump.
And it's not in any way a negative commentary on DeSantis so much as it is a clear and universal understanding between these two men that for this time, Trump presents the unique skill set to be able to get the job done, to finish the job.
You alluded to the fact that you weren't very much impressed with DeSantis's what happened yesterday.
So essentially, I mean, if you want to just elaborate on what your thoughts were in terms of his announcement.
What did you think of it?
Well, my thoughts were it was horrendous.
He was quite robotic.
But it was a win for Twitter in the sense of the number of people who tuned in.
So a lot of people tuned into that space.
And then our concurrent space, there was a lot of debate about what happened.
And so it was an open dialogue.
And so I thought from that perspective, Twitter won.
But I love to hear your thoughts, Matt.
Well, yeah, Twitter, I think, did well there.
I mean, if Twitter had had a space with Tucker Carlson,
would it have done better or worse, I don't know.
If they'd have had, you know, one with just Elon,
would it have done better or worse?
I don't know.
What I can say is that,
Ron DeSantis approached that experience as more of a oral book report than a Twitter space.
What I've enjoyed about this platform is it's dynamic.
There's a certain way that it's democratized where people get to offer their feedback.
It can be...
fun and like sua sponte like this has been right out of the blue but for desanis he wasn't really
talking with people he was just talking at them and it was it was like if you told the
a i chat bot to build you a twitter space from a you know republican candidate for president of
the heritage foundation
Yeah, so I want to encourage the audience here.
Leave your questions for Matt Gates.
We'll be with us here for a little bit.
If you have questions for them, put them down the bottom right-hand corner,
and we have the team going through them,
and we'll try to blast as many as we possibly can.
Congressman, so...
One of the arguments that the DeSantis camp makes is that he is more likely to win against Joe Biden than Donald Trump.
I'm not necessarily saying I agree with that.
But I mean, is that a is that a fair argument?
Is that is that true?
I mean, if we took, you know, shiny face Glenn Yon
and gave him some, you know, AI-generated campaign slogans
and, you know, warmed over speeches about American greatness.
And he said nothing of great substance.
And all Republicans unified behind him.
And there was no primary.
Like, he'd probably get about 60% of the vote against Joe Biden in the national election.
But then what would we have really won anyway?
Yeah.
Like, I'm tired of these Republicans that we get into positions of power that don't actually fight.
And I see them every day in Washington already.
What was exciting about the Trump era is that you could actually break through the wall.
You could do things differently.
That he was willing to take input from such a wide array of people and process that, that it generated about it its own own.
cool, innovative meritocracy.
And that's not what you get into Sanis world.
It's certainly not what you got from that Twitter space the other night.
Yeah, and so we have seen, actually, is that morning?
Yeah, I'm up.
Governor, how are you?
Governor, it's Congress.
The Congress, sorry, how are you?
I like where you're, I like, I just, I literally just walk up.
I'm a bit late for the space.
Congressman, my question for you is people don't like Trump's personal attacks.
And there's people talking about Trump fatigue.
Is that a reason why some people might go with DeSantis, even though they might not agree with his policies?
Oh, some call it Trump fatigue.
I call it Trump nostalgia.
Yeah. Some people don't like the mean tweets. I miss them. So maybe I'm the wrong guy to ask for that question. But here's one thing I've learned about politics. You have to win one election at a time. And I don't really, other than maybe the election of Joe Biden, frankly, in the last Democratic primary, there's not a whole lot of strategic voting. Usually people vote for politics.
who inspires them, not like, well, I'm going to vote for this person, even though they're not my favorite in this election, but because in an upcoming election, I think they've got greater prospects.
You know, that's somehow going to define that decision.
I get that, you know, Trump's different, but he's a, you know, he's a 78-year-old man.
He's going to be who he's going to be.
And I think it's the best option we got.
Congressman, one major issue that I believe that voters really, really care about is the Ukraine and Russia war.
And Trump's been very clear that he'll make a deal within 24 hours, he said, and he'll ensure that there's peace.
People have concerns about that there's going to be a world war.
We've seen Desantis kind of change his position quite a bit.
He wasn't even asked the question yesterday.
I mean, what does that tell you about Desantis?
Have we got any idea what his position is going to be?
And your thoughts generally on that would be brilliant.
Well, I am not a supporter of the United States' entanglement in the war in Ukraine.
I've been pretty vocal about that, pretty consistent about it.
Where I think this is most illustrative with DeSantis is not on the substance, where I think he's been on both sides.
It's how he makes decisions.
And I actually think DeSanis's heart is probably where I am and, frankly, where Trump is.
But if you get the right billionaire donor to call, the right super PAC benefactor, I think you find DeSantis more malleable.
And that's concerning to me beyond Ukraine.
Okay.
I do have to conduct another interview, so I've got to hop off, but may jump back on to this.
Thank you guys for having me.
Congressman, one last quick question.
I'll ask every special guest when they come on.
Your thoughts on Twitter spaces as a new form of journalism.
Just a quick few seconds, if you don't mind.
As a form of journalism, I hate it. As a form of communication and collaboration, I love it.
But my least favorite thing about all of this is that it results in new stories and clips and follow on content.
I appreciate it for what it is in the moment, and I loathe the fact that Twitter spaces have a life beyond
the actual word spoken on the platform.
I appreciate it, Congressman.
Thanks a lot for joining.
Congressman, thank you so much for joining us.
We really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Getting the panel up.
Let's get all the speakers up.
Justin.
That was good.
Now I'm the guy I'm on to ask him a question,
but we'll have plenty of time for that.
What was your question?
My question was, you know,
President Trump came up.
No, President Trump came out pretty strong today, and he lambasted Governor DeSantis for doing worse than Cuomo during the pandemic in Florida.
And I wanted to know as a representative of Florida, did he think the same thing?
I'm going to guess he didn't.
But, you know, it's because, you know, here was Trump accusing Florida of being the third worst states performance wise during COVID, which is complete fabrication and lie.
And it's an attack from the left.
And it's one more example on how I'm completely frustrated with the Trump campaign and they're gaslighting that could power the entire country for a year on the issue of COVID.
Right.
I mean, I think a lot of this would probably be wrapped up.
He could probably find some great credence if he just would own up to the issues that he caused during the pandemic and the things he still ignores.
And that's where I'm at.
I just, it's frustrating, super frustrating.
It's my core issue.
And I love that we can get the congressman on here.
I'm trying to get a couple other people.
See if I can get Steve D.C. on here from The last night's show.
Well, Justin, I know you're a major, major Trump fan, so I'd like to know what were your thoughts, generally speaking.
I'm not sure if we've got you on stage yesterday on Descanters' feet.
So what was, can someone tell me, what were the attacks?
So this is getting interesting.
Finally, we're seeing DeSantis attack.
What were those attacks like, Slyman, Nick, like, just give me a quick overview.
What did we see before you go to the panel?
So it kind of happened the way that we expected.
We saw these kind of attacks coming where DeSantis is essentially attacking Trump.
I think the line from today was that Trump in March of 2020 handed the country over to Dr. Fauci.
And Dr. Fauci was the one that was, you know, shutting down the country and implementing these draconian COVID policies.
which seems to be a...
Yeah, well, you remember...
...for Ron DeSantis,
because Ron DeSantis...
Yeah, we remember...
Congressman...
Yeah, Congressman Gess alluded to the fact that his Surgeon General in Florida had the same policies as Dr. Fauci.
And what did DeSantis do?
He fired him.
He fired him in the middle of a conference where the surgeon general Florida was saying, we are absolutely going to stay shut down.
He had one of his aides come in, tap the guy on the shoulder,
pull him aside he didn't walk off the stage the aid came back and again tap the guy on the shoulder
and he next day was fired so that's exactly what you do with leadership yeah it's what fouchy should
it's what dr so so jason so jesus he's using covid is one one form one thing to use is to attack
trump anything else that he's using or not yet just now focusing on covid policy
A lot of it was the back and forth with some of the videos.
This is the Twitter video war.
I think this is really going to be an election of that.
So there's lots of videos going back and forth from previous months and years and everything else there.
So it's on various topics, but a lot of it was COVID-centric today.
Mario, can I just time in here for a second? I have Chris Nelson reopened Chris, and my name's
reopened Chris for a reason because I started the group Reopened South Florida, which was fighting
against these local mayors and these local tyrants with their mask mandates and stuff, and I just
can't believe Matt Gates would come on here, and he sounded a little deflated. Maybe it's because
his candidate put out a whole bunch of nasty things about
Florida on the same day that he endorsed him. But Justin is absolutely right. When Scott Rivkees was the
Surgeon General here in Florida, he started spouting Fauci nonsense. And DeSantis had an aide come out and
yank him off the stage, basically. He should have given her a cane to
pull him off the stage with, and he replaced him with an America's frontline doctor,
Joe Latipo.
And to say that all the people are coming to Florida regardless of DeSantis, I don't know how
Matt Gates can say that with a straight face.
Everybody knows the reason why people are flocking to Florida from places like New York, from places like California, was because of the freedom that was offered here to come here and not have to wear a mask and to operate your business.
And for Trump to be.
singing Cuomo's praises when Cuomo was making people have vaccine passports. That's what they were doing.
You had to show medical papers to go into a restaurant. We would have absolutely had that here in Miami and Fort Lauderdale down here. They would have done that. But DeSanta's
saw that that's what was on the horizon and signed a law preventing it. And for for Trump to be going
out at him on this, and this is what I predicted too, by the way, was this would be the first thing.
And you know, the Trump people, they all want to say, oh, this isn't about the
passed, we need to move on. Dude, this was like last year. Okay. This isn't like 20 years ago
when when Trump was having affairs and stuff like that. This is like last year. And this matters
because here in Florida, we put things in place that will protect people's livelihoods. No
mandates are going to happen here in Florida if a magical virus escapes from Wuhan again. And that is
thanks to Governor Ron DeSantis.
I don't know how the rest of the country will be,
but we as the reopened movement down here in South Florida,
I chased DeSantis all over the place.
Anytime you had a press conference,
I was there saying,
rain in these local mayors, rain them in.
And you know what?
He listened to,
to the people and he became our ally.
He was an ally of the people against these little bureaucrats
that we had all over the state, by the way.
In Palm Beach, it was a really bad one here in Broward.
You had all these little mini Fauci's all over Florida.
And they were given DeSantis the finger the whole time.
And he actually legally, and through the law,
rained them in and stripped them of their power and freed Florida.
And it did become an a wasis of freedom.
And he set up things in place that this will never happen again.
So, you know, Matt sounded a little tired, but I'd be too if I was backing Trump.
And it's great to see that what's coming out of team DeSantis today.
So, Heather, I brought you up.
What's your thought?
You just brought Heather.
Look how obviously makes it look like, Heather.
Like, that was so bad.
He's like, Heather, destroy.
We need to just say past, Heather.
You don't need to say anything.
Just.
I mean, I just want to be,
I'm just like, Heather, look what she's,
look what he said about Trump and then she's like smash.
Yeah, Heather, go ahead.
Please, please smash.
I do want to say that, uh,
I'll let Heather smash here just a second.
I just want to let everybody know.
Congressman Gates is most likely coming back here in about 10 to 15 minutes.
He's currently doing another interviews.
I just want to let everybody know that.
I appreciate you.
I can prepare your questions, everyone.
Go ahead, Heather.
I mean, I just can't take anything Chris says seriously.
And I feel like honestly, it's all true.
No, it's not, dude.
You're like one of those, like, I feel like everybody like you in the back of my head,
I feel like somehow someone's paying you because like nothing you say ever makes sense.
You don't listen to evidence.
Like...
I genuinely believe all the big...
Nobody's paying me except for Ron DeSantis saved my wife's career and my career by protecting us from vaccine passports.
And a lot of you guys always aren't saying, you guys are getting paid.
You're getting paid.
None of these guys on Twitter here that are defending DeSantis, unless they work for his team, are getting paid.
But a lot of us are business owners who Ron DeSantis saved our business.
And I started out as an opponent of DeSantis, but...
He won me over.
Chris,
I was about the whole COVID.
Look, I'm all for, let me, let me do.
I want to say something about COVID because that, that is constantly used to debate.
Chris, I want to get your thoughts on this.
Do you think that, you know, if you remember during COVID, there was a lot of confusion.
Everyone was getting advice from Fauci.
And, you know.
I don't know why we keep using that as a reason
to support or attack any candidate because
Well, it matters a lot.
It does matter a lot.
It does matter a lot.
But I'm saying like back then it was just, everything was so new that now we're
judging them based on hindsight.
But I don't think they had the information to make decisions back then.
Like I think it's no, we I knew in March, Mario.
You knew Justin, Justin, you know Justin, you, you, you chose, Justin, Justin, you knew in March, but not everyone else did.
Yeah, Desantis knew. They all had the same information. Trump had the same information as DeSantis had. And they were all using, remember, Fauci and the CDC and what they were saying became science. And after, once we got first through the first two weeks to slow the spread, where I was like, okay, I trust Trump. This is a little weird, but, you know, let's see where he's going with this. There's no way he's going to go along with this. We love Trump. He's a freedom guy. Then he comes out and signs this.
cares act, which just is the reason why we have our inflation today, by the way, and then does
60 days to slow the spread. Once we got to that point, there was a, there were other doctors
that were coming out. Joe Latipo was one of them, putting out op-eds in the Wall Street
Journal saying, you know, look, there is no science behind this, unless we are ready to do a China-style lock
there is not going to be any preventing of this virus going around by lockdowns,
by doing these kind of semi-lockdowns.
And everybody had this same information.
And we know because DeSantis Forum is finally...
putting this stuff out, that Donald Trump made his decisions about Anthony Fauci because the media was in love with Fauci.
And Trump, it loves what the media says.
Ron DeSantis was reading.
All right.
Sir Christian, I was just, read Cassantis's book.
He was reading the report that we're saying otherwise.
Let me go ahead because I didn't interrupt her.
Just because I just hear COVID constantly being used as either a tool to support a candidate or to attack another.
And I know in this case, it's Trump v. Descantzance, but it's been used multiple times over the last few months.
And I just think we're trying to judge those candidates based on hindsight.
And I think we're not giving them.
It's kind of retribution, Mario, for our kids.
I don't know who else has kids here.
I have eight of them.
And when they went through an experience, they can't go to the voting booth.
I can and I can make my voice heard for them.
I hope they look 10 years back for now when they realize how much this damaged them, how strong their dad fought for them to make sure this never happened to them or their kids.
Yeah.
the problem with this argument is,
right?
first of all,
Mario,
you're right.
A lot of people are looking at this from hindsight.
Essentially,
when that was happening,
we saw there was a barrage of attack against Trump by the media.
We saw that significantly.
Even when he was given a device about why there shouldn't be a lockdown,
you saw the attacks that were happening.
And let's not pretend like everyone's trying to frame this as one guy was against it.
One guy was for it.
But.
I mean, essentially, yes, Trump did do lockdowns.
I understand that he didn't do them.
He advised them, whatever it may be,
but still, his advice is going to have an impact.
But on the other hand,
I mean, DeSantis was literally there with a 100-year-old patient,
literally putting the vaccine in him.
So to pretend that he's some kind of fighter against COVID or vaccine,
when he's literally putting it in there for a Photoshop,
thinking this is going to make him look forward,
he's going to get him more votes.
You can claim that he's apologized afterwards,
and Justin said there was a video when he was almost crying.
I'd like to see that video.
I still haven't seen it.
But essentially, look, he was...
We saw what they did and to make it look like they did that.
Yeah, let me know.
Let me guys.
Let me guys.
Yeah.
I want guys, guys, just two checks.
I want, I want, I want, I want, I want, I want, I want, I want, I want, I'll give you the mic right after Gabe.
I promise.
I know I interrupted you.
But Gabe, I want you to respond to this, to the COVID narrative being used.
I think it's going to be used in, in the presidential debates.
Can you give me your thoughts on the argument being made by both sides before I go to Heather?
Yeah.
Keep arguing. I love it. It is amazing. The amount of back and forth bitching and moaning about COVID, you've got Donald Trump today releasing a video saying how Ron DeSantis didn't know what he was doing. And then, if you look back at this a compilation of videos, probably like 20 different appearances of Trump in 2020, singing praise to DeSantis. So the fact that.
Both parties are attacking each other.
Oh, please, keep it going.
I love it.
I mean, Gabe, is your party going to allow RFK even an opportunity to attack?
He's even going to get a chance.
Does he have enough support?
He does seem to have a lot of support.
Based on what?
Based on what?
Based on the polls.
What's the polls show now?
His polls numbers are very similar to Santa Santa Santa.
I don't believe so.
I didn't see that.
Well, DeSantis broke the internet last night, so I'd say that's a pretty good poll.
And I think he did a damn good job, too.
Broke the internet?
What are you talking about?
That's right, Gabe.
That's right, Gabe.
He broke, because Twitter's faces is the best.
That's right.
Twitter's faces is the best, Chris.
Say it, Chris.
Let's hear you talk about it.
I vote.
I vote Twitter Spaces as well. I'm glad Chris we're on the same boat there Gabe. Don't talk.
You got a great space here, Mario. I love your stage.
That announcement was the most boring shit I've ever heard.
You had the one guy who doesn't know.
Don't hate on spaces, Gabe. Don't hate on spaces for me, Brooke.
I'm not hate on Spaces. He's telling you about what?
Let Gabe speak, guys. Come on, he's giving an unbiased. Go ahead, Gabe.
What else is it?
I'm not hitting on a stand-up comedian, all right?
But he knows how to do policy and get policy done.
I mean, I don't know.
I thought he was going to put in for a three hours.
Desantis is as much as Android as Elon Musk.
You got two people who don't know human interactions.
They're super awkward.
You've got one guy trying to moderate a panel.
Desantis had to bring in a fucking team of people to even have a discussion.
The fact that he had to announce that he was announcing he was going to run for president,
that's so fucking dumb.
Give me a break.
I mean, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not shitting on spaces because I appreciate spaces.
I am kind of shitting on Elon Musk for not having the bandwidth and the support that would be necessary to support something like this.
But also, if you're going to announce that you're running for president, the fact that you announced you were doing a Twitter space already took the fanfare out of announcing.
And the fact that he's having a scripted, despite Elon Musk and it's not scripted,
You're having a conversation where you're basically just coming in with prepared talking points and you have to bring people in to support you?
He made his pitch.
I mean, he was announcing for president.
He made his pitch.
What was his pitch?
How many times did he say the word fucking woke?
I don't think he doesn't drop F bombs.
What are you talking about?
Oh, whoa.
Okay.
How many times did he drop?
Woke is a big deal, man, because guess what?
Yeah, it's a thing, everything.
And if you want what's going on with the Fed, I guarantee it.
And how these people are forced to use diversity, equity, inclusion, or use these, not the, not the DIY, but these criteria in getting business a lot.
Let me do your favorite.
Chris, shut on.
No one cares, dude.
Chris, let me.
No one cares.
He's going to talk more about woke ideology.
Chris.
You know, woke goes to die in Florida and D.I. and CRT and all this stuff.
Regular people in America do not care about that.
He's going to spend all of his time and effort talking about woke this and woke that.
And you know what?
Go for it.
He's going to waste his time.
running on that platform and it's going to cost him.
Chris, Chris.
Not that he had a chance.
Let me do it.
Hold on.
Let me do your favorite.
Chris, Chris.
I'm going to do your favor, Chris.
And I listen to this.
Gabe doesn't like Trump or DeSantis.
So instead of arguing with Gabe,
so what you should do is you should skip your turn,
give Heather the mic.
She'll talk positively about Trump and then Gabe will go wild on Heather.
And now you got Gabe on your side.
That's how I'll play the policy.
You've got to play politics.
Don't use Mario's manipulative tactics.
Go after.
everybody.
Suplex everybody who attacks your guy.
Gabe,
Gabe,
I did check the
pause and
On May the 19th CNN, Paul Kennedy was polling at 20% similar to dissentists.
That's pretty surprising.
I caught me by surprise how quickly RFK, you know, scored a pretty high number of the polls.
Yeah, but these guys are not going to give them a chance.
At least the GOP are giving both sides a chance to have.
Well, it's very common for, it's very common because the Biden is the incumbent.
So it's very common to support the incumbent.
when it comes to an election.
But I don't...
Well, not really.
They did it.
And he's got...
They went against Bernie.
They went against Bernie twice.
It wasn't because they incumbent.
They have the establishing people.
They want in there.
And they don't want it.
They don't...
Anyone else gets basically wiped out.
No chance.
I forgot about the whole establishment.
All right.
Heather, Heather, would love your thoughts.
Go on.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, let's go.
I was going to say the whole quote point. I mean, the thing about DeSantis and Trump saying that one was bad on COVID, other was bad on COVID, let's be quite frank about DeSantis. I know personally for trying to apply to jobs in Florida, they still acquired the jab. They so required the mask. And I was considering going to Florida, not entirely because of DeSantis, but because of the state being a bit more right wing. And of course, more so importantly for me, it was by a beach. But
They still require masks and jabs over there.
They did lock down.
And to say that the Sanchez was perfect on COVID is inaccurate.
Both Trump and DeSantis, and I'm a Trump supporter.
Both them could have done better.
And we're looking at this.
you know, years, years into the future. We're not really looking at it as at that time. So,
I mean, you can say bash Trump or bash his hand is about the COVID problem, but let's be
quite honest, pretty much all forms of government had problems with COVID. Yeah, but this is,
this is the, the leadership issue that we're getting to. This is something I'm sure Leav would agree
with, which is that Trump will never acknowledge his faults, and therefore he will never grow as a leader. And
And it's going to be very challenging when you look down the terrible list of people that he put in there.
And Soleimand, as you can see up there in the nest, I put two videos.
The last one I posted, this is from September 2020, where DeSantis is doing a sort of reflection back on the lockdowns.
See, I would love to have a moment where Trump says, you know what?
that that whole vaccine rush to to market that we did, I think that was wrong.
You know what? The lockdowns are wrong. You know what? I should have fired Fauci.
He has never, ever even eluded.
to his regret around anything pertaining to the COVID policies.
I would love him to come out and say that PPP was a huge fraud and I regret it.
He gave Fauci an award.
He gave Fauci a presidential commendation on his way out the door.
That tells me how he had that was in 2020.
In 2020,
before the MRNA was no.
It was in January of
It was January
2021,
let's not,
let's not forget Trump was the guy
that was telling people to shoot close.
You need a calendar.
Wait,
2020 calendar,
you really do.
It happened in 2021 and his way out the door after being president.
He gave him a presidential commendation.
Look it up.
Berks was on there.
His son-in-law, Kushner, all the people involved in Operation Warps feed.
He gave a commendation to you.
You know what?
That tells me he thinks and still probably thinks, thought at that time for sure,
that it was the right thing to do.
And how many people have been injured by the effects.
And the lies to the who.
I know.
Seriously.
Let me.
Sorry, guys, too many people are talking.
It's an award.
Chris, Chris, I like you on here because you do smash people, right?
But just sometimes you talk over too much as well.
But Justin, I've got a question for you.
Let me just ask Justin.
Justin, you've got the video on the, on from the first of September.
When, what does that, what does he?
Obviously, I haven't got time to watch it right now.
But if you can just tell us specifically, what, what does he say in that?
Yeah, I'll have to go back and read it.
I watched about two weeks ago, and I can't remember verbatim.
But basically what he was talking about, someone asked him about the lockdowns again.
He took a moment, he paused.
He looked down and he said, you know, to think that we had...
these lockdowns and that those may have contributed to these debts and he shook his head.
He's just like, yeah.
I mean, and there's another video I have there, a second one where he talks about we will never, ever do that again.
That's what I want Trump to do.
I want Trump to go up there and say, I never will do these lockdowns again, but I can't get that from him.
Just, yeah, so Justin, if he said the first one isn't an apology, but the second one, if he said that, that is an apology.
If he said, I'll never do it again.
So I like to say if, if, like, let's see the receipts in the videos before we give any, you know, credibility to what he's saying.
Which one does he say?
Because we still haven't seen the video of Descenta's trying.
I'm not at my desktop for me.
I posted it and Descentes also felt really bad when he pardoned my friend.
So one second, one second.
He said he was sorry.
Chris, Chris.
Chris,
right, Chris,
Chris Orgiston.
What,
you know what,
you know that famous video
of him putting the vaccine
in that old patient?
And again,
people can use emotional argument and say,
you know what,
that could have been your granddad
and we want to save him.
But what was the date for that?
Do we know?
I don't know.
The death of that was the
It was unclear, but can I just, because Chris, he was...
No, no, so when was it? Was it around September 20?
Basically, the reason I'm asked the question is, is it after these videos that Justin has given us?
Yeah, it's after the videos. Because the vaccines didn't come out until the end of 2020.
And so these are probably some of the first vaccines.
And then all of a sudden the data started coming in.
And we now know from CDC FOIAs that came out just this last week that they already had signals of myocarditis early in the spring of 2021.
And they hit it.
They redacted that.
And a study was just confirmed today on this thing.
Every agency denied it.
They Democrat, they Democrat, they're VAIRS.
They said, anybody can put a report of an injury in VAIRS.
They totally undermine all of our reporting systems to hide it.
But you think Trump, that real estate agent,
should have divined it in 2020.
It's ridiculous.
No, not the vaccine.
The lockdowns for sure, though.
The lockdowns absolutely.
You lockdowns for what's targeting.
Justin.
Justin.
I just want to get your argument right.
So are you saying that...
He did the lockdowns.
He then apologized, maybe cried about it,
and then got emotional.
And then after that, he still put the vaccine in that 100-year-old guy.
Am I getting the timeline?
I'm not sure.
We'll get the timeline for you soon as well.
How dangerous they were.
The reason I'm asking, Chris...
Chris or Justin, the reason I'm asking the question,
if you guys can clarify that,
is because if he's apologizing and getting emotional,
but then he's still putting this vaccine in that guy.
I don't see your argument.
Justice Gorsuch,
Justice Gorsuch appointed by Trump.
He came out with one of the most powerful statements in a ruling the other day.
And he just basically said, this was the most egregious infringement on our rights in a generation, perhaps in the entire history of the United States.
as far as, you know, since slavery type of thing.
And basically, you know, you lambasted people left, right.
I think in the end, when you boil it up, whatever the timeline was,
this was all about the right thing to do is to uphold the Constitution
and uphold our constitutional rights.
When they shut down churches, when they shut down your business,
and they denied your business, that's what's all about.
Just, if there's a...
Justin, if there's a video or a statement from Trump saying that he'll never lock down again with that, should your opinion.
I don't think there is that. I don't think he's ever said that.
No, he's never said that.
So if he did that, if he liked that.
Someone just sent me an article.
So someone just sent me an article.
And it says, Trump says no new lockdowns under this administration.
So he's basically saying that.
But what action did he take?
He didn't take any action.
He just sat back and washed his hands of it and gave it to the governor.
It's because there was the state's rights issue.
Well, you know what?
DeSantis is different with this.
Learn about federalism.
This is something that's very different between DeSantis and Trump.
DeSantis governs with energy.
It's not different, Chris.
Can I finish?
He governs with energy and the executive.
DeSantis wasn't okay.
But he dies and falls asleep on Twitter.
He wasn't.
So what?
I mean,
he bored you.
I don't really care about that.
He does action and he gets things done.
Trump is exciting,
but Trump doesn't get anything done.
Trump is all talk and no action.
All right, right, right.
I've listened.
Guys, you guys.
I've listened to Chris enough.
Can I please weigh in a little bit here?
Yeah, go for it.
Go for Heather.
Okay.
So Chris try your best not to interrupt, please.
Yeah, seriously, Chris.
Go ahead.
Take a seat.
Everyone interested me.
So, okay, go, so.
During COVID, one of my things that I was actually reporting on were Trump's task force, like,
COVID task force briefing. So like when the lockdowns or the virus first started coming, right,
and states, he left it up to the states, certain states closed, other states didn't.
When that happened, he would do these like weekly briefings with Dr. Birx and all of these other people.
This was long before the vaccine was even in existence. And I would,
I, when I first got COVID, was probably in like June of 2020.
There was no vaccine and it spread rapidly through everybody that we worked with.
And what.
what Trump's task force and the docksters were pushing at the time was hydroxychloroquine
and a xithromycin so like a zepak right and on facebook in what was it probably like march of
2020 going into april of 2020 this was been like the virus right virus was first spreading there was a
Facebook group called COVID-19 survivors and all of these people it started mass multiplying
in numbers of all these people, not just that had COVID, but that wanted to know what was
working because there was that element of fear in people. Like, is it as bad as they say it is?
So everybody in that group was posting that hydroxychloroquine was working. And I actually
screen grabbed and recorded a bunch of stuff and archived it. People that had diabetes. One
woman had one lung. And they were attributing hydroxychloroquine.
chloroquine when given prophylactically actually saved them, right, and was working.
And this was something Trump heavily promoted.
So everyone's focused on the vaccines, but they're not focused on these treatments like
ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, budesinide, whatever, the inhaler that the...
one of the former doctors there in Texas was pushing, all of these things, if they hadn't been
censored by the media, would have made it so that we didn't need a vaccine because there were
so many early treatments that could fix COVID and it would basically make it like a common cold,
like treating it with Tylenol. But yet there was this mass pushed by the media to censor
those treatments and only heavily focus on the vaccine, which...
Right around the same time that Facebook group started exploding with all these real-life testimonies of what was working, the group was removed.
Right.
And this same time is when Reuters partnered with Facebook to fact-check medical misinformation.
And one of the people on that board was the former president of Pfizer.
Right? So there was like this, this huge sort of like effort now to censor all medical information on social media that one made the vaccines like basically not needed. Right. So all the early treatments, they were censoring that.
And then once the vaccines did get rolled out, all the adverse reactions to the vaccines were being censored.
So if we really want to give Trump credit, let's give him credit for hydroxychloroquine, which saved lives.
And if it weren't for the media that has waged a war on him, also waging a war on those early effective treatments, we never would have needed the vaccines in the first place.
Heather, but wait a second, but Trump.
Let me just go to one second, guys.
Lev, Lev, Lev, I want to go to Lev anyway.
So, Leve, go ahead and say what you want.
And then my question to you is,
there's been some reports from the mainstream media
about your interactions with DeSantis and some text messages
and you don't seem very fond of him,
so I'd love to hear that.
Go ahead, Lef.
Well, first of all, I'm not a Trump fan or the Santa's fan. You're not a fan. You've never been a fan of anyone since you came on the show. We'll make it clear other than just, just, just the space. I try to say it. I just try it. I love the space. I love you guys here. Mario, Sulaiman. Nick, you guys do great. So, but I just want to say one thing. First of all, Heather, there's a lot of things Trump said. And one of the things Trump promoted was shooting up chlorine in people's veins. No, you're
Also, no, that was another context.
That exactly, that's false.
Even I agree, that's false.
Come on.
Yeah, you agree.
All right, guys, I'll have you correct anything that Lev says that's false.
I'll correct it right after.
Go ahead, Lev.
It was on live TV. Everybody could make their own judgments.
I will say this, that I think that everything Trump did when it came to COVID was completely wrong.
He tried to follow any suggestion that he can.
He listened to anybody would tell him anything.
I'm not a Santa's fan, but I do agree that Ron at least did act a lot quicker than Trump
and opened up the state and made it a lot more powerful and made a lot more business here and active.
And that's one of the reasons why a lot of people started moving down to Florida.
But whatever Trump did, he first told people not to attack vaccines, then he took the vaccine, that he tried to hide it, then he tried to take credit for the vaccine.
So whatever Trump did was just to try to take credit for whatever good and whatever was bad, he tried to pretend that it never happened.
As far as Ron go, I mean, I'm not a fan of his either.
I think that this whole COVID conversation, I don't think it's something that is going to win either one of them, the presidency.
I think this is just too much conversation going back and forth.
They both locked down the States, Trump locked down the country.
DeSantis locked down the state. Yes, DeSantis opened it up earlier, but it's a minor conversation.
There's a lot more to problems with our country and with the world that the president's going to have to deal with with then just what happened with COVID.
Lev, what's your thought about, to move away from the COVID discussion now, what is your thoughts about DeSantis himself, both as a leader as well as a possible, as a governor of Florida and then as a possible presidential candidate and president?
The difference, well, I'll tell you this much.
The difference between Trump and DeSantis is with Trump is what you see is what you get.
DeSantis is like that snake that lays in the weeds and they will come out and bite you when you're not looking.
He's a chameleon.
And one thing I'll agree with Matt Gates, which I usually don't do, but he will go for where the money is.
If a big donor gives him enough money, he will support that policy.
He's not out there making his own policies.
He's mostly just going after policies that the money is flowing into him and telling him to do.
He also, knowing Ron, the way I know Ron, is he had ambitions of the presidency from the day one.
Florida was just a stomping ground for him.
It was just a step to get to where he wanted to get to.
What screwed him up was that Trump didn't win 2020 because in his perfect world,
he thought Trump was going to get 2020 and then hand over the reins at 24.
And now he's going to go after, have to go after and battle Trump,
which I think he's going to have a very hard difficulty because at the end of the day,
I made that wedding between Trump and DeSantis.
And I was one of the biggest supporters of DeSantis that...
convinced Trump with Rudy to have him go out there and stop grounds for him and support him
and give him his endorsement for DeSantis to win.
So I don't think DeSantis has what it takes to be the president of our country.
I don't think he would do very well on the world stage.
I don't think he has a personality and he listens too much to people around him
and doesn't have his opinion that much where he agrees in something and stays with it.
You said that you were the cause of their union essentially.
What were the specific things you did to bring them together?
And how did you get involved in the first place as well?
Well, basically in 2018 in May, Ron approached me when he was still congressman. He approached me when I was at the Trump International Hotel, came up to me and basically said, you know, I'm the guy. He was told that I'm the guy to speak to be able to, you know, get Trump to support him because of my relationship with Trump and Giuliani.
At that time, Trump just sent out a tweet about I think maybe several months ago supporting Ron but didn't endorse him.
There was a big push for Adam Putnam and I was a big Adam Putnam guy at the time because of my relationship with Brian Ballard and everybody in Florida.
And I was actually donating to Putnam at the time.
And I basically told Ron that, you know, I don't think that he's somebody I would support because of I was also a cannabis guy.
And I didn't think Ron was a, you know, a hardcore cannabis guy and wasn't leaning towards that.
Ron started, you know, coming to the hotel for the next couple of days and basically
spending time with me and pitching me and telling me how, you know, he would be a cannabis guy,
that he would be great that, you know, I would have a friend in the state office and, you know,
that our relationship would be a lot better than mine and Putnam's and that he's a Trump supporter
and started showing me because he was at the time every day on Fox touting,
supporting Trump against the Russian hoax and all of that.
And basically at some point, we started becoming closer.
And I approached Rudy and I told Rudy my opinions.
And I told them that because Rudy and Ron didn't know each other at the time,
I introduced them and told them that basically Ron would be our guy, a Trump or somebody that would be loyal to Trump, a hardcore trumper,
and would support him and basically win Florida for us, which Florida would be a big state for us for the 2020 elections.
And then at some point, Rudy went to the office.
And at that time, it was just like a perfect storm because at the same time, there was also reports coming out that Trump started seeing about Adam Putnam because Putnam was a Joe Bush guy in 2016.
And he made some rhetoric remarks about Trump.
And Trump saw somebody showed him the articles.
And Trump started hating on Putnam.
And it was basically nobody else at the time.
So Ron, he was lucky at the time.
And we convinced Trump to go do the rally for him.
And after he did that rally, that's when DeSantis went up over Adam Putnam.
And not only that, but then I continued not only raising money for him.
You got to understand, me and Ron had such a relationship.
People call me 12 o'clock in the midnight.
on almost every other night to talk about what we're going to do the other day.
I flew with him to all over the country, to Colorado to fundraise for him.
I held three fundraisers for him.
I've spoken to most of his supporters that gave him big money and pitched him to give him more money.
I helped him get the Cuban vote down in Miami.
I mean, and I brought Giuliani down here to stomp in November 3rd and 4th,
we went to rallies right before the election.
I was the first person Ron gave a hug to when he got off the stage.
And I really believe that Ron was true to his face.
And, you know, he promised me a lot of things.
But as soon as Ron won, I mean, Ron started throwing his true colors and basically
getting rid of everybody that, you know, he, you know, that he didn't want.
He started leaning towards people that started giving him the big money, even though they
were against him in the beginning.
But once they started giving him the big checks and big money, he started listening to
them and forgetting who his true friends were.
So Ron doesn't have the loyalty.
Yeah.
he's showing it right now because like I said I don't believe I don't like Trump or him
but if it wasn't for Trump Ron would never be a governor of the state of Florida and you know
he's just not a loyal guy so how much is Billy Corbyn paying you to do this uh this uh documentary
with him against Trump is it
First of all, it's zero, and it's not about Trump or DeSantis.
It's about my four years in Trump world.
It's going to be a lot more than just Trump and DeSantis,
and you should watch it, Chris, because it's going to be,
there's lots of stuff about Pompeo, Pence, Bolton,
and a lot of other people.
Lindsay Graham, you know, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden.
There's a lot of things that's going to be in the documentary.
It's based on my four years in Trump world.
I will watch it.
And I like Billy Corp and stuff.
He puts out some good stuff.
Hey, just in real quick, some news breaking news, which was they've released the numbers.
DeSantis raised $8.2 million in the last 24 hours.
So the question is, who gave it?
I mean, the question is that, Justin, who gave them the money so we know why policies are on to what loves it?
Last majority of these came in for under $200, which are, you know, basically small dollar donations.
Oh, brilliant.
How many were under $200?
Yeah.
I will know basically next month on the 15th.
It's not huge bazillionaires doing this.
This is called grassroots and you're going to find.
And I've noticed there's some never-Trumper people that are now all of a sudden Trump people and they're never Desantis people.
It just reminds me a lot of how the anti-Dissantis people are.
They remind me of the anti-Trumpers back in 2015.
But.
you know you're going to find that a lot of these donations and i think it's going to get to
20 million is a lot of these donations are going to be just from regular people small business
owners people that are really the backbone of this country who saw how ronda sanchez stood up for
stood up for them during all the covid mania and uh they're grateful there's a lot of people that are
very grateful for ronda santis
Chris, Chris, Chris,
the problem with your argument is
you can use that argument against maybe people
who are pro-Trump,
but you can't use it against Lev.
He doesn't like Trump
and he doesn't like dishonest.
Oh, I wasn't using it against him.
No, no, I wasn't using it against him.
I was just saying,
I was going to ask Chris a question, yeah, yeah,
Chris, let me finish, bro,
that was hard.
So essentially, um,
What his argument is, is anyone who pays DeSantis, he'll change his policy based on that position.
And that's concerning.
So I appreciate what Justin's saying, a lot of people are given grassroots donations.
So that's not going to impact his policy.
That's the majority.
But then the minority of them who probably are given large donations, I mean,
Maybe we're going to know his policy based on those donations according to what Lev said.
I doubt.
Sarah, go ahead.
Do you have a question?
Let me just got Sarah.
Thank you.
I wanted to ask Lev a couple of things.
First, Leff, would you say that you're falling out with DeSantis was after he became governor?
Did you say that he dropped all of his friends that were loyal and helped him get there?
And that led to your falling out with him.
And then secondly...
Salaman brought up a point about fundraising and DeSantis may or may not change his position depending on who his donors are and I want your opinion on that as well. Thank you.
And just to add to Sarah's question, Leff, if you can give a specific example as well, because anyone can make a generalization.
Yes, please.
Thank you, Selahman. Thank you.
Okay, well, first question is, yes, our falling out began after he won governor, because there were certain groups of people that were on Adam Putnam's team.
And basically that towards the end, even I helped make a piece between him and Desantis to join him.
Susie Weil was one of them that joined his team. And Brian Bauder was another...
person that joined this team. And then there was other people that started joining the
Santas' team once he was close to the election and after he won, that started talking bad about me,
calling me a dumpster fire because of certain articles that came out in the press, which DeSantis
knew about already, which we discussed, which
I have text messages of him saying that it's fake news and don't worry about it.
You know, just keep your head up and stuff like that.
But then afterwards, we even had meetings, private meetings, me and Ron,
when he was already governor, where he told me that Lev...
You know, he gave me a private phone number, told me not to worry about it, that he wants me part of his transition team.
And you sent me out paperwork and everything like that.
And then slowly but surely he stopped calling, stopped picking up phone calls and all of a sudden had his assistant start blocking me, you know, until I got too busy with Rudy and Trump and Ukraine and really, you know, stopped talking to him.
So as far as that goes, the second question, I think what was it you said about fundraisers?
Yes, would he be swayed by who's donating to him to change his positions, maybe on things like health care, social security, COVID or the Ukraine?
Well, first of all, I know for a fact, I don't want to name certain donors.
I don't want to lay them out there on spaces, but there are certain billionaire donors that donated to Ron the Jewish donors that persuaded Ron to change his mind about certain things to do with the Jewish population in Florida and also about his visit.
Did you give a specific? Like what?
I don't recall exactly the exact policy.
You know,
let me go back to some of my records and some of my emails and double check.
It's a big brush you're painting with, Lev,
and that's why I think a lot of people are concerned.
I mean,
I'm telling you.
Trump today is,
he's teeing off today.
He was at the golf tournament with the LIV.
LIV is probably paying his,
his,
his clubs millions of dollars across the country from Saudi Arabia.
And I don't fault him for that.
But let's just be clear if we're talking about big money changing hands and somehow
influencing people, I would see there's concerns there if people wanted to look at that way
as well.
But I really don't, I don't have any worries about these things because I don't.
I know, I think I know the character.
You don't have worries that somebody can basically pay the United
President of the United States and force him to change prices.
But whoever pays him most.
So they might have been for Lev, actually, the following question is to Justin's point though,
Leav, do you think that a kind of, just as Justin's saying is that kind of like the
Saudi money because of the Gulf, do you think that might be a talking point?
Yeah.
within the DeSanta camp or other anti-Trump candidates saying kind of this foreign influence and foreign money into his business.
Do you think that's going to become a talking point?
Well, put it to this way.
When he was running his 2018 campaign, DeSantis didn't care about where the money came from,
but all he did is care about the amount of money.
And he only looked at the big donors and cared about meeting with them and discussing and promising them whatever they want to hear.
So I haven't been with him for already several years.
I don't know who's paying him now.
I haven't been with him.
And I don't know who's,
but just looking from the outside and looking at the way he's,
doing certain things.
I don't see him bringing up these policies on his own.
I see that somebody's pushing him,
especially like with the Disney thing.
I think that there's some big money behind that,
that he wanted him to go that route
and why he's taking it to such a degree.
That's my opinion.
I don't have any fact about that.
From who?
Can you talk about Christina?
That is your,
I mean, that is your opinion,
so that is important to highlight.
But, Leff, specifically, I mean,
I mean, you gave that example of Jewish donors giving him money and that impact in policy.
But you said you can't remember what the specific policy is.
Is there a specific policy that you do remember?
Because the issue is when we're making these kind of like accusations,
we do need a bit of substance to back them up because...
I understand this, Solomon.
I'll get you.
I'll get you the exact, but I knew he started, he did a lot of favorable stuff in which I'm four.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm Jewish and I'm fair.
And I'm four, you know, he did a lot for the Jewish community in Florida, for the schools, for the Habats, for the synagogues.
I mean, so I'm not against it.
But he wasn't a for-dose policy until some real money came in from South Florida, from certain synagogues, which again, I'm not going to mention the names right now because that's not my job to do.
But I will look up the policies and come back on here and tell you what they were.
I just don't, I wasn't prepared to discuss policies right now.
So, I mean, you could leave it at that for now.
For now, for now, fair enough.
For now, for now, for now, I don't have proof.
For now, I don't.
I think DeSantis took money from it.
Let me just go to her.
Chris, one second.
Chris, we're going to come to you a second.
Sarah, do you have you got another question?
Yes, thank you.
Lev, you're doing a documentary and you said that it's not about Trump or DeSantis,
that it's about your time with Trump.
How could it not be about Trump if it's about your time with Trump?
And when will that come out and on what that work?
Oh, no, I didn't say it's not about Trump.
I said it's not particularly about Trump.
It's a lot about Trump.
It's about the Santas, but it's a lot about,
it's basically about my life in Trump world and everything.
I mean, there's lots of subjects.
There's the Ukraine impeachment.
There's things that want on that people don't know
what happened with Venezuela, with Maduro, with Guaido,
that I was intricate part with.
There's things in Turkey and Erdogan that I was intricate parts with that people don't know about.
So there's a lot of things that are going to come out.
I mean,
Lindsey Graham's whole role in the Ukraine stuff and so on and so on.
So, I mean, it's more than just Trump to, but it's based off of a Trump's world, absolutely.
And, you know, Descentes has a lot in there and stuff like that.
And Giuliani, obviously, and so on.
Chris, have you got any questions or have any thoughts?
I look forward to seeing the documentary, and I've seen Billy Corbyn's work before.
Billy Corbyn is very much on the left and very big about, you know, doing gotcha things with people on the right.
But I'll tell you, I love cocaine cowboys and the โ but I โ
and the other one he did about Falwell, who, you know, endorsed Trump.
But, you know, it doesn't sound like you have any receipts about DeSantis doing things based on corporate donors.
And I'll tell you, I know politicians that are beholden to their corporate donors.
I know politicians that are hospital politicians.
There's one of them that's a Republican congressman that just endorsed Trump.
His whole contributions are from Hospital Association, this and that.
And guess what?
He was out there stomping for Sarasota Memorial Hospital when we were with the whole thing where they removed Dr. Lattel and they were doing, they were having the whole public hearing about the COVID protocols.
At Ron DeSantis, I think he took money from Disney.
I think didn't he take money from Disney?
I think that he doesn't listen to his corporate sponsors.
And I'll tell you, it probably does.
upset them. He makes decisions, and I know this because I know the man, from watching him,
not personally, just from watching him. And he makes decisions that doesn't make much sense. He's
about to let this COVID hospital liability shield, you know, expire. And going against the hospitals
for the, the mask mandates and the vaccine mandates and taking on all these people, I think
he made a lot of people really unhappy.
And I've just watched him and watches how he makes decisions.
He doesn't make decisions like a guy that's beholden to corporations.
Yes, he does.
And I can give you two examples.
Yeah, go ahead, Heather.
Let's see you.
So the first one, right, was during when he locked everything down and he shut down
Airbnb's but kept hotels open.
and then got a huge donation, his biggest donation from a hotel tycoon owner, right,
that profited off of his decision to close Airbnb's but keep hotels open.
Secondly, the whole thing with Disney, if you look back on Mario's recorded stream
of his announcement yesterday or whatever.
When he was talking about Disney, he actually shot himself in the foot.
He actually made some sort of comment where he said it became no longer profitable for Florida to stay in business with Disney in that sense and to keep that deal going.
For the sole fact that Americans, in the same way they tried to cancel Bud Light and Target, have been boycotting the wokeness being injected into Disney for years now.
I myself canceled Disney today.
plus subscription in our household.
And that was long before DeSantis, you know, was in the picture.
And so Disney itself had already been losing money, losing subscribers, right?
And DeSantis yesterday pretty much alluded to that, that it was on its way out already, and it became not profitable to keep those negotiations in place.
Then he also says, I actually helped Disney and kept them open when California closed them.
So in reality, he's actually done more to benefit Disney.
And Disney was one of his big donors.
And he acknowledged yesterday that Disney was dying and that that
arrangement was no longer working.
Well, that's mainly because of Star Wars.
For him to try to allude, like, all of a sudden he's this night in shining armor in Florida coming to destroy Disney.
Disney was already dying.
Yeah, we're agreed.
I mean, Disney is like picking a dead.
Let me go to, Chris.
How's there stockpriced doing today, Heather?
Let me go to Doc.
Doc, you got a question?
Doc.
Yeah, I did.
I was curious about Christina Peshaw.
You know, the very silent and stealthy communications director.
I think now for the campaign.
I'm curious about her history in the Ukraine,
the pictures of her kissing Zelensky on his inauguration,
her association,
and now disclosed association as a,
An agent for, sorry.
You know what I'm talking about.
So I'm curious about Christina.
That's my question.
Lev, that's a question to you, I think.
I mean, I don't know her personally, but she's a total joke.
When I try to confront her on some of the stuff, she said she blocked me right away and never responded.
So she's definitely, I think, a total joke.
And for Ron to have her as his communications director, I think, is a joke.
She's pretty brilliant.
Let me go to Brick.
She drives you crazy, doesn't she?
Brick, let me go to break.
No, she's just, I think, the joke.
I've been listening for the last 45 minutes.
I've heard a lot of talk about COVID.
But going back to the question up the top of the space,
Trump versus DeSantis, who will win?
I don't think that COVID is going to be the deciding factor.
I'm not even sure it's going to be one of the top three.
Okay.
You know, there's a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking going on when we look back at how things were handled in various months in 2020 with the response to COVID.
You know, we're looking at it with the benefit of hindsight.
And yeah, I mean, in retrospect, mistakes absolutely were made.
But I don't think it's possible to say that it was clearly obvious that they were mistakes at the time.
So that being said.
You know, I think the big issues, I just don't think that people are going to sit down and do some sort of mental calculus about which candidate did what on COVID when they did it and why they did it.
I think they're going to vote on the visceral issues that are going to be affecting them.
And I think that that's, you know, immigration.
I think that that's the war in Ukraine, if it's still happening.
And if it's not the war in Ukraine, it's foreign policy in general.
And I think it's also the economy.
And I think those are the three things that they're really going to look at.
And, you know, on those, President Trump, I believe, is better equipped.
He's got a demonstrated history of not being adventurous when it comes to foreign incursions and wars.
I mean, we know that Bolton wanted to start a war when we had a drone shot down in the Middle East.
Sure, it was a $300 million drone, but that's why we have drones.
So we don't have to get into wars when they get shot down.
But, if I may, but then the whole killing Soleimani, they're just going to completely ignore?
That's the typical Trump
before you want you to forget.
Just the vaccine.
The brain operation warp speed.
Say it was a good thing.
You want to forget about this,
but I'm telling you,
the voters have not forgotten
that they tried to strip away
all of our freedoms
and tell us we couldn't live our lives
unless we took this stupid vaccine.
And who was the father of the vaccine?
Yeah, but that was large.
That was largely.
It's no wonder you want to forget this.
But we're not going to let you,
we're not going to let you forget this.
And the people...
It's crass, as always.
Here's what I'm trying to say.
The premise of my statement was,
the more you try and use cudgel response,
excuse me,
the more you try and use COVID response as a cudgel
to bash either of these candidates,
it's not really going to work for you
because the other one also had fault in the game.
So you're really getting at like parsing the issue to like who propers
percentage-wise might have been a little bit better.
I honestly do not think that when the election comes down,
not just the general,
but even the primaries,
I think that people are going to move beyond COVID.
Now, there's obviously going to be a group of people
for who COVID is now.
a primary motivator.
I just don't think that that group is going to be significantly as large as the people
concerned about that.
People concerned.
He ran.
But I have a question.
I can't.
He raised $8 million, but no point.
He just raised $8 million,
but nobody could donate to him before because he just announced.
I understand that there's a lot of pent up support for Ron to Sanchez.
Why do you think that is, Rick, too?
Why do you think there's a lot of pent up support for him?
Because we have a healthy primary process in the Republican Party, and there are people who prefer him over Donald Trump.
But I don't think he goes. Why is he even on the grid right now? Ron DeSantis is on the grid right now because he promoted freedom over fear during the whole COVID disaster. That's why he's already in.
You stay for a period of time. Let's be honest.
after arresting people who were on the beach let's be honest i mean things like i think
the videos it was the local governments that was the miami beach pd and boy were they a pain in the
ass this state we had our protest on the beach is state i was the one that took the video of
kimberly falkenstein getting arrested on miami beach uh that was my video i could have made a lot more
money for it but i actually didn't make any money for it but that was the here's the thing
that was the miami this is what i'm saying
This is where I'm saying, getting down into the minutia of where and when and what the COVID response was at what time, on what day and what month, with what information is not a winning issue for either candidate.
I think my main way.
It's not a wedding right.
Let me speak real quick.
I got to go here in just a minute because I got to go to Justin Chris, please.
I got to go to a hop off to a radio show real quick here that I'm hosting for the next two hours.
I hope to hop back on if you're still here.
But I've got 22 other issues that I have with Trump.
And here they are.
I can just listen real quick.
Ray, Bolton, Meadows, Noonchen, Kelly, Millie, Chow, Omarosa,
Cohen, Scaramucci, Sessions, Barr, Tillerson, Esper, Azar, Farah, Haley, Kushner, Adams, Fauci, Burks, and Pence.
I mean, these were across the board.
Terrible, terrible, terrible decisions.
And he listened to them.
He hired them.
And now he's later backstabbing them for doing whatever.
But those are critical issues that I don't, I don't think anyone can fault me.
for questioning Trump having another term with those people in his first term.
I think everyone should question what I say, Justin, because Brick is right.
He didn't hire Fouchy.
Yes, he did.
He hired him to be his COVID-Barr.
But don't bring receipts to.
With the exception of Foustian, he hired every single one of those people.
But Justin, who would dissent his guess?
I mean, I think the argument you're trying to make...
Let me first understand your argument,
because is your argument that these guys were establishment figures,
part of the swamp, et cetera?
I think the Trump camp would say...
I mean, I think DeSantis, if anything, is pretty establishment,
and the people who are backing him are establishment, GOP.
I think that's a broad bush.
I don't think you can.
No, they're not.
They're not establishment.
In the end, it's all about decision making, okay?
And I see the decisions that I'll give me a perfect example.
There was an excellent colleague of mine.
He has, like, very few credentials on an academic level,
but he's one of the smartest people I know.
And he was one of the main backbone people, for example, helping Dr. Scott Atlas when he was at the White House, just completely pro bono, which is what my team did for six months in 2020, right, trying to write the COVID chip there.
And later, he showed his prowess. He demonstrated a couple of these guys even got, you know, peer reviewed studies without any major medical credentials.
They just basically did great work.
You know, what happened then, Governor DeSantis hired a few of these guys to help him on his COVID policy themselves.
He didn't look at what college they went to and where they're from Yale or Harvard or what sort of people came and endorsed them.
He looked at their work.
He interviewed them.
He passed Monster, and I think that's what he'll bring to the White House.
Is common sense hiring and not bringing them?
Dr. Zaynobarachad.
One of them was out of Ohio.
He was a podcast sportscaster there, and he had a great notion.
He was really brilliant, smart guy.
And he brought him down there.
The grand jury done anything with Jay Botanteria.
The Santas, many people know, he said he got the...
Florida Supreme Court to set a grand jury to investigate the origins of COVID.
He trotted out Jay Boticharia, who's a great, great, great professor at Stanford, you know, eminent
epidemiologists and biologists, and nothing. They haven't gotten down to any origin of COVID,
even concerning DeSantis's decisions or just to find. There's a, there's a 22-page document
that was put out by I've seen it. The grand jury hasn't.
The grand jury hasn't issued any subpoenas.
You're right.
I think that's valid.
I love to see that too.
I'll talk to Dr. Jay and we'll see what the latest is there.
The grand jury is going to be damning.
You know, talk to guys.
If you need to just leave, just leave you don't need to like announce to anyone.
Right.
Cool.
We've got a few more guests coming up.
We've got Tom coming up.
So while we bring them up, Sarah, you got your hand up.
Go ahead.
I really don't think that any voter is good.
We're talking about COVID.
I just don't think that that's going to be on the forefront of American voters' minds.
People are more concerned about immigration, the economy, and the war in Ukraine, and yet
we're rehashing COVID mistakes.
I'm not a Trump supporter.
But I think both of them, faced with the same decisions today, would likely make different decisions.
I don't know. With Trump, I don't know.
Chris, Chris, where does the Santa stand on Ukraine?
Chris, where does the Santa stand in Ukraine?
He's not for sending any more money to Ukraine.
And when he gets in there, things are going to change.
You're going to see government operate in a way that you've never seen it operate before.
We're operating with this massive surplus down here in Florida.
He has just done such a phenomenal job.
And by the way, you said brought up immigration.
Who is fighting against the Biden administration on illegal immigration?
Right.
He just sent a whole bunch of the Floridian Guard out to the border and also is winning legal victories.
Florida won a little victory.
But yeah, COVID guys.
And I know the Trump supporters and all and the people that were for the vaccine and thought wearing a mask and these duck bill masks and the.
part of where they try to make us wear two masks and force masking children and the teachers unions running amok that that was all just okay and gee it was just too bad it was just a mistake but you know that's the
yes it's going to be a big issue it's still is Chris Chris you just you just said you just said he's going to stop sending money to Ukraine how does that stop the war what is what does that do uh
In your opinion.
Chris,
I don't quote me exactly on this,
but if you Google it,
you know exactly what DeSantis has said about you, Chris.
Chris, just a quick question, right?
I think you can't hear people when you're talking.
Chris, specifically, you made a statement that he will not send any more money to Ukraine.
Where's the reference for that?
Because if he said that,
there isn't a reference.
He did say that he's in favor of auditing more money going to Ukraine,
but he never said that he was against more money for Ukraine.
So that's just a flat out, well, it's a misrepresentation.
I won't say it's a lie.
Well, let's say, maybe Chris has got a quote.
Well, I'm actually looking it up right now.
This is something I will.
When I do go to another press conference, I'm going to hammer DeSantis on this because this is a very important thing.
I thought at some point he said he wouldn't send any more money, but this is, I think he's answered this.
So go ahead and Google this.
But if I, if he doesn't press this.
No, I did.
I did, Chris.
I'm not going to ask him about this because it is a very important topic.
He's, yeah, and he's avoided it, and that's the problem.
He's been flip-flopping on it and avoided the question, and that's a problem.
That's a problem.
If he has flip-flop, which I don't know of the flip-flop at all,
he doesn't flip-lop, I'll tell you.
But if we do need to definitely get him on record talking about this.
All right, Chris, Chris, Chris.
Chris.
Chris is going to check the reference.
I don't think that's accurate what he said, but let's see.
Lev, I want to ask you, though, that specific point at what Chris said,
Obviously, we know it was inaccurate, but separate to that, based on your experience with Ukraine,
why do you think he's flip-flopping?
Because, like I said, I don't think he has an idea of what he's going to do with Ukraine.
He's going to be looking to see what's going to be the most favorable thing to do for his
base and for his donors and for people that are around him, and that's where he's going to go.
He doesn't, that's the difference between him and Trump.
And again, that's not because I like Trump or I'm touting Trump.
Trump, right or wrong, at least here.
has a way he said he wants to do something and he tries to do it again it could be wrong it
could be right with the Santis you don't know which way he's going to go until it's the
last second so that's the problem if it's a choice between his base if it's a choice between his base
and a choice between his biggest donor, which way would he go?
His base, 100%.
I think at the end of day, if he already got the money from the donor, his base.
If he's still trying to get money from a donor, the donor.
That's a good one.
Right, Tom, thanks for joining us.
I do appreciate you coming on.
Hey, good evening.
I haven't seen you in a long time.
I'm sorry everything that happened to you was an outrage.
Thank you, Tom.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
What are you thinking?
Did you hear the announcement last night?
I don't know if you listened to the space.
You know, what do you thinking about the entire situation?
I'll ask you some final questions after that.
Yeah, I tried to listen.
I had to end up listening to recording, so that was frustrating.
Okay.
You know, I think what's surprising about the way this campaign is shaking out is that it's, it's really a, it's the President Trump's campaign seems to be being run in a, in a, in a very professional way.
And then you've got the Trump factor on top of that. So he seems to be firing on all cylinders in that regard. And,
And at least now, the campaign seems to be one of a president seeking his party's nomination again.
So you have this sort of incumbent protection or presidential war about the way the race is going.
And, of course, you know, that may be, that may change.
I don't see it changing.
I don't see Desantis being able to change it or any of the others.
You know, but on the other hand, they all, you know, they all have a theory of the case, right?
They all think they can become the nominee.
And I would say like the burgeoning field in the Republican Party isn't so much about Trump's weakness, but it's about Biden's weakness that you see the Republicans think, well, you know, if I can get in as the nominee, I can beat this guy.
And obviously they see they have to get over Trump to do that.
And I, you know, I don't see that happening.
I don't think that's, you know, because I like Trump or I don't like Trump or DeSantis or whatever.
I don't see a path forward given the way the polls are going.
And in my view, the reality of the political center in the Republican Party, that Trump was abused and deprived of his second term in a manner that was contrary to law and the American way.
And people want to, people think that he's a right to go, at least in the Republican side, and be the nominee again, given the wrong that he suffered.
And so I don't think how any of his opponents can get overcome that.
And you kind of see that in the polls.
There's that huge, huge well support.
And I would say surprising well support, given where things stood six months ago.
Tom, I want to ask you, you know, because you mentioned poll numbers, now that Ronda Santos has announced, did you expect his poll numbers to spike? I mean, we saw, I believe, the hall in the past 24 hours into his campaign was $8.4 million. And the average donation, I believe, was under $200. You know, do you think those polls are going to tighten up?
Yes, but he won't do as well as he was doing, I guess, whenever he was doing the best last year, whenever those numbers were, 38 or, you know, 45, where he was nearly tied with Trump.
I just don't see that, you know, he's going to be facing negative press not only from Trump, but, you know, he's not the only person running in the primary.
So I just don't see him being able to get the numbers.
You know, you can go from 20 to 30.
It doesn't get you the nomination. You go from 20 to 38, it doesn't get you the nomination.
Tom's 100% right with it.
At, you know, 45 to 55, you know?
Trump has too much of a loyal base that is behind him, and that's his biggest problem.
Desantis' biggest problem.
But, Leve, has Trump hit his ceiling? That's something that I keep hearing. It sounds like,
like maybe Ron DeSantis,
and I'm trying to play devil's advocate here,
that DeSantis has,
you know,
room to grow his support,
but a lot of people argue,
and this was one of the audience questions that we got.
And I encourage more people to lose some audience questions,
because I'm going to be rapid firing him,
shortly that Trump has hit his ceiling that he can't garner more support.
And,
you know,
I mean,
multi-field primary.
I mean,
you,
he he can't probably technically garner more support he what other support does he need if he's
polling at 55 percent that's what i'm saying i mean trump has enough loyalty a loyalty of his base
behind him that he might not go any higher i agree with that but there's enough people out there
right or wrong that believe like tom said that he's been unjustly prosecuted and again that's not
my opinion that's just what
you know, people think out there and they support him very strongly. And that's going to be the hard.
It's not going to be COVID or decisions. The biggest problem Ron DeSantis and the other field have against Trump is that he has a huge hold on the mega base that is going to support him no matter what he does.
And because of that, it's going to be very difficult for them to beat him.
Yeah, and you know, and let me just respond to the COVID issue. I'm sorry, going to
I was just going to say, I think it's important to note too, CNN didn't have to do that town hall with him.
And then afterwards, two different hosts on CNN acknowledged that the Durham report basically like vindicated Trump in a way.
So like I'm wondering if that like their coverage of those types of things,
which they didn't cover favorably before is going to influence new people and actually bring people to be like, hey, wait a minute.
You know, they just said on CNN that they basically lied about Trump.
What else are they lying about?
Like, is that kind of coverage from a network like CNN going to influence new people?
No, I think that's a fair point. And, you know, even though those folks who've kind of rejected the Russia collusion theory or discounted it, it doesn't mean it wasn't a black mark on his presidency. And people thought, well, maybe there's something there. They just haven't figured it out yet. And I think it is kind of a, you know, a vindication for him that may allow him to.
reassure some Republicans who otherwise a little bit nervous about it.
But, you know, I think the analysis that COVID, you know, people are going to criticize
Trump for things he made.
Certainly I wasn't all that happy with all of his decisions.
You know, but I do recall when DeSantis and frankly Abbott both lifted their, you know,
their restrictions in Florida and Texas, you know, reminded me of the Don Rickles joke about
Frank Sinatra.
He goes, oh, you know, Frank Sinatra, he saved my life.
A bunch of guys were beat me up in a parking lot, and Frank Sinatra came over and said,
all right, boys, that's enough.
You know, that was the kind of the approach some of these Republican governors were taken.
They had these outrageous restrictions and then took credit for lifting them.
And so I don't think it's going to be much traction on either side for it.
But I really do think all of it's irrelevant in what the crisis is related to the country.
And, you know, from Judicial Watch's perspective, I just see the Republic tottering.
They're trying to jail Trump on pretexts and outrageous applications of the law.
They're targeting our First Amendment of speech.
Our border is broken. It's chaotic.
Our borders are open.
We have this assault on our children through humiliation.
And they want to blow up the Supreme Court.
And I want all the candidates to address that now and not what they're going to do in two years.
I want to know what we need to do about it now.
And I want leadership from the candidates on that.
I think, you know, that's what voters should be using these primaries as an opportunity to get,
which is leadership now, not in future.
Because Washington has a dearth of leadership.
And I tell you, if these candidates, you know, now they're leaders.
And we should expect leadership now and not in the future.
So, Tom, I have a quick question for you.
Real, real quick.
Do you think that there's a possibility that they could,
Because obviously a lot of people myself included think that the timing of COVID being leaked from Wuhan was sort of like the prerequisite to push the mass mail and ballots, the drop boxes and things.
And there's already been reports recently that there's been other COVID variants and stuff that they're creating.
Could we see another virus?
the election year come out and is that then going to bring the COVID responses back to the forefront of the
So just to understand your question, you're saying are they going to leak another virus to influence the election?
Well, basically, yeah, like, could we see another virus in 2024?
I mean, Fauci himself was like, oh, expect another virus.
So, like, I personally think that there's a good chance that we could see some other virus
unleashed upon the world in 2020.
Jesus Christ.
No, I don't believe that's going to be the case.
I think we're going to have, you know, the 2024 elections in terms of the COVID impact.
is that the echoes of those changes made in response to the COVID mania will continue in
2024 and further continue to undermine the integrity of the elections and mostly, you know,
mail and balloting and such to a degree that's used and overused, you know, unsupervised voting is anathema
to clean and fair elections. So that's the danger in 2024. You know, and Democrats, you know,
their approach, they've told us, you know, they want to jail Trump.
You know, they think he's the worst person in the world can never win so many, but, you know, they're not that confident, which means, which shows you why they want him to campaign from jail.
You know, that, that's the way to end a republic as well.
And I just hope all the candidates understand the threat our nation faces from this abuse of power by the Justice Department.
You know, one of our guests, Lev, he saw it directly.
I mean, Lev, you were on your way to Ukraine, weren't you, to do some investigations that would upset the Biden regime or the deep state?
I mean, that was the one that was...
You know, but the point being there's nothing beyond them in terms of abuse of power.
Nothing.
Let me tell you, I just ran into my Broward Mayor here, the Broward Mayor.
I just ran into that.
Hold on.
Before you do that, Chris, I want to bring in.
Heather made quite the...
a suggestion here that maybe
they'll be bringing in
another virus
that'll be released to influence the election.
I want you to respond
to that and kind of give a counter argument
to Tom's answer.
It could happen. She's right.
She's right. It could happen.
100%. That's why... Are we really having
this conversation? This is the most
ridiculous thing.
You're saying it came from bats and it came
from bats and it came... If you're trying to have a serious
conversation,
Okay, go ahead. Go ahead. Also. Okay. So let's go. So I think before we had this conversation, it's kind of ironic, right, before Heather, your question, we kind of actually almost had a consensus that the COVID debate was kind of going to be over, right? Like, it's not impacting our lives as in 2020. We can go back and forth. Was it right? Was wrong? Lock. I got it. But at least in 2022, this new thing, everybody panicked. Everybody freaked out.
But let's see, if you're going to make an accusation of China, which right now actually, ironically, is going through an actual COVID wave again.
They're not instituting lockdowns.
They're moving on.
Like life is continuing.
It doesn't matter.
The deaths aren't going there.
I think COVID is going to be behind us.
And the main issues of this debate, depending, I think it's important from the Republican side, who is the nominee?
Because I think the political debate, although there's going to be consistencies if it's Trump or DeSantis or somebody else, like the economy, if Ukraine is still going, et cetera.
But I think there is going to be a fundamental difference. I think if DeSantis is the nominee,
we're probably going to have a lot more cultural debate, right?
The, you know, the Disney, don't say gay, or however you want to say.
I think that's going to be a more predominant aspect of the political debate.
And if Trump is the nominee, I think there's going to be more back of the, you know, the rigged election, 2020, etc.
But I think COVID is done.
The point at the moment.
I'm sorry.
Can you say that again?
I didn't hear you, please one.
I said you haven't refuted her point at the moment.
I mean, if I was.
I mean, yeah, no, COVID is not to be a political debate.
I say you're deflecting.
No, my point is that it's bio-warfare. It's basically like wars aren't always fought with guns. They're fought with chemical weapons.
Well, Heather, Heather, I mean, I'm saying he's going to bring in. Who is they? Who is they? I find it very hard to believe that China would launch their own biological weapon that's also killed tens of thousands and not in some estimates up to a million times. The U.S. is going to launch it, just like they launched the last one.
Okay.
But who in the U.S.?
DARPA funded them?
Look at this. Heather just sent me this article, or I don't know, it wasn't
Heather had sent me, but this, China just announced a new variant coming out.
Heather is absolutely right.
This absolutely could happen again.
No, that variant has been existed.
And I'm not saying that China is going to do it on purpose, but something could happen again.
No, no, okay. Chris, Chris, that the reality is existed.
No, don't talk, don't.
That variant has existed.
It's making an impact in China now.
Like, let's get everything.
If we're going to make an accusation, let's make it correct.
That variant has existed around the world.
It is now going to China, and they're continuing with their lives.
There's no lockdowns.
What was good?
We had, we had, we had.
Please let me say something here.
Please.
Chris, let Joe speak.
This sounds about as crazy as the woke left, to be honest.
Pandemics have been happening for a while.
They have been increasing in frequency since early 2000.
People forget because they didn't really lock down the entire world.
But pandemics have been increasing due to heating of the planet, whether it's climate change or natural digression of the ice age, whatever you want to call it.
And because of the deforestation, animals are getting close to cities.
That's the crudiest thing I've heard.
That's the coocious thing I've heard all of all.
Can I finish Tom?
You can comment after, right?
They have been increasing.
The frequency has been growing.
There was a pandemic response team that Trump fired four months prior to COVID spreading.
So this stuff was in place.
Where's the information that that's,
that pandemics have been increasing.
Where's the study of the pandemics have increased?
Go look at the avian flu.
Go look at the timeline.
Okay.
I understand those are epidemics.
I can give you,
do you want that in visual or do you want that in a written timeline?
I can post either one to the nest.
Yeah, I want you to provide information that pandemics have increased since 2000 based on
climate change and deforestation.
Yeah, I'll put it up on the timeline.
I'll put it up.
point it up in the next. Give me five minutes.
And tie the pandemics to deforestation
and climate change. But go ahead.
They don't say deforestation. They say animals
encroaching on cities.
If you want to put that, it's development.
Maybe not defamation.
I know you make up the new analysis.
It's not a new analysis in a lot of places because of deforestation.
They don't have a place to live.
You know, what happened in China was they went and grabbed a virus.
And as Judicial Watch found just a few weeks ago, we paid EcoHealth to have Wuhan.
create mutant
coronaviruses out of bats
to see how they might infect
humanized minds.
They created the mutant coronaviruses
and there's little doubt
at this time in my view.
Am I saying
that this is the result
that the coronavirus was not manned?
Hold on a second.
I didn't.
I don't have this.
You know, I'm not just coming up
with talking points
about deforestation.
I'm talking about documents
that show that
coronaviruses were mutated literally they used the word mutated gain of function obviously
in wuhan and other places in china with taxpayer funding they knew about it they applied for the money
and they said we want to we want to create butan coronaviruses back in 2014 so the question is as
we've heard later is okay so does that mean the gain of function technique
or this specific research created COVID-19.
And if so, was the leak accidental or on purpose?
Anyone who says it was on accidental and could never have been on purpose is just guessing and speculating.
But is that what I said?
Did I even mention COVID?
Tom, did I even mention COVID?
Did I even mention COVID or say whether it was lab or not lab?
No, I wasn't responding to you.
I moved past your comment to talk about the idea that the pandemic was started as a result of purposeful action.
And I don't think certainly that's a fair question, given we still don't know how the last pendant.
No, the comment was made that it was purposefully released.
I don't know.
Yeah, I think that's a possibility.
My point is if it was in a lab, we don't know how it got out.
I said it was my opinion that it was released.
And I said I had concerned that they would do it again and were to push the mass mail and ballots, the Dropboxes.
You're saying it would be purposefully released by your comment, and that's what I'm saying sounds as crazy as the woke left.
Who has five alone over our country, yes.
I think that they would do that.
In Donald Trump, his administration cracked down on Chinese espionage.
They arrested a Harvard professor and two Chinese nationals stealing, or the Chinese nationals were stealing biological research and were caught at Boston Logan International Airport.
right Donald Trump was actually investigating some of their their programs like the thousand talents plan well where they will pay people in these research labs to steal proprietary information that taxpayer funded research and bring it back to Wuhan in China that like they don't play by the rules and when when Donald Trump was
cracking down on them, they, along with the corrupt Democrats like Joe Biden, had a vested interest in making sure that Donald Trump didn't get reelected.
So that's-
I think, but hold on, hold on.
Let me just.
I do want to highlight this important aspect.
Also, one second.
One second.
One second also.
Let me ask Joe a question,
and then you can jump in as well
because you might want to answer the same question.
So, Joa, I'm not understanding how you're saying
it's a crazy, that people have been as crazy as the walk left.
When Tom has made,
and I want your refutation of Tom's argument,
because what Tom is basically saying is,
we know that the COVID vaccine was created in a lab.
What we don't know is whether it was done intentionally or accidentally.
So both are possibilities.
We don't know.
I didn't say that COVID was created in a lab.
I think there's strong evidence it was.
I agree with that.
And if it were, we can't presume that it was accidentally.
There's evidence that it was and there's evidence that it was.
Then I put Joe, my point is this.
If there is a possibility, which there is, a decent possibility that it was leaked on purpose,
or it could have been accidental.
We don't know, but the possibility is there for both of them.
Then why is that crazy?
That's the bit I don't understand.
What I'm saying is crazy is to say that they would unleash it.
unleash another virus.
Let me just tell you the past 20 years.
So it's only crazy.
So it's only crazy.
So your argument, Joe, it's only crazy if it's done more than once.
No, no.
It's crazy that they would unleash it on purpose on the country, on the country, for what purpose?
It hurts them economically.
It hurts their own pocketbook.
economically. If you look at the last 20 years, 2002, SARS outbreak, 2012, MERS, 2009,
swine flu, 2014, Ebola, and then we had COVID. These are the most outbreaks we've ever
had in our entire history in a 20-year span. And this has been increasing. Decade after decade,
they keep getting more and more and more. Can it be a leak that happened?
100%. I don't discount that at all. Is there gain of function and loss of function research done on things on certain countries? Yes, there is. Is it typically for maniacal reasons? Maybe it could be for biowulfur or it could be for medical research to see if they can cure some diseases. I believe both are true, right? Do I think it's leaked on purpose? That's where I think it gets crazy, that it was leaked on purpose.
For what reason?
I mean, I, you know, I don't think you can rule it out.
I mean, the Chinese government are, have zero regard for human life and the damage it would do to their own population.
But that all being said, I think, I think there's a plausible scenario that it was accidentally on purpose, that the leak occurred.
And they're like, well, let's see what happens.
Well, you know, it's out.
Let's see what happens.
And that's why they were unhelpful.
in helping us figure out how to deal with it and why they, why folks disappeared and why they
otherwise restricted our ability to figure out how to combat it. Tom, this is, this is all that
because they were quoted barracks. It was because I think they wanted to see the damage it could do
and they took notes and they saw that the United States was willing to act like the Chinese
communists in suppressing its population. And to Heather's point,
You know, the left certainly took advantage of COVID to scare people from voting in person and to install these radical, in my view, unlawful changes to the voter system that included unsupervised voting that basically tore the heart out of any confidence that people would have ultimately in the results in 2020.
And it still echoes to the same.
But Tom, I've never heard anyone from the right argue that it wasn't from the Wuhan lab.
If it was, China had control.
Why would China unleash it on their own population when they could unleash it somewhere else?
I told you why.
I mean, I was arguing that it was accidentally on purpose, mostly.
I'm just saying we can't rule it out.
You're just making speculation on speculation.
I'm saying we don't have enough information to tell us one way or the other.
Now we can make some guesses.
No, but speculation is you agree that they're going to do it on purpose again.
You agreed to that.
I didn't say that.
I didn't say that at all.
I'm just saying if we don't know how it happened the first time, how can we know what will happen, what will happen the next time around?
No, someone, someone that a male voice added that America will unleash it on itself.
I don't know if it was dark.
I don't know who it was.
One of one of the guys.
It was Heather.
No, well, Docs at America, I think it came from the Wuhan lab.
And to answer your question as to like why they would unleash it, well, two things.
When you're creating bio weapons, right, you can also explore creating the cures, right?
If you have a patented bio weapon and you're the only one that knows how to treat it and you unleash it on the world, you have a power that other people don't have.
It's almost as bad as having nuclear weapons.
Right.
right, when you have that sort of information.
So in terms of China, they have, what, like a billion people?
Yeah, and would you unleash it without having the cure, Heather?
Like, it just doesn't make any sense.
Maybe they did.
Who knows?
I mean, Ivermectin treats it pretty well.
And unfortunately, a lot of people died because they were given from desivir and other crap that we knew didn't work.
but that's besides the point, right?
So think about what's happened since, right?
Donald Trump,
like they basically got the Biden crime family back in office
who we know because of some of the dealings
on the Hunter Biden laptop,
we're seeing how China was in bed,
some of these Chinese companies,
were in bed with the Biden family.
This to me really sounds as crazy
as asking eight-year-olds if they're a man or a woman.
Because maybe you're not paying attention.
If you actually do a little more listening
to less talking, you'll understand.
Sorry you guys are interested, but just before I go to you, Heather, just to anyone who's got any comments, comment on the bottom right-and-side.
I am reading a comment here and it says so tied to the COVID argument, no one cares.
Vote as top three issues are economy, immigration and war.
Disantis supporters can never discuss these issues.
And so that's a comment from the comments section.
So any comments you have, we are reading them.
The best ones will be read out and we'll ask them to the panel.
And based on that, I am going to ask a question to the panel.
But before we do, guys, subscribe to Mario's page.
It's $1 and we will be having exclusive subscriber-only.
Yeah.
streams and spaces, and they've got some guests that they're going to plan to line up,
so go ahead and subscribe, and that would be good.
Brick.
I mean, on the economy, I don't know.
Did, as DeSantis said anything about where he stands on the debt limit negotiations
at the other Republican candidates mentioned it, well, that's, you know, one way to destroy
the country is through, you know, fiscal ruin, which is our spending trajectories at this
point.
And the left is fanatically opposed to what are necessary, though.
It might be woefully insufficient cuts and modest changes here.
I don't know what DeSantis thinks about it.
I think Trump has said, you know, they should stand fast.
I'm not saying Desantis hasn't said anything.
I just don't know what he said about it.
It would be interesting to know.
Chris, I mean, I'd like to ask you that question because you generally know a lot of his positional policy.
Like, what is, like this is the problem.
It's the same thing Tom said, the same thing a lot of the people in the comments are saying.
he doesn't seem to have any kind of like deep policies about any issues
and then it brings forth Levs argument that essentially
he's going to decide them based on whoever pays him the biggest money
so Chris like what we know we don't we don't know what his position is Ukraine
but if you want to answer Tom's question what is this position on the economy
If you look at Florida, I mean, we've got the biggest budget surplus in our history, and that is from DeSantis running things.
He just signed a massive tax cut.
And if you want to look at what he's going to do on a national scale, he's going to do here.
That isn't what I was asking.
Do you know what he's?
what he said about the debt limit negotiation he talked about it and the fight i'm actually uh looking
through it a little bit to see what he talked about i mean i think he probably has if i'm asking
there's got to be something that we need to get this thing under control i mean disantus is a fiscal
conservative i mean he's a guy that's going to i'm not suggesting he isn't i just want to know
you know this is a politically sensitive time and topic
And the candidate's all running, Trump said, hey, you know, stand fast, don't give in at all.
As DeSantis said, anything similar or different.
But Tom, before Chris, you get involved, I think the issue we're going to run into, right?
So I think there's a, you know, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not for neither candidate, but the
Santas just announced he ran, right?
And so I think it's going to take time.
Yeah.
And I think the Twitter space probably should have done.
I think the problem with the Twitter space was more disant to saying, this is what I did in Florida and less about, and not as much, not less, not as much as these are my policies as president.
Because being governor and president is completely different, different powers, different authorities, et cetera.
But I think DeSantis will get there.
I think DeSantis is going to start announcing more.
We do like CNN is doing another town hall with Nikki Haley.
I'm expecting one with DeSantis.
And I think once that happened, we might have a better idea of his policies.
I'm not being critical. I'm just trying to figure out if he said anything yet. I think he has Tom, and you do great work, by the way, Tom, and this space is just absolutely awesome. I think he did touch on it. Somebody on, he's doing a lot of radio shows right now, and somebody asked him about the debt limits. I'm going through looking at what he said exactly about that. But I think it is important to look at a
the character of a man and then his track record.
If you just, and people kind of go, oh, well, we don't know what he would do here or what he
would do there.
Number one, he doesn't just do whatever the corporate or the media tell him to do.
He doesn't listen to any of that stuff because if he did, he would have made exact opposite
decisions that he made in 2021.
You got to remember, people were not happy with him in 2021.
Yeah, it's popular now.
Everybody wants to be an anti-lockdowner now and stuff.
But in 2021, he was being called a mass murderer. And there were people telling him, you know, you need to go along with, you need to do some, something about the Delta variant. And he fought to keep schools open. And then he signed tax cuts. And now we've got this massive surplus here in Florida. So.
Well, I don't excuse that. I think, you know, if you want.
somebody to
be fair.
This mess out
in Washington,
D.C.
It's going to
be him.
I mean,
he's going to
be the guy
that's going to
go in and get
the Congress
because Congress
is the Article 1
branch of government.
They're the ones.
I think what
Trump supporters
would say is a
lot of what the
DeSantis did in Florida
echoed what Trump did in his first term.
And there's a lot of things you have to ignore that Trump did that were positive in bolstering DeSantis.
And Trump did it under much more difficult political circumstances.
He certainly didn't have the friendly legislature.
Right.
in Congress that DeSantis had in Florida.
So, you know, for instance, on tax cuts and transgenderism and all of that, you know, Trump was front and center and he took significant steps, at least finally against the deep state in terms of getting his foothold or, you know, getting his legs going on taking on the personnel issues at the end of his term.
And I kind of see Desantis as like a continuation of the Trump policies in Florida.
So, you know, I think I think DeSantis' supporters would do well to recognize that, you know,
Trump was in terms of deregulation and policy changes the most significant president.
in the post-warian.
Tom, have you looked at the polls in battleground states?
He said he did great his first three years until he turned the country over to Tony Fauci.
And that's really, when he handed Fauci the keys instead of Jesus take the wheel, it was more like Fauci take the wheel.
And, man, I'd hate to be somebody at Marilago right now with him running around in a rage all obsessed with him.
Yeah, you know, and, you know, and, you know, I think the Santas listened to the siren
saw him and a Fauci as well.
I agree.
The debt limit or the spending exploded under Trump.
I mean, these Democrats are pointing this out, but it's true.
Yeah, so here we are back talking about COVID again, and we have already agreed that's not
going to be the issue.
It's going to be the issue, and I know you want to.
I don't want to forget about it, but listen, the debt
I don't want to forget about it. It's just not going to be
the issue you think it is.
And you know, Chris,
and Trump and DeSantis are the same
person. I'm telling you.
You should look at this possibility too, Chris.
Is that yes.
Yes, Florida did well, but Florida also
benefited
from the maladministration in many blue states.
We had a lot of people leaving states like New York
because their taxes were out of control,
because crime was out of control.
They moved to places where things were being run better.
Texas, Florida, things like that.
So in a sense, Governor DeSantis is playing a different game in the state of Florida.
It's not a zero-sum game in Florida.
As president, the economy is a zero-sum game because if New York loses and another state gains, that's not a gain.
So you can't just say, I'm going to do the same thing for the nation that I did in Florida,
when part of your success in Florida is because of the absolutely bat-shit insane crazy policies
that are going on in New York and California and Illinois and all the other policies.
places that are going to be sanctuary cities and super lockdown cities and you know uh randy wine
garden is successfully lobbying for no schools to be open that's why people were moving yeah they
try that's part of why people are moving you're right of why people are i mean you're right
so what i'm saying is what i'm saying is that a large portion of
of the reasons that underpin the relative financial success of Florida in the last two years
are attributable to the poor administration of other states in the United States.
And if you become president, you can't wave a magic wand and say everything's going to be like it was in Florida.
And that tide rises all boats.
It is not the same game.
It's not the same game.
Wave a magic.
wand and make everything work.
You know, why don't you think that Descenta, you know, you guys, you just can't give him credit.
And you know what?
All you guys, all you Trump people were seeing.
I just gave him credit.
You're saying, oh, it was the other governors.
What he did here in Florida was create a beacon of hope to the whole world.
And why can't he take what he did in Florida and Tallahassee and bring it to Washington?
He's just governing on a bigger scale.
Well, if you don't know the difference between
Tallahassee and Washington, that's a fundamental problem.
He's been to Washington.
DeSantis has been there.
He's been a congressman.
He knows how it works up there.
We keep talking about COVID, and COVID's not the issue.
If you look at the polls...
guy. And what else with DeSantis? And this was an Achilles heel for Trump. Trump was a businessman. He was used to doing like almost like mafia style like Kiss the Ring business. And he tried to bring that into DC with, uh, the high director and everything. Desantis knows. And I get his, his Twitter space might have not been all the fun and exciting.
excitement and one-liners everybody was hoping for.
But, you know, he knows how to work the levers of government in order to protect people's
rights and create the environment that she...
I disagree.
He knows how to do that in the state where his party controls both houses of the government.
That is not necessarily the same situation in Washington, D.C.
Florida, to paraphrase John Lemon...
The Florida is not Washington.
Florida's not Washington. Washington. Washington is not Florida.
Rick, I just got to say that Trump had to.
Guys, just let Ian speak.
It's going to be very hard for Ian and Chris to back up Desantis.
Now it's going to be a competition who can speak.
But go ahead, Ian.
I'll stop Chris.
Yeah, I just want to push back on Brick, you know, pointing out that, yeah, Desantis correctly, you know,
I'm going to be fair to both the Sanchez and Trump.
I think that there's a lot of partisanship going on.
And I don't think it's fair to either candidate.
I mean, a lot of it is Trump just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks, right?
But the putting finger.
I'm not Trump.
And so, you know, I don't have to play that game, right?
But I want to point out that when Trump took office in 2017, he had controlled both the House and the Senate, and he had no idea how to arraign them in.
He had no idea how to manage the levers of power.
DeSantis has the knowledge.
He's got the experience to do it.
He was part of, you know, along of Thomas Massey.
he led a lot of the crusades in the in the house back then right on pushing conservative agendas
there's a lot of uh you know attacks being flung at the santis so not voting for certain things
you know when he was there but if actually look at his record it'll show that yeah the reason he
didn't vote for some weak bill was because he voted for a stronger bill right this is something
that the uh the trump camp doesn't want you to know about you know and uh
If you look at Desantis' track record, when he says he's going to do something, he does it.
He doesn't just tweet out law and order.
For instance, in Florida, when Trump is busy treating out law and order, which is nonsense and he wasn't doing anything.
Now, part of it is obviously he had hurdles, right?
But it's all due to his own appointees.
The people who put in charge of the FBI went exactly in line of what he wanted.
DeSantis, on the other hand, if someone doesn't fall in line, he fires them.
He gets rid of them, puts his own people there.
get stuff done. That's why when Trump was treating out law and order, DeSantis actually in his state,
he made it legal for, you know, homeowners and for the police to actually deal with these
Antifa protesters on their own. You know, the police had full ability to take them down, arrest people,
charge them, prosecute them. This is not something that Trump was even worried about. He just
treat out law and order and hope that the states do whatever. But like that's, you know,
You know, that doesn't show leadership to me, right?
That shows a bit of weakness that he's just delegating.
And, you know, he takes the problem.
To your point, there, the polls in battleground states,
the polls in battleground states are showing exactly what you're saying.
They don't care about COVID.
They care about what's been done for education.
They're worried about their kids in school.
And are they going to get taught with the woke want?
And they, and DeSantis has fought hard against this.
And if you look at the polls in battleground states,
Desantis is beating in some polls.
That is correct.
And I want to point out in their states.
And because the CBDCs also,
because Trump says,
oh, now he says he doesn't want it.
But Brian Callan,
that was the,
not the Secretary of the Treasury,
the,
Secretary of Domestic Finance
put the groundwork in for CBDCs
under Trump, which he approved.
And now he says he doesn't want it.
It's absolutely insane.
We're DeSantis outlawed.
I just want to go back to one point
that Ian made about 2017.
And that is like, you know, would you admit that
the fake Russian collusion hysteria investigation hampered President Trump's ability to get things done.
100%. He was a victim and all that, right? I will defend Trump on that point.
A lot of things. In fact, Trump did a lot of good, like when he banned transgender people from serving the military.
That just makes sense. They're mentally ill. You don't want them, you know, weakening the cohesion of military.
Biden undid all of that lets them in and look at where the military is now. It's a mess, right?
Yeah.
So Trump, he was on the ball as things.
It's important to note that even though that in 2017 when he entered that the Republicans
controlled both houses, that circumstances were kind of against them and it wasn't
really like, you know, it wasn't smooth sailing.
That's all I want to point out.
But one thing I want to point out that I don't think anyone on the stage has done so yet,
you know, is like people like to point to certain polls, you know, and polls come from a variety
of sources, right?
You've got Pew, you've got Harvard, you've got, you know, some right-wing ones as well.
And they'd like to point out that, you know, Trump is leading, you know, compared to Desantis in certain areas, you know, when it comes to a national stage, right, like countrywide.
But those polls are not really good.
Whether it favors DeSantis or it favors Trump or it favors Biden, it doesn't really matter because what people, and this is the point I'm trying to make.
What people don't seem to understand is that, you know, elections in America, they're not, it's not a popular vote, right?
Because it was a popular vote.
California would have been by a long mile.
They got a lot of people there.
Yeah.
elections in America are based on, you know, it's a state-by-state thing, you know, it's because of the electoral college, and it's there for good reason. So the problem I'm having now, and I have no problem with Trump being president again, you know, I'm like, look, I think everybody has a dog in this race, no matter where you live, right, because American policies affect everybody. But the point I'm trying to make is that,
Trump doesn't really have a clear shot at 270, right?
He can't win all 270 electoral college votes.
Like, whereas DeSantis is a much better chance at doing that,
especially in battleground states and places where Trump simply doesn't poll very well.
You know, no, like that.
What is the basis for saying that?
Why would any Republican...
do better than Trump in these so-called battleground states,
given the numbers that Trump pulled in 2020?
I mean, I mean, you know,
my view is whoever is the nominee, it's a jump ball.
And to say that someone is more likely to win or lose
because of a, you know,
whatever debate we're having about their personal qualities
or policy policies within the Republican Party,
I think, you know,
The election's going to go, Democrat or Republican, in my view, largely irrespective of the candidate.
And the idea that DeSantis has some extra juice he can bring into these battleground states, especially given his stances on these cutting-edge cultural issues, ones which I agree with.
You know, I don't think, I just don't think I don't buy it.
I mean, he's going to do as well as Trump did in 2020.
And Trump, you know, I would say he won.
Yeah.
you know, using quotes, but in the end, it was a 75, was it, I think from 40 to 70,000 votes among
five or six states, you know, I think given the candidates have run since then, and I just don't
see any Republican necessarily, especially given the, the desperation Democrats to retain power,
which is fair, given that, you know, they're going to be fighting for their political values that
there's going to be much difference in the outcome in the election.
Okay.
So the-
In favor of the stances that otherwise wouldn't have happened for Trump.
So the reason I think that Trump has the worst chance at winning 2024 compared to,
I mean, even with his numbers in 2020 when he was extremely popular, right?
Right.
And the reason I think he can't get to 270 is because I think the mood has changed on Trump.
All of Trump's nominees, except for one, I guess, lost in 2022, right?
That's just a fact, right?
The relegation of the 2022 election is about as popular as defunding the police.
And, you know, when you look at polls now, you know, he's down eight points compared to DeSantis when it comes to independents.
So I think that's a big thing.
I mean, these guys are like the key vote, right?
Regardless of whether you're Trump or DeSantis,
you're going to get those Republican votes,
but can you get the independent vote?
And DeSantis wins on the independence.
I want to ask you this because Trump won in 2016 because he captured Rust Belt states, such as Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania.
And he's lost those, unfortunately.
He captured the Blue Dog Democrat vote.
But, I mean, does Rhonda Santis have the ability to...
And the reason I think that...
Because the entire thing was the reason they voted for him was because they, you know, he kind of...
He reached out to them directly.
Unfortunately, he didn't deliver on his promises, right?
Pennsylvania in particular, and this is one I'm familiar with, was that he did a pretty good, a pretty bad job at not preventing the closure of a lot of the coal mines.
So they felt betrayed. I mean, I've talked to a bunch of them.
More closed under him.
Exactly. They closed under him.
They felt like it was a betrayal.
And by the way, you should get Ryan James Gurdeski on here.
He knows a lot more of all these statistics.
Like, you know, I'm messaging with him and he's good.
Like, you know, you should get him up here.
There is one of the thing to consider.
The biggest thing is the system are based on the BATOGround States
to virtually guarantee a favorable outcome to the Democratic Party.
And until the system is cleaned up, no matter who is there, it's going to be a challenge.
Tom, the polls are showing something.
And when I say polls, look, I did a million dollars worth of surveys for three years every single month.
I understand surveys, and right now a lot of surveys are top of mind surveys, like who comes top of mind and that's who you put in the poll.
But when you get, when you get like morning consul working on the case and they look at battleground states, they show that the people believe DeSantis can be Biden, but they don't believe Trump can be Biden.
So there is, there is polls that are showing more favorable to, to, you know,
to DeSantis. But if you ask them the same question, Trump or DeSantis, right now that's a prognosis.
I mean, I can add to this. That's a prognolification you're asking folks to make.
It shows that among voters who hate Trump and Biden, so they hate both people, they favor Biden by three to one.
So it's three to one. They favor Biden over Trump. So if it comes down between who they hate more, they hate Trump more.
Can we all accept that almost virtually every poll of note shows substantial or seemingly surprising support for Trump versus Biden slightly better?
than DeSantis.
I mean, that's the reality of it.
I think it's a surprising outcome.
I'm not, you know, I'm not saying,
well, this shows that Trump's the winner.
It's just that that's the reality of it.
And, you know, DeSantis, you know,
people thinking DeSantis is going to be Biden versus Trump being Biden.
You know, I don't know.
Maybe he will.
Maybe he won't.
You're asking someone, they guess.
I don't know what that means.
The question is, who's more likely to become the nominee for the Republican Party?
And I go back to what I said in the beginning.
the overwhelming number of majority of Republicans, based on my experience and my understanding
where things are politically, I believe that Trump was wrong in 2020 and deserves another shot.
And I don't see any argument his opponents can make in the primaries currently that would
overcome that.
And that's the challenge for all of them.
Was he taken by Trump's own pollster, right?
Tony Fabrizio, he's the guy who called 2020.
just putting it out and and the polls are showing that they care more about education than
than about the COVID issue.
And I don't know Trump's record on education.
But I do know Desanthus.
You know, like education, no one,
there's not a single person out there who has been stronger on education than
Ron DeSantis.
I mean, that's quite clear in his, you know, banning of, you know,
the so-called don't-say gay thing.
It's more like a parental rights in education bill.
And as well as his, you know, his pushing, like, American education and colleges in Florida.
He means parental bill of rights?
that was Trump's policy.
Don't be passing it on to just know.
What are you talking about?
Trump didn't do anything with it.
The parental bill of rights was one of the policies that Trump put out.
Trump never did anything with it.
Like most of this stuff
Oh my God.
The digital bill of rights and the parental bill of rights
were two policies that Trump campaign has been pushing
that DeSantis is trying to grift off of.
How is he grifting off of it when it's benefiting?
There's a difference between pushing something and doing something about it.
Yeah.
Trump didn't get it done.
Trump put out a one sheeter.
Oh, yippity doodah.
What did he do actually when he had power?
Actually, no, I mean, part of the powers of the presidency is if Congress doesn't pass laws, the president can use executive powers.
So he was the first to ban DEI.
you know, federally, he was the first to ban CRT.
No one had even tweeted about CRT prior.
None of it was in fourth because there was, you know, he passed an executive order.
No, these were, but it didn't actually do anything because he didn't put in the, uh,
Ian, and that's not there.
And that's not true.
Yeah, Ian, can you, yeah, can you jump in here?
Okay, so he banned DEI and CRT in all federally funded agencies and the contract contractors that did business with them.
He also banned trans from the military, from women's prisons, from women's shelters, and he undid.
He reversed the Obama rule on schools using trans, using the bathrooms and schools.
He also did the 1776 Commission, which I think DeSantis implemented some of it in Florida.
But Trump was very much the pioneer with regard to all of these social issues.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, if I were Desantis, I would be running, I would be saying,
Look, Trump did a great job as president.
I followed up on a lot of his policies
and implemented them in new ways in Florida,
and I think quite successfully.
And, you know, I plan to do that when I go to Washington.
If I was Trump...
To pretend Trump was, you know,
Woodrow Wilson, you know, in a coma for four years,
I don't think it's going to get to Santis anywhere.
You know, I think there's got to be...
at acknowledgement because there are many you know republicans like trump they supported and voted for him
and to tell them that they made a mistake and that that four years was wasted and no good came out of it
um i think belize most people's experiences what i would do if i was trump i would endorse to santis
drop out of the race and then big
for a pardon.
Oh my God. Oh, my God.
Well, you know, I mean, that's not, that's not, I mean, that's a funny response,
but that's not a serious response.
If I were Trump, I would say the same.
I would say DeSantis took my, if DeSantis took my lead in Florida,
he did some good things, but I've been in the big chair before and I can do it again.
And by the way, I did it under circumstances that no president has ever faced before.
And.
And I still, you know, came out strong and, and, you know, did policy X, Y, and Z.
So, you know, I'm just trying to run the arguments one way or the other.
You know, I like DeSantis. I like Trump.
But the idea that DeSantis thinking that having communicated with thousands and thousands of conservatives, personally,
DeSantis taking this position or his support is taking this position that Trump is a loser is
Boy, well, you know, I don't think that's going to end up with the results they hope.
Well, Tom, I don't think you're off.
Trump is a loser.
Can I say something really quick?
Why does it talk about these things, Tom?
Instead of talking about the things, and I said this to Roger Stone, I said, look, why doesn't he talk about his victories?
Why doesn't he talk about these things?
He does.
No, all he does is talk about him.
talk about the sanctimonious.
I don't think any of us are deaf.
Some weird tweet about Kim Jong-un last night.
The stuff coming from true social
is just getting weirder and weirder.
And instead of talking about...
His members are still right on.
He has this discussion with Ron DeSantis, where he has just been attacking him and attacking him and attacking him, that it's made him.
He has nobody to blame, like with most things, but himself.
Donald Trump, all he's doing is attacking Ron DeSantis, who is somebody.
Well, and if you're Trump, you're going to say, boy, it's working out well.
His poll numbers have dropped 10 points to 15 points.
in approval within Republican electorate.
So Trump is seeing a political benefit to these attacks on DeSantis.
I don't believe these polls.
I just don't believe them because a lot of people do not like him going after DeSantis.
I know.
Why don't you believe the poll?
Do you think that people are expressed?
That Trump rally in Ohio.
I mean, do you, come on, hold on a second.
Do you think that people are afraid to express their support for DeSantis?
and are lying to the pollsters.
I don't know who they're polling.
Are they doing a poll?
I mean, they may not be exact, but they're an indication of increased support for Trump, don't you think?
I don't know anything about these polls.
Are they polling the pool at Mar-a-Laga?
No, wait, wait, wait, wait, who are they pulling?
Who are they pulling?
That's whistling past the graveyard.
The polling Trump supporters is who they're polling.
You're not talking to.
It's because there's so many of them, and there's not many dissanus supporters to
Look, we're all, this is going to play out, and we're all going to see how this goes down.
But all I see is Trump shrieking like a lunatic on truth social, saying something weird about Kim Jong-un and the button.
Like, what the hell is he talking about?
Is this a side effect for the vaccine?
Hey, Chris.
Hey, Chris.
Hey, Chris, if DeSantis is so wildly popular and there's all of these people that love him, why when he ran for governor, right?
If he's so personable that people are just going to flock to his leadership and his personality, why did he make a campaign at, right?
Basically, like,
like saying how much like Trump he is,
putting his kid in a maga onesie.
And guess what?
Now that he doesn't have Trump's popularity
to grift off of,
guess who he put in his campaign ad
that he released a day ago.
Oh, that's right.
Elon Musk.
He should have put me in it.
He needs some man bigger and more popular.
than him.
You know, I don't understand this.
I want to know.
Who do you think whose hands are bigger?
Trump's or Desantis?
I mean, I don't understand this attack on DeSantis' personality.
He's a politician.
No, it is, because he's drifting off of men more popular than him, whether it's Trump or Elon.
And now he doesn't have...
Hold on a second.
I mean, the thing is that, you know, he's a little, sometimes a little bit stilted on his speeches, and he's...
He's all business, but he's a politician like any other politician I've met.
He's personable enough.
He's a nice guy.
You know, he's not, he's not incapable of socializing and talking to people.
And, you know, again, to me, there's a straightforward argument here.
And I think the, and frankly, I think that's how voters in the Republican side of things are going to finally evaluate it is that Trump did some good things as president. He was unfairly maligned and abused and he's a no shot.
And so I would caution both sides not to get too aggressive on going after people saying that the worst person in the world and can never hold the keys to the kingdom.
Honestly, I agree, Tom. I think the petty attacks weaken both sides, right? I mean, this is like...
Going after Desantis' personality, it's a weak argument.
It doesn't say anything about his policies.
And the same thing goes to Trump.
I mean, yeah, he says some crazy shit, but it's mostly him shooting himself in the foot,
which I wish he didn't do.
I mean, it seems like...
If he shot himself in the foot, he wouldn't be raising in the polls.
And let's remember.
Listen, listen, listen.
Let me speak first and I'll let you speak.
I like Trump, right?
But I feel like he weakens his own arguments when he goes to the petty attacks.
He should just speak on the issue, speak about his victories.
He's done a lot of good, not just in America, but in the whole world, right?
I mean, people respect the guy.
So when he goes on the petty attacks, it insults him.
me. It insults everyone. Like, we like Trump because of what he does, not what he says, right? And so,
you know, it's funny when Nikki Haley says that DeSantis is basically Trump without the drama,
I'm inclined to agree, you know, if it comes down to that, it's like for a lot of people.
I don't really think they're alike in any way. And let's not forget when Trump went on that
debate stage, we don't want him to be different. He was a,
regular, you know, he mean, a wealthy guy, but he was just a guy, not in politics. He was,
he was a New York attitude. And he went on stage and he told everybody that they lot, he told
Jeb that his family lied about weapons of mass destruction. He, he mentioned Epstein and the
Clintons. And, and he said that the news was fake before any politician, any public figure would
dare to say that. It was so refreshing that, I mean, let's be real. The people that are voting for
for Trump that voted for Trump aren't just Republicans. People crossed over. They were tired of the
Bush dynasty that gave us the Clintons, that gave us Obama. Everyone had big hopes for Obama. He let
everybody down. It was a big disaster. And so there are so many people who vote for Trump because
they hate Democrats, they hate Republicans, and Trump offers something different. He has
world experience. He did not spend time going up the ladder from being, you know, like a mayor to a
congressman to a governor and then end up in the White House. He was a magnet. He took what his father did,
which is the American dream. He built on it bigger and he...
obtained everything he wanted, and then he said he wanted to make the country bigger, better.
He was always, always critical of how the government ran the economy, about the wars.
And there are people, like if you look at Rich Berris's numbers, there are 8 to 13 million people who won't vote.
unless it's Trump.
And it's not a cult.
It's because they hate the Democrats, they hate the Republicans, and Donald Trump offered
something different and new.
And he ran the country like you run a business where you sign the checks, you keep the lights
on, and you have pride for it at the end of the day.
And let's not forget, Trump doesn't just attack people for no reason.
He's attacking DeSantis because loyalty is something that's important to Trump, right?
If you go to any of Trump's rallies, one thing he always does is he gives credit where it's due.
There's always this VIP section where there's people that he knows, congressmen, people who
judges, whatever, sitting in the row.
And he'll literally, like, give credit words, do it and be like, wow, you know, Michael
Gableman, you did amazing work.
He's well respected.
I mean, even when, what was the Supreme Court justice that died, even though she was more, like,
to the left, he, like, said kind words about her.
So he's not just this savage person that's just attacking people wrong.
for no reason.
He's attacking DeSantis
because DeSantis
showed his true colors
and went on a national stage publicly
saying, look at me,
I'm a pit bull Trump defender
and then turned around
and stabbed him in the back.
That's why he's attacking
to say he's attacking.
And I want...
Sorry, guys, there's too many people speaking.
Gabe, I want to bring you in.
By the way, I think Trump's poster, like, funny.
Like, the trolling is hilarious, and I thought people like trolling.
But the top banter, in my view.
Gabe, what's your thoughts?
Because I know you're a liberal.
I need you've had your hand up for a while.
Go ahead.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I think it's great, man.
I said, like, an hour and 45 minutes ago, I said, keep talking about COVID,
keep arguing, keep bitching and moaning, and you guys have consistently done it for the last
hour and 45 minutes that I've been listening.
And you've done an amazing job, I've got to tell you.
I mean, like, hands down, you guys don't, you, like, you do it better than, I mean,
the best, obviously.
But when it comes to the comparisons that are made, I mean,
You guys fight over the pettiest stuff.
And it's, it's hilarious to watch about, you know, who's loyal and who's backstabbing.
Yeah, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter to the common voter, right?
Common voter only cares about what's going on in education.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'll agree.
I'll agree with, I mean, this is why DeSantis is stronger of these issues.
That's what he talks about.
That's why his whole legislative fault.
Well, I don't know if I would say one is strong than the other.
I mean, I will agree with Trump doesn't talk about it enough, right?
That's the issue, right?
Trump just goes with the drama and the loyalty and all that nonsense.
You know, that doesn't matter.
And if he talk, they're going to keep, they're going to keep fighting.
They're going to keep fighting.
They're going to keep fighting.
They're going to keep fighting about the pettiest littlest things.
They're going to say, oh, well, this person was loyal here.
And he said this and he agreed to that and blah.
All of this bullshit.
Everyone in this space that's arguing, you know, DeSantis versus Trump, it's great to watch because it's exactly how much of the narrative you guys have lost completely.
And this is the exact reason why the party will be split between DeSantis and Trump.
And when it comes down to election day, I'll say, I'll say it right now.
Trump will be the candidate of the Republican Party, despite the fact that I don't like Trump,
he's going to be the candidate.
And at the end of the day, the arguing and the bitting and moaning that's happening in this space right now over the little as shit.
And again, for the last hour and 45 minutes, right after I spoke last time, I said,
you guys will continue to argue about COVID.
And please keep doing it.
Because as you're focused on these little things that don't matter,
What's going to happen is that on election day, you guys will be split and you will make it incredibly easy for Joe Biden to be reelected.
And at the end of the day, it's going to be Trump. He's going to be the candidate.
You sound like a Trump supporter. He will be the candidate. Ron DeSantis doesn't have a fucking chance.
And here's an example. Somebody asked earlier what his opinion was versus Ukraine versus Russia.
Last night, he was given a meatball question, which was what was his position on what he would do when he was the first day in office on how to resolve this issue.
And what did he do?
He dodged the question and talked about gender ideologies and how the military was woke and this and that.
That tells you right there the guy has no idea what he's doing.
He's not prepared.
And also show you as a candidate he's a complete joke.
Well, we'll see about that.
He has no chase.
And I don't even like anyone.
Gabe, I think that's a little premature
to say at this point.
He announced his candidacy
yesterday to...
to write him off today, I think is a little premature.
And also, he doesn't know how much that the question, right?
The guy has stumbled at each point.
And I'll tell you, I'll tell you why.
Ian, I'll tell you why.
Ian, Ian, let Sarah go.
We've seen a liberal civil war right now.
And we've seen a Republic one for a while.
Go ahead, Sarah.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I don't interrupt anybody.
So, thank you.
And talking about polling today, they are going to change.
They're going to flip.
We can't really trust any of the polling today.
We don't know what's going to happen in the upcoming weeks and months.
I think that it'll be very close, but in my opinion, I think it will be Donald Trump.
And I know that that's a big debate between everybody,
but what I'm hearing is that everybody is so split
that I don't know if Team DeSantis could get behind Team Trump.
And I don't know if Team Trump people could get behind Team DeSantis,
and that's where it's hurting the Republican Party.
Well, you know, the difference between 2016 and this year
is, in my view, that you don't have anti-Penegro,
at least with from the candidates too much of an anti-Trump factor they're all trying to appeal to trump supporters
so they're a little bit more nervous about going after him directly and i think as a result
And as a result, I think that will benefit Trump in the primary.
And, you know, and frankly, you know, the 2016 primary was really a Donnybrook.
And, you know, it turned out pretty well for the Republicans in the end because of the weak candidate.
And, you know, as I said in the beginning, I think the reason someone like DeSantis is running,
you know, they don't really have to run this time.
Could have run in 2028 is because he sees that Biden is historically weak.
And so if I were Democrats, you know, I'd be concerned about, you know, doing whatever I could to ensure that the right candidate is there.
And one, you know, if I were an honest Democrat, I'd want a candidate who isn't on the take.
and his family isn't on the take quite obviously corruptly from the country who are most likely to go to war in in the next three years, China.
And to me, there's a national security crisis that both parties have to confront because Biden's corruption.
And that, to me, is going to be the issue of the election.
And the coming war with China, you know, Biden's in ethnist and corruption related to it.
And, you know, that's going to go a different way if that turns out.
Tom, do you think Trump could out raise DeSantis fundraise?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, you know, DeSantis is going to have a lot of anti-Trump support within the corporate world, I think.
So, I mean, I think Trump, you know, DeSantis will raise enough to be competitive.
But, you know, in the Republican primary system, it's still Democratic-Hump hasn't been great.
And so unless he's able to get, you know, this question is, we would be able to win in the contest he needs to win in.
And, you know, remember, you know, I think Pence is going to have one more time.
Money has made, if you look historically past 50 years.
person who out raises typically wins.
That didn't happen in 2016.
Right, and I predicted in 2016 he would win because of the way his marketing was working.
But I also predicted in 2020.
The other X factor is Pence coming in in June.
And that's going to further...
Tom, you got to stop it there.
Pence is a total joke.
Well, the point is, I mean, you say things like that, but the point is there's a primary.
It's going to make a difference on fundraising.
I would rather.
There are going to be different voters who otherwise might vote for DeSantis or some of these other candidates who will go to Pence.
And it further...
And it further splits the anti-Trump vote in the primary.
I mean, you know, to me, this is, you know, I think we should be debating.
Is Trump going to be campaigning from jail because of the seditious coup process that's underway through the Justice Spartan, the FBI to blow up our democracy?
And that's the debate.
There's no doubt in my view he's going to be the primary candidate.
I guess I can guess wrong on the politics there.
But I'm guessing he's going to be indicted in three jurisdictions, and at least one of those jurisdictions are going to put him in jail during the campaign.
And that's going to be undiscovered country for our democracy and republic.
God help us.
Can I actually say, I'll bring in.
Sure, sure.
Go ahead.
You know what?
I'm sorry, Nick.
You go ahead.
You're the co-host.
I'll go after you if that's all right.
Go ahead.
Okay.
Sure. I wanted to ask a question. And maybe I'll bring in Justin on this one. Welcome back to the panel, Justin. I want to ask you, do you think that these charges hurt Trump or do they help him in the long run? Does it really energize the base? Does it bring in more independent voters that think that he's, you know, being improperly prosecuted, unfairly prosecuted and they seem as a victim? What are your thoughts on that?
I don't know about independent voters, but I think it makes DeSantis's, it's bad for DeSantis,
because Republicans certainly believe that this is an attempt to stop Trump from becoming president again.
It basically fits his entire narrative about.
about I'm a victim, everyone's coming for me,
they're trying to stop me from being president.
So I think it helps Trump in the primary.
That's true though. That is true. That is happening.
There's my point.
But what Tom and what someone else was just saying about fundraising,
I actually think DeSantis will raise more money than Trump
and that will be used against DeSantis effectively.
And Trump will, like he did in 2016,
point to people like Ron DeSantis and say you are bought and paid for by special interest, it will stick.
And, yeah, I don't think money buys presidential elections quite like it used to if you can get the coverage like Trump can.
Yeah.
You know, what's surprising about Trump is that the campaign, he seems to be doing...
um you know running a good campaign he's got you know he was getting all the endorsements lined up
the way traditional candidates do uh it seems like they have their act together in the process
side of it so um you know my my thinking is he's going to do much better against the democratic
candidate and i don't believe it's necessarily going to be Biden uh than uh he did in 2020 i think uh
The Trump campaign is much more professionally set up.
And given the success they had in 2020,
and I do think it was a successful campaign-biting measure
despite the loss, and certainly compared to 2016.
Certainly compared to 2016,
I think it's going to be quite the race.
And Democrats are reacting by trying to jail him,
which tells you how politically potent they consider him.
Yeah, so Sarah, can I just say I'm glad you're back, even though we don't agree, I'm glad you're back on the panel.
Thank you.
Thank you, Nick.
In listening to DeSantis's speech last night, he seems to be very reluctant to even challenge Trump on his issues.
At some point, he's going to have to, and I'm wondering people that are supporting Trump,
uh desantis why is he not attacking trump on the issues at hand why is why does he seem to be
handling it with kid gloves is it because he doesn't really believe he can win and that
trump will eventually be the nominee or is it because he's just holding his cards close to his
chest and waiting for um the debates
Well, it's just to me that they're all running for vice president. That's what suggests to me.
Not a chance. No, no, he's, look, you saw it in the video, you know, really look at how savage Trump's base becomes when you dare to question anything their leader is done. I mean, they become like very, you know, nasty towards you and everything. And I can handle a criticism against the Santis, but the Trump people, they just go nuts.
Right.
So, you know, he's really threading the needle in a careful way and kind of letting other people take the arrows for going after Trump, you know.
But in the end, Desantis is a respectful man and he doesn't play games.
He doesn't tweet.
It's actually his team that does the tweeting and stuff like that.
He's very measured in what he says, and he's very respectful.
And by the way, he does have respect.
Do you think he should start, should he start doing more of that?
You know what?
I've encouraged it on Twitter.
You see my post on Twitter, but the Sanchez will do what he's going to do.
And, you know, he's really...
He's a godly man, and he's shown a lot of respect for Trump.
And if you didn't know this, it was Ron DeSantis, who was one of the few GOP congressmen,
while all these other GOP congressmen were too scared to say anything,
DeSantis and the Freedom Caucus, when he was in Congress,
were the ones that spoke up for Trump against the Russia collusion stuff.
And he was a great defender of Donald Trump.
And I don't think that ad of him with his kids saying, build the wall.
I think that's a really cute ad.
We really like Trump.
And, you know, I was.
at a Trump party, actually, not that long ago.
Not with actually Trump, but Trump people.
And kind of that nostalgia came back a little bit.
And, you know, a lot of the Trump base are very, very good people, you know.
And I get it.
It sucks.
I still have my Make America Great Again hats.
He'll always hold up.
But you've been attacking the panelists that are Trump supporters all night.
Well, I don't know if I'm attacking.
And I don't, I don't mean to talk over people.
And I hope nobody feels like I've attacked them or anything.
Because I know I've got a loud voice.
That's not my goal.
But I think that there's people.
Just to back you up, bro.
No disrespect, Chris.
People want to hear Trump say, people don't like Trump attacking to San Francisco.
Chris, just to back you up, I think you've shown a lot of passion
and you should probably give DeSantis a bit of coaching lessons on that
and maybe you'll get more votes.
Give him a little.
Give him a little bit.
Give him a little bit of what?
Hey, Ron,
they can give him a bit of your passion, bro,
because you got so much passion,
and I just felt like he was a robot that day,
didn't give any kind of passion.
He didn't engage very well with the public.
It seemed scripted.
Like, when you're speaking,
it doesn't seem scripted.
You're ready.
You're ready to spy.
Thank you.
Anyone who attacks Desantis.
The problem with DeSantis is he just,
and you mentioned about the text,
on tweeting
and I was like I'm not surprised
because the guy seems like
he's not able to do anything
unless he's got a script in front of it.
Well, you know, I've watched Ron DeSantis
and you know, me and my wife,
I get a lot of my jokes for my wife
and if you see anything funny I ever post
it's not me, it's for my wife,
and if I ever asked DeSantis a good question
Oh, so you are, you are, you're like, you know,
but you watch the scientist and he has, he's a more introverted guy.
He's exactly the opposite personality type as me, you know, and I used to go to his
events and, you know, now I'm in the press corps, but, you know, I used
to yell to him and he used to be kind of like uncomfortable with it and stuff.
But, you know, I've watched him grow and I've watched him get more sociable with people.
But he's not the kind of guy that like likes flattery.
If you went up to DeSantis and started fawning all over him and telling him how great he was,
he's not that kind of guy, but I think he's doing, I think he's doing a lot better.
And just so you know, my understanding of the reason that Trump
really doesn't like DeSantis, is that, you know, back when when DeSantis was running, he had said something, and I don't remember, maybe one of you do, that where he was basically dissing Trump.
Well, I don't agree with Trump and really, really kind of made it clear that he was playing.
put a distance between him and Trump.
And Trump was furious and cut him off politically in the middle of the campaign.
And, you know, and I know they were desperate to get him back in.
And he eventually did come back in and help DeSantis out.
You know, so Trump sees that DeSantis, you know, used, benefited from his, his political support to put himself, you know, get himself elected governor.
And he sees the fact that he ran, he's running against him as, you know, just terrible.
And that's why you see this this more direct animus with the Santus than you do against the other candidates.
And that's the background.
That I think is the story.
And whether it makes people feel better one way or another about certain things.
And what Trump says or not, I'll defer to them.
But the reality is, you know, Trump feels that he went out on a limb to support DeSantis.
And what DeSantis has done in response by
trying to take the can't the nomination away from them is unforgivable well could anybody really
Tom I think you've got a bit of background noise there and just guys sorry Chris before I go to Gabe and then you
guys um bottom right inside put your comments in we are reading them and we will get through the
comments there's been some really good comments and same point again a lot of people saying that
dissenters has no personality he reads from a script he's not his own man that's what few people are saying
Well, okay.
In addition to that, oh, sorry, do you want to,
the last point I was going to make was, sorry, Nick,
last point I was going to make, guys, is please subscribe to Mario.
It's only $1.
And essentially, we are going to have subscriber-only spaces.
They're going to be exclusive spaces with the large guests.
So that's going to be fun.
So make sure you subscribe, it's the subscribe button on the page.
Nick, you were going to say something?
Yeah, I wanted to ask Gabe real quick as we were talking about audience questions,
so I thought I'd hit one real quick.
You know, this is a question that a lot of people have on their mind.
Do you really believe that Joe Biden is in the proper mental state
to be up against either of these candidates, either Trump or DeSantis?
I mean, well, it seems like he's going really downhill, you know,
especially since, you know, the videos even from 2016, 2020.
I mean,
Is that a serious, you know, is he a serious contender with that sort of mental capacity?
I think, I think in terms of comparing the, we'll take those three candidates, but yeah, I think that where he is right now in terms of leading is fine.
I think that obviously naturally over age, you know, I mean, you could say the same thing about Trump, right?
Like you could talk about how Trump says nothing but.
visceral things online and when he's giving a speech he goes off on crazy random tangents and attacks
people you know to chris's point i would agree right but but wait is that even can you compare
the two that way though because it seems like Biden is more and more unintelligible as time goes on
they the white house doesn't like to allow joe biden to answer questions that aren't
pre-staged if they even allow them to answer questions at all.
But Trump will stand there and answer questions all day long.
It just, it seems like they are hiding this mental degradation, no?
I don't think that they're hiding it.
I mean, keep in mind that even when we went into the 2020 election, everyone's like, oh, sleepy Joe, he's running from the basement, blah, blah, blah, all the stuff.
And then at the same time, people are like, oh, my God, Joe Biden is this evil puppeteer who's controlling, you know, all these things from the background.
So, you know, it comes to a point where it's like, which is it, right?
Is it dementia degradation and you're saying that he's not, not someone who's taken seriously?
Yeah.
Oh, it's literally just looked around Twitter.
People are, you know, anyone is like,
Joe Biden is being controlled by other people,
that he is a puppet.
That seems to be the argument I've heard.
No, the argument goes two ways.
One is either he's not competent and he's slow
and he's being hidden away.
And the other one is that everything is controlled.
It's Joe Biden's FBI and Joe Biden's DOJ
and he's the one who's intentionally doing this against Trump
and blah, blah, all these things.
So it really comes to this point of like, which is it, right?
Is he not saying incompetent in actually having, you know, the mental capacity to this?
Or is he this evil mastermind that's pulling the strings behind the curtain in terms of how would be?
Oh, it can be both.
It can be both.
Oh, my God.
This is why you can have someone who has significant.
You can have someone who had significant cognitive challenges.
No, no, no.
You're the same person who emailed Dan Skavino on October 31st saying,
we had an election today and I won in terms of how, no, no, no,
in terms of how to tell the White House how they should approach the outcome of the election,
before the election even happened.
So whenever I, no offense at town, but all the events had it had.
What does that have to do with that?
What did the email say?
Why don't you read it out loud?
Because when I hear you talk.
Why don't you read the email out loud?
Why don't you read the email out loud?
The ballots counted by the election day deadline show the American people have bestowed.
Okay, read the entire email.
Read the entire email.
Let me get the whole email. But also, all right. So, you know, I appreciate the Democratic talking point. I made the point that Joe Biden may have cognitive challenges that makes them potentially unqualified to be remain in office or to continue second term. And may also, the cognitive challenges don't necessitate that he's still not making decisions and still isn't personally corrupt.
I don't do this either or paper tiger argument.
The people see what's going on with Joe Biden.
His own people see what's going on Joe Biden.
They manage his public appearances to mitigate for his cognitive challenges.
And I guarantee the same thing is happening is Donald Trump.
His policies, I still hold him to camera.
Gay, no, they don't have to put blue tape on the ground for Donald Trump to stand on.
I mean, he plays a round of golf, and then he flies to New York.
He's the same guy who reads off a telecomptor that the airplane
and they get to make during the Revolutionary War.
And they can't tell me.
You can't argue that one person.
one person's mental capacity or or a mental kind of competency of of Donald Trump versus Biden.
Like these are things, if you want to say that, then you can say the same for the other person.
Well, you can. And I think what happened with the CNN town hall is that people had a lot of questions about whether Trump got older and
and they saw that he was cognitively as as sharp as he's ever been.
And I think that rushed, and I think that rushed the DeSantis campaign a little bit because he did so well on CNN to try to get him out more quickly in terms of announcing.
That CNN hit was a significant benefit to Trump because it was a failure.
favorable comparison in terms of mental capacity.
And I would submit to two people who should compare in terms of mental capacity
are two people the same age who very much are in the public eye.
Joe Biden and Dr. Fauci.
Dr. Fauci, love them or hate him.
There's no comparison, his mental agility for a man his age versus Biden.
And the comparison is despairing for those of us concerned about the management of our country,
especially in the national security sphere, given Biden's evident cognitive problems that are so on display, but...
you know, that every Democrat in the country is worried about except the folks on this panel.
Well, I don't know. What do you worry? What do you worry about? A evil genius? Like,
or an evil, uh, an evil, mad scientist. I didn't say he's a genius. I said he's corrupt and has
cognitive challenges. I'm not trying to make it a joke like, like, okay, like who would you rather
have a guy that's, like, uh, is losing his marbles or a guy who is like an evil mad scientist
who wants to do science experiments on people like Fauci was. So, so, so it's,
Oh, well, yeah, well.
I did not realize Fauci was 80.
I mean, he was in there since 1984, ironically, the same year Mark Zuckerberg was born.
And I mean, I think we just all wanted to see Donald Trump at some point really fire Fauci.
It was actually me and my wife.
He could not fire Fauci.
This has been talked over and over again.
No, he cannot.
Yes, he can't.
Can we please not go back?
Please stop with this.
Stop with this.
He couldn't fire Fauci.
I mean, even Politico and Washington.
Let's stop with the COVID.
Guys, you know what it is?
When people, Chris, Chris, you know what it is when too many people talk?
It's very hard for the business.
On the stage, it's a bit more easy.
Let Finn, let Finn am finish, and then you can go ahead.
Yeah, so I'm going to make two real quick points.
So, I mean, it's well known.
The Civil Service Act, 1978.
He had been there since Reagan.
It had just been impossible.
He was in the government, as looked at as a medical expert,
and he had a role there regardless.
So I have to set that aside.
One thing that people are missing is DeSantis did have one big win yesterday and actually
came from Elon.
And it's when Elon said, oh, I didn't really know that books weren't being banned in Florida.
And that was actually a big win for all conservatives because of this ridiculous talking point
that somehow keeping porn away from our kids is somehow actually banning books from people of every age that want to buy books.
any book they want in any bookstore or Amazon. So that was really the only win I saw. I came from Elon,
but I think that was a win for all conservatives. And then the second point I want to make is
there's, you know, I think we have to just let go. Censorship. No, when a parent decides this is
not appropriate for a child, that is not censorship. That is that is guidance. You can still
It should be for a parent to decide though, right?
That is what the answer is. I'm just saying a lot of people are ultra, ultra non-anti any censorship. And I continuously make the argument that some censorship is good. Please let me finish. Okay. I just have the mic for a quick second here. And I'd just like to make my point.
Those books are, anybody can purchase those books, even parents, but to not have them in a school where our taxes pay for it, parents don't want that.
It's not appropriate.
And that has nothing to do with censorship.
Those books are still available at any bookseller that wants to sell them.
But the really quick point that I want to make is that...
People have this idea that like people who are fervently that want Trump back in the White House, that it's a cult and that we don't have any reason why.
And they forget that he's had a seven year enema, basically, by the media.
We know everything about him.
And then we had four years of looking at every single policy he did of every single policy.
Anything he enacted, anything that he did, we were right there watching it.
We were living under the gas prices.
We were living under the better regulation.
We were living under the freer energy market.
And so we, this is choice.
This is preference.
It's not a cult.
It's preference because we have.
And we criticize McCarthy.
And we criticize McCarthy.
We criticize Dr. Oz.
We criticize...
Let me go ahead and bring in. We have Congressman Matt Gates back on the panel. Welcome back, man. Thank you so much for returning here. I know you're awfully busy today doing media hits and such.
I definitely agree with the prior speaker that a multi-year enema is a precondition to the presidency. I absolutely ascribe to that.
Matt, do you really think that journalism on Twitter is a bad thing, like you said before?
I couldn't believe when you said that.
I was being facetious about the nature of these recorded conversations.
That part of being in spaces is being able to pick up on some sense of sarcasm.
Okay, I'm glad you're sarcastic. Mac, do you feel like you were betrayed by Trump when he brought all the people into who endorsed him? And then he turned around and Stephen Chong put out that Florida sucks memo about all these things. And honestly, are you going to say that people would have come to Florida anyway if it wasn't for Governor Ron DeSantis's policies? I can't believe you would actually really believe that.
Well, I don't just believe it.
I lived it.
I've been a lawmaker for Floridian since 2010.
Which well-decead precedes Governor DeSantis, who I think very highly of, and I think he's done a great job for the state.
I'm very proud of the work I did as his transition chairman.
When Ron DeSanis had to decide who to trust to build out his government, I consider it a great honor that he trusted me.
And I think he's done a good job.
But I don't know that...
This presidential contest is a referendum on the job Ron DeSantis is done as governor.
I think it's a referendum on the current state of the country.
And we need a drug a little more potent than Ron DeSanis right now.
And that's why I support Trump.
And that's not a critique of Ron.
Tom?
Matt, Tom Fitton here.
Good to hear from you.
It's good to talk to someone who actually understands oversight.
Okay.
Well, thank you.
You know, and I think that's the kind of current crisis.
I think this primary is a distraction from kind of the attack on the Republic with the abuse of the, you know, the Justice Department and the prosecutor's offices in New York and Georgia.
And I've been frustrated that they didn't use the debt limit to curtail those abuses.
And I'm frustrated that, you know, we're all whistling past a graveyard.
I don't think you're one of those whistling that they're going to try to jail Trump during the election season.
And I think it's a significant risk.
I mean, what, what should be the approach there?
I have my own ideas, but I'd be interested to hear what you think about.
You know, how do we deal with this assault on our republic from the left that's weaponized?
And weaponizing is almost a...
it makes it seem like it can be holstered again i don't know if those agencies can be rescued
from what's been done yeah it's uh but but right now they're trying to jail us and um and
there's not much concern and from our friends in washington about it yeah i don't know if it's
weaponized as much as it's gone feral and you know once uh once something goes feral it's kind of
hard to bring it back uh
I think we need to hold Mark Palmerance in contempt.
I think that needs to be a really important requisite step.
We bring Palmerance in and ask him questions like,
did you commit any crimes when you were investigating Trump?
Did you violate his constitutional rights?
Did you violate the...
ethical standards of an attorney involving yourself in this case was such an obvious conflict.
And to each of those questions, Mark Palmeritz pled the fifth.
And that's his right.
And we shouldn't even have a negative judgment about whether or not he did those things or didn't
based on his assertion of his Fifth Amendment privilege.
But it certainly warrants further investigation.
And then later...
My colleague Lee Stefaniq asked
Palmerance whether or not there were any lies in his book.
He said there were no lies in his book.
And Tom, you know, as an attorney, you understand
once somebody says that,
they've engaged in subject matter waiver.
Oh, well, wait, wait, wait.
As an...
I'm a non-lawyer expert in the law.
Fine, fine, fine, fine.
But you're right.
There's a subject matter waiver over the fifth amendment privilege that I think
Palmerance engaged in, and so then we try to go back and re-ask him those questions.
You can't say to one question, I take the fifth, the non-related question, answer it without opening yourself up.
to challenge there.
Right.
And so I just think that his unwillingness now to answer those questions,
just that are pretty fundamental misuse of federal dollars and the like,
means we ought to take that action.
More broadly, you know, there is going to have to be a reliance on the jury system.
At some point, that is a check on the abuse of the powers that we're seeing.
But with some of the treaties that we could be looking at in Washington, D.C., Metro Atlanta,
New York City, it's hard to imagine that there'd be fair trials there.
So this could be an odd circumstance where like the republic
What about what about what about what about curtailing funding to those jurisdictions
either indirectly or directly based on their violations of civil rights?
The Justice Department, there's not a dollar that's spent without the approval of Congress.
We could shut down investigations there if they're objectionable and designed to
destroy the First Amendment rather than
and interfere in elections.
I mean, there are all sorts of checks the Congress can pursue,
and, you know, I'm just frustrated there's not much of a debate there.
You would concede that a limit on those checks is to the federal entities,
not necessarily the state and local entities.
We can't.
Right. Well, I mean, if...
There is money, which gives us jurisdiction to ask important questions,
but I don't think that shutting off the money would be dispositive
as to the pursuit of any matter.
Well, that is true, but it would make it politically difficult for them to justify violating civil rights and, you know, losing all that funding while doing, you know, I guess in principle the federal government should have no part in this, and that means pulling funding in any way possible.
But the DOJ is investigating the Republican Party in a aggressive way.
investigating their fundraising, attacking state legislators, attacking citizens who are volunteering
as electors, all First Amendment-related activity. They're acting as a political research operation
for the Democrats, and they plan to try to jail Trump in the middle of the campaign.
And, you know, it's all being done with approved monies by Congress. And I don't understand it.
Let me concede this point. We spend more of our time.
focused on how the DOJ plays defense as opposed to how they play offense.
That's a fair critique because actually, you know, a more than 50% of my day
spent on these endeavors is spent on seeing...
how the foreign influence task force goes and designates any derogatory information about the
biden's as russian interference and dust busts that how at the irs there's steering away from any of the um
concerns about the Bidens, how the suspicious activities reports are frequently withheld on some of the financial transactions at Treasury.
So they've got this whole kind of plumbing unit throughout the government that is able to sequester negative information about them.
And what we believe is if we can expose that...
infrastructure that the bad acts, you know, won't be viewed as disparate events, but as part
of this, like, a grand orchestra of corruption. And it's a fair critique to say we don't spend as
much time on how they are playing offense, something I assure you I am quite familiar with.
So I just want to thank Congressman for coming up.
We appreciate you asking questions.
None of these questions are pre-screened.
We are going to questions generally on people on the panel,
and we've got people on the panel from a variety of ideologies and political positions.
You don't need to praise the Congressman or Elon Musk before you ask a question.
But before I go to the speaker questions, let me go to Mario first.
That was a nice chance.
Wait, hold on.
When I run for president, when I run for president, they'll be pre-screened up, right?
Okay, right.
Yeah.
You're going to be in this space.
I'm going to-
I think that's what you promised.
Yeah, we got to launch a PR campaign.
Anyone that announces their presidential campaign on Twitter spaces without coming here is a chicken and doesn't want to face the tough questions.
So that's going to be the PR campaign we're going to work on.
But Congressman, my question to you is bringing it back to DeSantis and Trump.
But one thing that many are worried about is the divide that we're seeing in the Republican Party.
Or maybe that's not going to happen.
But are you worried about such a divide?
And how should the party manage this divide?
I do worry about it.
And I worry about it because there really should not be the level of vitriol between the Desanis team and the Trump team that I see.
And trust me, I've shared that perspective with anyone and everyone who will listen to me.
You know, a lot of the people who are dissantis supporters are people that are my friends, especially like look in Congress.
Two of the people that I spend, three of the people, I spend the most time with Bob Good, Chip Roy, Thomas Massey.
They're dissantis supporters.
But, you know, we...
they would say positive things about me and about Jim Jordan and about those of us who support
President Trump. So I think that like in the Twitter sphere, there's certainly a lot more
animosity than in the lawmaking sphere and lawmakers sphere. And you know, I don't know that
DeSantis and Trump will ever be on each other's Christmas card list again. But I think that
It's probably helpful if at some stratosphere of this conflict there maintains a recognition that at the end we got to go beat Joe Biden's ass or Gavin Newsom's.
Why would we like go for the jugular and try to have fatal shots on one another?
I want to just go to the panelist to get them, because I'm not sure how long we've got Matt for, but because we've got a number of questions.
If you guys can keep your questions quite short, that'd be brilliant.
Kim, I appreciate you coming on stage.
Always value your opinion.
Hi, Matt.
Kim.com.
I admire your intellect and your robust efforts to bring the truth to love.
But my question is in regards to the Ukraine war, it seems to be escalating.
There's a real risk for humanity that this conflict gets completely out of control and that we are facing a world war.
and wars involved and you know one of the things that i see is a beacon of hope is that the
debt ceiling will not be increased and that mega republicans are trying to defund Biden to put
pressure on him to maybe change course with the war in ukraine is that a realistic scenario
are republicans looking into doing that or not
No, that's not realistic.
And the view I hold is in the minority of the Congress
by probably about a two-thirds to one-third perspective.
And while that sounds demoralizing, when this began,
the only three members of Congress
who voted against these increasing hostilities
toward Russia were myself and Thomas Massey and Marjorie-Teller-Green.
But the debt limit will be raised.
It's just a question of how good a deal we get or don't get and then what the cascading political consequences of a bad deal or a good deal or an okay deal would be.
But, you know, there were a small group of us at the beginning who tried to make a
funding for Ukraine, part of the debt deal negotiations, and we were stifled by the neoconservatives
who far outnumber us, frankly. And you know what the number one factor in determining,
kind of whether someone's a neocon or not in the Republican conference? How long they've been there?
And that is what gives me hope.
It's hard to win a Republican primary for an open seat as a neocon.
I should say it's harder than it was two cycles ago or four cycles ago.
But it's really not that hard for the neocons to keep their jobs.
And so in a way, we've.
We've just sort of got to age past them a good amount.
And my hope is that we'll get millennia.
I mean, if you look at the millennials in Congress,
they lean far more my way.
But we've got more people over the age of 70 in Congress
than any other time than America's history.
And guys, if you've got any comments,
please comment on the bottom right inside.
And we will ask the congressman any questions you've got.
But let me just go to Sarah.
Go ahead with your question.
Thank you. Congressman Gates, you said some very positive and favorable things about Ron DeSantis when you joined the space initially. I'm wondering, why would you support Donald Trump over Ron DeSantis? Is it policy? Is it personality? And my second question would be you made a sort of a flippant joke that you would run for president. Will that be something we'll see in 2028 or beyond?
No, that was truly a flippant joke.
But I am most concerned about how the donor class influences Ron.
And as governor of Florida...
It's just a different landscape in that regard.
Like the big interests are like Disney and sugar.
And to Ron's credit, he took those entities on,
and I stand with him in both of those fights still to this day.
But with what we are facing in Washington,
Iran-de-Sanis presidency provides insufficient...
oomph for change.
And I don't know that there's a person on the planet Earth
who knows Ronda Sannis and Donald Trump better than I do.
I've spent a tremendous amount of time with both of them.
I've actually spent hours and hours and hours with both of them together.
And while I think Ronda Samos and might make a great president one day for this moment,
with these challenges we face that Tom Fitten outlined so brilliantly earlier,
I think only Donald Trump is in the position to kind of cut through a lot of that.
And I actually think his second term will be better than his first.
And I think the major advantage of his second term will be the absence of any pressure toward a reelect.
I mean, any human being who's the sitting president thinks towards a reelect.
And it will be liberating.
And I think...
really exhilarating in a lot of ways for us to have a president who doesn't think in those terms,
like Trump.
Congressman, before I go to Joe, I've got another question for you.
We've had, I've had a few sources tell me that Trump, unsurprisingly, he's coming back to Twitter,
and he's looking at leveraging Twitter spaces as well.
I know you've got some concerns in Twitter spaces, and that's really all media about things being taken out of context.
But I'm curious as to how you think Trump would leverage this new,
I'm gonna call it a movement,
moving away from mainstream media,
which has been his narrative and he's kind of accelerated that narrative.
How do you, have you spoken to his team?
Do you know anything about his strategy when it comes to Twitter?
Benny Johnson yesterday talked about saying,
guys, he will be coming back to Twitter.
He will be leveraging Twitter spaces.
How would he leverage that platform?
How would you leverage that platform in comparison to how DeSantis has and how he did it yesterday with pre-scripted questions and a very well-controlled Twitter space?
We'd love to see if you've got any thoughts on this or any insight you can give us.
And if you've spoken about Trump's team about this.
And then we'll go to Joe our next.
Yeah, no, great question. I think what we got yesterday was very high volume boredom.
You know, I don't know that anyone came out of that Twitter space. It was like, oh my gosh, like there was a sizzling moment, right? It was a warmed over stump speech.
followed by some, like, highly processed, pre-screened questions.
I mean, and that doesn't mean that there weren't interesting policy nuggets that were discussed
and an interesting insight in how Governor DeSanis thinks about problems.
But, like, fun, it was not.
I think the most telling feeling we all got during the Desanis,
town hall was at the end where he was like, let's do this again.
Like, who was out there thinking, well, I've got to set my calendar for that?
You know, I don't want to miss the highlights of the next one of these things, right?
So I think that that's how he approaches it.
How I approach it is typically when my wife is doing work late night for her job,
and I have a few extra moments.
to be able to expend energy where I can't give her attention.
So that is my personal.
And Congressman, I don't give you credit as well.
Like half the panel right now is liberal,
and you don't know what questions are being asked.
You didn't pre-vette the panel.
You didn't pre-vite the questions.
If I want to give you credit,
you mentioned Congressman Massey, Thomas Massey,
earlier, who's been on stage a couple of times as well.
Same thing, never pre-vetted the question.
Lauren, as well, never pre-vetted the question.
So I think anyone that does...
Prevout the question?
I didn't even pre-beth the country.
Exactly.
But you've been, you've been watching us for a while.
I think Joel's been watching us for a while to make sure you didn't get some crooked host,
putting it on the spot.
Totally endure.
Trying to get it.
Faces on Twitter.
Totally.
I appreciate that.
There's no gotcha moment here, Congressman.
So I hope you.
No, but I want to answer the question as to Trump because.
Trump would be like the LeBron James of Twitter spaces
because he's an extreme extrovert
and he can like talk for hours and hours and hours.
So if instead of just like calling his buddies at night
and talking about his views on things
and what happened that day and, you know, his vision,
he could do that on Twitter spaces.
I think it would be, it would be can't miss content.
And...
You know, who doesn't miss that?
Love him or hate him.
I think a congressman, I think Trump will dominate Twitter spaces
because you could just like in the middle of the night
open up Twitter spaces.
So let's say Desantis is doing an interview on Fox.
You can tell this to his team.
Imagine Descentes is doing some interview somewhere.
Trump could just open a Twitter space
and start berating him and take over the limelight.
And he could do this time and time again.
I think Trump and Twitter space,
the raw nature of Twitter spaces just fits his personality.
You don't have to like him.
But I think from a market, from it from a,
narrative perspective,
he's kind of dominate.
It's going to be fun to watch.
The man could literally say to more.
On Fifi on Twitter and get 150,000 retweets.
If there are two spaces open,
and one is like,
Ron DeSanis giving his 100-point plan for America's future.
And the other is like Trump listing the 100 women who are not his type.
Like which is going to get more followers?
Exactly.
Exactly.
It's going to be fun.
It's going to be an interesting presidential one.
Joa, Mike is yours.
Hi, Congressman.
I had two questions for you.
One, you kind of mentioned about the fundraising.
And that's a question I asked a couple people who have been on panel before.
Just my gut feeling is DeSantis could out-raise Trump and money does play a big part in who wins.
And just your thoughts on who would out-raise who would out-raise who, really?
I don't even think that reasonable people disagree on this point.
Ron DeSantis is going to outrage Trump.
He's going to have more money.
But we are at a level of politics with the presidency in 2024 and in an era of politics, where after a certain dollar amount, it is such diminishing returns.
Now, Trump's got to make sure it's not stolen by grifters and consultants and vendors and list shares.
And, you know, in the past, people have been susceptible to that type of grifting.
I mean, hell even Newt Gingrich, who was the Speaker of the House, saw his own 2016 presidential campaign ravaged by those features.
And with DeSantis, you know, there's going to be sort of an Obama-era era.
an Obama campaign mentality towards spending, where they're not going to have to make choices
about which things to do because they're going to have the money to do all of it.
But at the end of the day, like, if, you know, if you're selling dog food and one can's got
the best slogan and the cutest kid on the front, but then like when you open it up, like,
The dogs just don't like the food as much.
I don't know, like, to what extent the slickest marketing strategy becomes the revolutionary component of the campaign.
Yeah.
I mean, historically, the money does matter.
But the second question, Nick, let me just ask the second one.
And then the mic's yours.
Go ahead, Joel.
Yeah.
If the people, like what I'm seeing in some of the polls in the Browderground states, the issues that are coming up are not the war and it's not COVID.
It's about education.
It's about CBDCs.
So like what Tom outlined, I agree with you, Trump probably would be the better candidate.
But from what I'm seeing in the polls, those aren't going to be the issues that American people care about the most.
They care about how their children are going to be educated.
Do they have to deal with the openness?
And what's going to happen to their wallets with CBDCs?
And this, to me, DeSantis has been a stronger player on than Trump has.
So if that was the case, do you still think Trump is the right candidate?
Well, I would ask you to source evidence for the claim that evasion of wokenness is higher on the list of important issues for voters than the economy, because I've not seen that.
Matt, let me ask you real quick. On that topic of money, and we did hear, you know, as you said, that it's probably pretty obvious that Rhonda Santis is going to raise more money. First, I'll make, I'll just tell the audience here that Trump raised only out as much as Hillary raised in 2016 and still managed to pull it out. But what I want to ask you, Matt, is.
Why do you think that is?
Why is Ron DeSantis going to bring in more money?
Are we talking big dollar donors?
Do they think that these big dollar donors maybe have more control over DeSantis than Trump?
Yeah, I mean, Trump is like very unpopular with like the third wives of billionaires.
I want to answer.
Heather, jump in.
Hey, thanks, Congressman.
And this is so refreshing that this is why I think people love President Trump and love you as a congressman because you guys are so authentic, unscripted, and you're willing to answer any questions.
So I appreciate that.
My question is, I recently covered a story on some of these illegal migrants being bused to hotels in New York.
And when I went there to try to cover the story, nobody from these NGOs, these organizations that are distributing them would talk to the media.
And they actually told me to leave and wanted me, like, arrested for trespassing if I returned.
And so what was interesting about this is when I had walked a little ways away from the hotel, I started talking with one of the illegal immigrants.
And he had a phone where we could communicate through the app.
And then these people from the NGO that wouldn't identify themselves came out and said,
I filmed it all and told the immigrants that they weren't allowed to talk to us,
which for me was just like, well, if they're coming here to be liberated,
why can't they talk to the press, essentially?
And so my question to you is, how much do we know about these people being brought in,
these organizations bringing them in?
Like, is anyone in Congress really digging into what's going on here?
Because...
All of them were grown men.
There were no women.
There were no children at this hotel.
And the whole thing was super, super sketchy.
So that's sort of my question for you.
Well, first of all, good on you for doing more thorough reporting and being gritty about it.
Second, the reaction you got from the people who work at these entities is the signal, right?
Because they're showcasing that this is a highly sophisticated operation.
You're not dealing with some group of Catholic nuns, just trying to be do-goaters for desperate people.
You're dealing with operatives, trained operatives.
And it is a human supply chain
that the left is orchestrated to, one,
lie to people in other parts of the country,
to create a financial pathway for the cartels
to get bought off, to move them in to the country.
And then three, to get them into often,
you know, very coercive labor situations
and also into social programs and also into
jurisdictions where you can vote with a note from your mom.
And different groups are responsible for different features of that human supply chain,
all, you know, I think set up to empower the left.
The problem in Congress is that we're so focused on just the gaping wound at the border
that we probably do less than we should to...
pull the thread all the way into the interior of the country to expose some of these expansive networks.
And what really pisses some of us off is that it ain't like these NGOs are just out there getting money from George Soros or Tom Steyer or whoever your villain billionaires for the moment.
They get money from the U.S. taxpayer.
They got a shit ton of money in the Inflation Reduction Act,
in the American Rescue Plan,
under the guise of some do good or work that they provide,
but largely it is a,
a loop of payoffs that requires continuous cash to be fed in,
which is why we're trying to put some down pressure on the increase of the debt limit.
I mean,
those things is fundamentally connected.
So just one quick follow up.
No, one second.
One second, Heather.
Neckiw going to announce someone.
Go ahead.
Oh, sorry, okay.
So I want to go to Fiena.
In the meantime, guys, drop your comments in.
Yeah, guys, I'm just going to go to Fee now.
Guys, try and keep your questions short because then we can get more people to ask questions.
So go ahead, Fian.
In the meantime, Nick is checking audience questions and he is going to read them out.
Thanks, thank you, Simon.
Hi, Congressman Gates.
Thanks.
I was the one that said President Trump had gotten a seven-year inima from the media.
So my question to you is, um,
Sentcom had reported to Congress a little while ago that Afghanistan or ISIS is going to be capable of foreign attacks in six months.
And I'm wondering if you see this...
playing like becoming more of an issue as we go into the election. And then my second question is
what are the chances of having like a church style committee the way the January 6th committee was done
under Nancy Pelosi where it's like broadcast somewhere on like Newsmax or even Twitter or
in the media? And thanks for your time and for everything you're fighting for.
Yeah, no problem.
I am somewhat skeptical of the claims of ISIS's capability, particularly ISIS K, out of Afghanistan.
What my perception is their goals are largely...
internal to afghanistan they are sort of in a battle with the taliban and oh the tangled web
we weave right now the u.s government through a lot of the decisions we're making about access
to bank accounts capital of weapons is supporting the taliban against isis when we were just fighting
against the talban with some of the people who've now joined isis k so uh you know all the more
reason for us to not view ourselves as the magic wand of central as
Your, what was your other question being on?
Well, thank you.
With regard to like how Pelosi did the January 6th committee and broadcast it as a bit of a bit of a call.
Do you think there's a chance that something like that could happen?
So...
Yeah, I'm currently watching the Eastern Conference semifinals,
my Miami Heat are losing to the Boston Celtics.
And I can only imagine how much easier the game would be
if there was no defense when you tried to score.
And that's sort of what Pelosi and the January 6th committee had.
They were just going up and down the court,
scoring uncontested layups,
because they didn't want someone like me or Jim Banks or Jim Jordan
on the committee to...
offer clash and pushback and critique.
Newsbacks did cover end-to-end, the last weaponization committee that we had,
where we put forward the whistleblowers with some pretty stunning claims about how stats
had been manipulated, how Americans had been targeted based on their faith or
like posting the Betsy Ross flag or maybe even being in this Twitter space with me.
Who knows?
But we are not going to get the type of media lather for our oversight work that the January 6th committee got, or frankly, the Democrats ever get.
Yeah.
And to sit around complaining about it, I think it's counterproductive.
What, you know, Joel can tell you my comms director who's on the stage right now is that I spend most of my days in depositions and interviews talking to folks from, you know, FBI, CIA, Joint Terrorism Task Force, Homeland Security, Meta, Google, Google,
to try to map out this censorship industrial complex
and some of the election interference and corrupt
influence of these entities and we probably won't get the showcase of a January 6th committee
but I'm going to do my best to get it all out to the public all the same.
Congressman, we saw the news, Congressman, we saw the news earlier today and Charles, I'll go to you right after,
regarding the leader of the oathkeeper is getting 18 years sentence.
We saw roads get 18 years, Schwartz get 14 years, Webster got 10 years.
Those sentences are significantly shorter than what the Department of Justice initially sought.
But I want to get your thoughts on this. Is that just justice in motion?
Or is that the sentences are an extreme relative to what the crime is?
Look, if the oathkeepers stood before a jury, they had every constitutional privilege of
Florida heart defendants.
They were found in the guilty of seditious conspiracy, and if they were trying to literally
overthrow the government, one, they're idiots, two, they had no chance, and three, they
probably deserve some punishment.
I thought that the sentences would be less than they were, so I was a bit surprised by
their duration, but I wasn't particularly grieved by them.
That's a good response. Nick, did you want to go with the question?
No, no, jump in Charles.
Hey, thanks, Congressman. We appreciate being here. We met at CPAC, and this is Charles from New York.
I appreciate the time you give us then and, you know, the really time to give it us now.
So in regards to the primary, I don't really think CBDCs or any of these things are polling as issues in the GOP primary, but rogue DOJ and subversive three-letter agencies are.
So in the wake of the DERN report, you said that,
that FBI agents that participated in Crossfire Hurricane should be indicted.
But we also saw in 2022 after Devin Nunes sent out 14 criminal referrals to Durham,
you know, we sort of heard the same thing.
So if Donald Trump becomes the president, what would be different now?
And how would that vary from Iran-Dissantas presidency when it comes to enforcing actions
against these rogue agencies?
Well, I would really like to think that both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis would make
me attorney general, but it might be only Donald Trump that would be willing to do that.
By the way, Congressman, I've got it.
Hold on.
Let me ask Congressman.
We will do worse.
I know that.
We will do worse.
Congressman, let me ask you another question, Nick.
By the way, you're lagging.
Let me ask you this, because you were thrilling Alejandro Mayorkas, who is the home
Homeland Security Secretary the other day in a committee hearing.
What is he doing about the whole border crisis?
Does he deserve to be removed from his position?
And what would you do differently down there at the southern border if you, you know,
say if you were in his position?
Well, I think that Majorcas is largely laughing at us for having not impeached him.
I know for a fact that my orcas believe that by now, he would be impeached.
And the fact that he hasn't yet, he wakes up every day, thrilled that he's breathing fresh air.
What I would do differently is just reenact the Trump policies.
This isn't rocket science.
If you have safe third country, remain in Mexico, if you don't parole people into the interior here, then you're able to...
deal with a lot of these issues.
I think Chip Roy's legislation to get to provide some title 42 authorities is pretty
essential to solve the problem.
I would get that enacted.
And we're in the situation now in Arizona where they're literally taking down some of the
physical barriers at Morales, Dan and other places that were working.
So I would still look to erect physical barriers.
Those have worked.
Tom, yeah, jump in, but let me ask you to all along.
Congressman, did you see the video that,
I don't know if I'm the only one that finds it extremely funny.
Oh, Nick can't hear me, hold on, let me fix it.
On you, bottom one thing, corner.
No, here you go, took off Nick.
So Nick couldn't hear me, so just removed him, and I'll bring him back up.
But, Congressman, did you see that video,
probably the funniest video I've seen in months, that Trump said,
reposted on truth social.
I tweeted about it yesterday as well.
It was, I'll pin it at the top of anyone that hasn't seen it.
It was a space between Elon, DeSantis, Hitler, the devil.
Who else was there?
Soros was there, yes, Soros, Dick Cheney, and Schwab was there as well.
Did you see that video, Congressman?
Yeah, I would say hardest hit in that video was the devil.
Yeah, and then Hitler just goes off in German.
They took a little segment from the movie, the downfall.
But again, I go back.
Trump, you don't have to like him, but Trump on Twitter, Twitter and Twitter spaces.
It's probably going to be one of the most entertaining thing we've seen in a long time.
But that wasn't really a question.
I'm not sure he's coming back. I'm not sure he's coming back.
I think that he's going to be real sensitive to any potential derivative suit at truth if he comes back to Twitter.
Yeah.
I'm not sure. Look, I've had a few people, and Benny was on the space yesterday, said that 100% is coming back. He's had sources to say it. You know, he said it publicly. I've never said it publicly. I've heard it a few times. But it's interesting. So have you spoken to his team about it directly or never brought it up?
Or to Trump directly?
No, I've talked to him.
I've talked to him about it.
I don't know.
I've talked to members of his team about it.
I think his team really wants him on Twitter because, you know, he can reach a very large audience there.
And if you're a political consultant, you can reach an audience for free and push message and raise money and drive narrative, you want to do that.
And I've always found President Trump to be, you know, about two and a half steps behind some of his advisors on that.
I don't say behind as a criticism.
I just think he's been more cognizant of what that would mean for truth if he was posting content.
So you might get a world in which Twitter is like the...
stuff that was posted a few days ago, that it's almost an aggregator of some of this
truth content or some of this content that's elsewhere.
But I don't know that you're going to be ever getting back the hot fresh takes on Twitter
that we all became accustomed to previously.
Congressman, an audience question that we have is your position or your view on the restrict act.
So I'd love to hear it off.
I wanted to ask that same question.
I just think it's not being talked about enough.
I'm not sure what your stance is on it, Congressman.
Let's be clear.
This is referring to the TikTok.
That is the major portion of this bill.
It's not.
Yeah, and what's concerning and what's concerning about, let's get Congressman's thoughts on it,
because Congressman, the overreach of the, let's say the, I think, what, I think
I can't remember it's the, what was a committee that would have a lot of overreach on censorship
as well as a crackdown on crypto?
I can't remember the details, which was kind of the Trojan horse being,
you know, kind of painted as a ban on TikTok.
And we've talked a lot about it in this space.
We're talking about the restrict act?
Yeah, we're talking about the restrict act, correct.
Yeah, if the only tool we have to ban TikTok is the Restrict Act, then we're pretty fucked.
And you just better tell your kids and grandkids to learn Mandarin.
I think that there are a lot better ways to deal with the threat of TikTok, which I think is real, rather than this, like, orgy of government expansion of power.
Yeah, there are plenty of powers already, and Biden doesn't want to exercise them.
Congressman Tom here again.
I like any report you have on the status of the debt negotiations.
And I would think, you know, my view on this impeachment is it's politically difficult, whether it be my orarchists or no one knows who myoricus is, so I would focus on Biden.
But, you know, but I think it's necessary in light of everything that's happened.
And I would just recommend in the least a broad-based impeachment inquiry.
That would not only escalate the oversight in terms of public attention, provide some legal, I think it would legally strengthen some of the oversight, and I think it's necessary in light of the constitutional abominations and corruption associated with Biden and his gang.
But in the least, we need to cut the spending.
So I was hoping, is McCarthy holding the line?
Well, on impeachment, I agree with your position.
I've co-authored articles of impeachment against Biden on the border and against
Majorcas on the border.
And the border is on purpose.
And that's why.
Like, I don't agree with my colleagues who...
think that Biden deserves impeachment over Afghanistan
because that's just a fuck up, a royal fuck up,
but I don't think he did it on purpose.
I think that they literally are that incompetent.
On the border, this is not incompetence.
Any mid-level security manager of a casino
knows how to keep a space secure with modern day technology.
We are a country that relies on the ring door camera
And yet we leave the border to our nation wide open.
So that's on purpose, and it's why I support it.
But the sad reality, Tom, is we couldn't get impeachment out of the House Judiciary Committee today.
And that's one of the most based committees in Congress.
And so we'd have no chance.
Well, that's a leadership, that's a leadership issue, isn't it?
Well, you know, at the end of the day...
Or maybe not. Maybe it's broader.
Maybe it's broader.
Yeah, listen, here's where I'll defend McCarthy on that.
I took some pride in stripping from McCarthy
many of the powers of the speakership
because we didn't trust him with those powers at the time.
And you can't take someone's tools to solve problems away from them
and then run to them and say, go solve my problems.
Like, you know, we...
converted the role of the speakership to one that did not have the ability to dictate the
you know positive or negative effects of everyone's legislation and everyone's lives and so now you
can't you can't ask him to be like the the wizard of problem solving on the debt limit here's
here's the deal i think we're going to get i think you're going to get a spending level that is not
2022 spending levels
Certainly that is not the pre-COVID 2019 spending levels
that I wanted, but that is something
that Kevin McCarthy can call a cut
and something that Joe Biden can call a freeze.
I think that is what you get on the spending level.
I think you get work requirements not on Medicaid,
which is actually where you save money,
but on either TANF or SNAP,
but in a way that allows Joe Biden to waive a lot of those work requirements,
if he so choose.
chooses. I think you're going to get none of the repeals of the
Inflation Reduction Act that we've sought. You may get some
guardrails on the new IRS agents.
I think you'll get some features of permitting reform in HR1 that Joe Biden will claim as an extension of his infrastructure agenda and his inflation reduction act.
And I think for that, you'll get about a $4 trillion increase in the debt limit.
Congressman
Is that sufficient?
You think that will pass
and is it sufficient
for McCarthy to keep a speaker?
So Tom, right after this
will give the final
Congress will give you
that one more question after that
so I know it's getting late for you as well.
My wife's still working.
Okay, we'll keep going.
And the heat are losing to the Celtics, terribly.
So I think that it will pass with about 80 to 100 Democrat votes.
and between 140 and 160 Republican votes,
I think the coalition opposed to this will be like the squad and the Freedom Caucus,
and it will rocket through the Senate after it passes the House.
And I think that there is no serious threat to McCarthy speakership.
Doc, do you want to go with the next question?
Yes, thank you.
Nice to talk to again, Congressman.
Have you had eyes on the Carrie Lake situation?
Any opinion on her prospects or path for an appeal?
And the second question is, have you also seen two cases from Georgia returned by the Georgia Supreme Court to trial on 2020 election claims?
And finally, as to those situations...
What would your expectation be about any prospect for federal intervention to help election integrity?
And thank you.
I believe that the road of federal involvement in the election is a road to perdition.
I think that we have to do what Holder and Obama did.
I mean, after Holder and Obama left power, they decided they were going to go fight out in these states,
one secretary of state at a time, one election board appointment at a time,
one supervisor of elections at a time, and they built an election infrastructure that...
allowed them to make unilateral changes in the law.
That's not really a controversial position.
That's what they did.
And that is the terrain we have to fight on,
not believing that what, what,
the Mitch McConnell, John Thune,
or like John Cornyn-led Senate is going to help us
intervene in these matters when people don't check IDs for voting. I just don't buy.
So that's my perspective there. I'm not familiar with the Georgia litigation. I found some of
the evidence in the Arizona cases quite persuasive. And I really like Carrie Lake as a person.
I find her to be a warm and caring person. I think she would have made a phenomenal governor. But
We lost in Arizona because of an election turnout strategy that baffles my mind as someone
who's been on the ballot almost every year since 20 or every election cycle since 2010.
You know when I'm willing to take someone's vote, anytime they're willing to give it to me,
by any means that they are willing to provide it, whether that is in the mail or early or on election day and
and to depress your own pre-election day vote makes you vulnerable to election day shenanigans.
And to not see that, it's not sign that Carrie Lake is a bad candidate.
I actually think she was a really special candidate in a lot of ways,
but it shows a lack of sophistication about the electioneering process that I think really left her vulnerable.
Right, let me go to Sarah.
Sarah, you got a question?
Thank you so much.
Congressman Gates, both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have indicated regarding the January 6th defendants that they may pardon, but neither has said definitively if they would pardon.
What are your thoughts should they be pardoned?
And do you think either Trump or DeSantis will follow through and pardon the January 6th defendants?
I think if either Trump or DeSanis were elected, there would be some class of the January 6th defendants that would be pardoned.
I believe the class would likely be larger under Trump than under DeSantis.
And I think the class would certainly not include every person that has been charged with a federal crime.
Can I ask you just as a quick follow-up?
What class, in your opinion, should not be pardoned?
Well, easily, I could say that people that engaged in direct physical assaults against law enforcement should not be pardoned.
So, Congressman, let me ask you this real quick.
So you have actually helped lead debate prep for both Trump and DeSantis.
So you have a little bit of an inside view of how they, you know, act behind the scenes.
And, you know, so how do you think they would do in a debate?
I mean, do you think, you know, Trump would crush him or would, you know,
DeSantis be able to counter some of the attacks from Trump?
I think that they would both need to have a good night to beat the other.
I mean, I think that they're both incredibly bright and nimble.
And, you know, Trump is probably more interesting.
And so he would probably have the edge.
He's got more gravitas.
He's got more size.
I think he's a little bit more,
he's not a little bit,
he's considerably more charming.
But I have said to the president,
and everyone around him,
that I would not take Ron to Samis lightly in any debate.
I know how hard Ron prepares.
One thing I can tell you about both of them,
they're a little surly about prep.
Neither one of them is like real excited when it's debate prep day
or, you know, prep for a major event.
I always tend to like it when it's debate prep day.
For me, I like to get with my advisors and spar with them a little bit.
These guys acted like it was like really kind of a,
a pain to have to joust about various things.
I don't know what that says.
So Jennifer, I'll bring you in because I believe you have been following pretty close when you have been active in the education space,
talking about SEL and DEI in K-12 schools.
So, yeah, I'd love to bring you in.
So go ahead.
Yeah, thank you, Nick.
And thank you, Congressman.
So just going back a little bit to a few questions ago,
You know, someone had asked about, you know, the culture war that's going on and you had said that, you know, it wasn't really the top priority that you saw for people that, you know, the economics and education, which I fully agree. Like Nick said, I live in this education space. So I agree with that completely.
is really the top issues or some of them. So my question is, though, you know, this this woke
culture, you know, for equity and in education, mental health is absolutely devastating both
issues, economics and education. So I'm just, you know, curious on your thoughts on that and how
you can separate those because as I see it, they are directly correlated. Thank you for taking my question.
I don't separate them. And actually, as, you know, I'm a government employee on a fixed income.
So to me personally, I probably vote, you know, as much on the woke culture as anything.
I think I challenged a previous speaker when they said, well, the most important thing in the
Midwest to voters is who is a culture warrior. And my pushback on that is that I didn't believe
it was supported by data. I thought that was a,
a statement largely driven by one's personal emotion.
By the way, an emotion that I share,
I think those things are linked,
but I think that there is a class of voters that we have to win
who throw their hands up in the air about the culture wars on all sides,
and all they care about is, at my job,
are they laying people off or hiring more people?
are they shipping more are they telling me about all of the new global assets that we have in you know
India and Jamaica and where else or are they opening new branches here in our country
and I think there are voters to whom that is more significant than at school,
whether or not they tell your six-year-old that he's an oppressor.
And that's, again, I want to be clear, that's not a reflection of my views,
but it's how I assess the data about the election.
Can I have a follow up?
Yeah, go ahead, Jennifer.
Just one follow up.
Thank you.
Thank you for answering Congressman.
So also, you know, in education right now, it's all about mental health.
And I'm just wondering your thoughts on that.
Because as I see it and what I know, it is being weaponized against people.
And I'm just wondering, you know, your thoughts on how mental health should be handled in education.
Thank you.
I think we overindulge.
Big Pharma's solution set on mental health.
The solution set for mental health when I was young was my mom told me to join the baseball team.
and my solution to mental health when I didn't win as much.
And debate tournaments was my dad told me to spend more time in the library and have better arguments.
So I just don't buy that every challenge in life that an adolescent encounters has to result in a different prescription drug or a different struggle session or therapy group.
Congressman, I want to ask a general question, if you don't mind, Nick, and I'll give you the mic.
Congressman, what would you say is the biggest threat the U.S. faces over the next decade and moving away from politics?
I've got three categories personally.
The Ukraine war being an obvious one, the tensions with China and Taiwan being in the middle.
is another and obviously another one that Elon's very vocal about is the risks that AI brings to humanity.
What is one thing that keeps you up at night, not as Congressman Matt, Matt, but as Matt on a personal level?
I am increasingly concerned about transhumanism, the notion that we lack the risk.
real interactions and experiences and emotions
and that we digitize and socialize everything.
I am of the zennial micro generation
that did not grow up digitally.
And so like when Facebook first arrived,
when the internet first arrived,
like the things that happened in those spaces
weren't even real.
If you told a parent or a friend that someone bullied you online,
they would laugh at you and tell you to turn off your computer.
Now cops might show up at your door.
And I think that if you follow that logical progression
to the point where we all just become orbs that plug in,
in the long term, that worries me about the state of humanity gravely.
And the second will sound like some warmed over Reagan bullshit.
But I really do worry about the national debt and the status of the U.S.
dollar and how the entitled program programs that we've set up are going to themselves
function as a threat to the republic.
And what that means and what it's always meant for societies and,
the unidirectional nature of it, the fact that we never seem to ever be able to undergo
responsible austerity when it's called for. I mean, you know, I struggle with my weight sometimes,
and I know that after a few too many margaritas and queso nights, like I have to have some
austerity. I've got to use the stairs instead of the elevator and...
we just don't do that as a country
and it is not sustainable.
And I know how mid that sounds,
but you asked.
Congressman,
I want to ask you this.
So we do have Congresswoman Bobert coming in here in about,
hopefully about 10 minutes.
But I want to ask you,
so you were a holdout with the McCarthy vote when he was becoming speaker of the House
in January.
And it seems like you guys were able to negotiate.
You were a huge part of this.
Being able to negotiate some terms that seem to be, uh,
really effective even now in terms of holding McCarthy accountable and making sure that the
agenda is is being properly followed for the Republican Party platform is being properly followed.
Can you go over that a little bit? Like what kind of differences do you see now?
What did you force into place to make sure that McCarthy would be held accountable?
That's probably a longer list that I'm going to go through now.
I know I've talked about it on spaces before and many of the hear have listened.
But what's interesting is that during that battle in January, no less than AOC went on Alex Wagner's program and she said that the things that we were fighting for were admirable.
single subject for legislation, amendments that related to the underlying bill,
ideological diversity on the committees, 72 hours to read legislation.
And yet now, when Kevin McCarthy has functionally adopted the Freedom Caucus fiscal position,
when he's put people like Thomas Massey and Chip Roy on the Rules Committee,
and he's put people like Andrew Clyde on the Appropriations Committee,
when we've got the ability to put a rudder down into the water and steer the vessel,
the very same people go out on television who were praising us to say,
now Kevin McCarthy is...
Matt Gates is hostage.
Kevin McCarthy is beholden to the ultra-maga extremists.
And the reason I think we're winning right now is because McCarthy is the best version of himself.
Like I even do interviews now or folks on the right are like, oh, well, you know, isn't it true that McCarthy's on a leash?
And the answer is we are seeing in Kevin McCarthy more servant leadership as speaker than we ever saw from him as Mr.
minority leader or as with or in any of the roles he's had because he understands what his
limits are and that is important for him for me for all of us and i am grateful for it congressman
what what do you think right now about this debt ceiling debate do you believe that you know
is there going to be a deal is it going to favor uh yeah there's going to be a deal and it's
going to be a deal that i don't vote for
And it's going to be a deal that probably, like, the stuff that would have to be in this deal for me to vote for it at a baseline would have to be the repeal of all the Green New Deal shit that was in the Biden legislation previously.
And that's not going to be in there.
That's not even currently being negotiated.
So I'm not a yes on this legislation, but people's obvious next question is, well, then are you going to throw the bum out?
Just because you disagree with someone on legislation or even disagree with their tactics, that is not a basis for removal.
A violation of a commitment would be a basis for removal.
And you can't force Kevin McCarthy to deliver an outcome.
or deliver his head when he's not in sole control of that outcome.
And here we control one half of one third of the government.
Look at what McCarthy's done.
He's gotten us more, we will get more of a downward pressure on spending than we have gotten in any deal on the debt limit in my lifetime.
He will get us more on work requirements than we've ever gotten since Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich.
And he'll get us more on energy than, you know, certainly anyone ever would have expected during the Biden presidency.
So there's like, that's the positive.
Now, the negative is we're gaslighting like $70 trillion in debt over the next 10 years, probably.
And that gets back to one of my core concerns about.
So I want to remind the audience here.
So we are having Congresswoman Bobert join here very shortly.
I want to remind everybody, put your questions down in the bottom right hand corner.
We've been asking several countless, actually, audience questions here because Congressman Getz has been here for quite a while now.
answering, you know, totally unvetted questions.
And we really appreciate him doing that.
But I'm going to go ahead and yield to Sleman here.
Go ahead.
Yeah, thanks for that. Yeah, let me just go to Chief and then Mr. Patrick and then I've got a few questions myself.
So go ahead, Chief.
Hi, Matt Gates, huge fan.
I guess the question I would have would be about Biden's DOJ and the rampant efforts we've seen suppressing conservative speech and labeling conservatives as domestic terrorists and even worse.
We've seen this shadow campaign from them and I'm wondering how on a...
national level and on a state level we can fight back against that and stop this because it gets worse every year and we're not really seeing anyone get fired or removing their position it seems like it's getting worse and i really do thank you at least for fighting for a little bit to get more ground on mccarthy i do hope that he follows through with all their promises but
That was my question about how we can possibly stop Biden's DOJ and other law enforcement agencies from labeling us as domestic terrorist, extremists, whatever I call it.
Well, I think that the tool that we developed in January to deal with this is the Holman rule, which allows us to force a vote on the salary of any particular bureaucrat.
And there are a few we've identified not only a DOJ, but DOD, Department of Education, who've pushed some of this really egregious process.
race ideology and gender ideology, and we'll probably isolate their salary for a specific vote,
and I predict we'll probably do pretty well in defunding those at least in the House appropriations process.
The second thing I would say, and I know it sounds a little cheesy, but you've got to expose it and you've got to put it on blast in these committee hearings.
And I will tell you that does work.
Here's my evidence for how that works.
I showed how certain authors in the Department of Defense's education entity were pushing critical race theory.
And when I asked Millie and Austin about it and they clammed up and couldn't answer,
Within 48 hours, they had disbanded the entire DEI unit
at the Department at Dedella.
And thereafter, when I asked tough questions
about the snipe hunt for white supremacy
that seems to be going on at the Department of Defense
where they label anyone an extremist
who forward an impolitic joke seven years ago,
they put the guy in charge of that in a box,
limited as authorities,
and on background told even CNN
that the reason they were doing so
is that they couldn't defend
some of the actions they had taken
and the content they had created
before the House Armed Services Committee
where I asked tough questions.
So when you're not in power and we're not,
Sometimes you have to browbeat the worst features of the government in order to shame them into curtailing their behavior.
But that's not a substitute for then utilizing the power of the purse and some of the tools that we built in the speaker's race to be able to defund and defang, as I often say.
Congressman, before I go to Mr. Patrick, one of the issues that was discussed yesterday in
the interview with DeSantis was the issue of Disney, Disney pulling out of Florida.
Now an important skill that one needs as a president, both from a foreign perspective and
also with internal US politics, is the ability to negotiate.
Now, the fact that Disney are pulling out, maybe there's going to be a loss of a billion dollars.
There's going to be lots of two to four thousand jobs.
I mean, what does that say?
I mean, does it show that he's not a great negotiator or does that show that he stands his ground for his ethics and policies?
Well, it shows that Disney has converted an investment decision into a PR campaign.
Because as I think the Sanis correctly pointed out, if they were acting against their own financial interests in the Lake Nona deal, then they would be subject to a derivative suit from their investors.
And so they've, trust me, Disney has made a financial choice, not based on politics, but based on the bottom line.
And as it relates to the mouse's overall impact on Florida, it hasn't always been positive.
Let me lay some stuff out for you.
Disney has been one of the most powerful
corporate entities in the state of Florida over the last half century and it ain't always
Apple Pie that and Mother's Day that they're lobbying for it's shit like you know limiting the
ability of people to sue on their parks when they're injured it's been getting special carve-outs
and benefits in law that even their own competitors aren't entitled to it's getting a tax
corporate tax credits and loopholes
when Florida decides not to be a combined reporting state when it comes to corporate income.
So when somebody buys mouse years in Orlando, they can act as though it's the purchase of some intellectual property in Delaware.
And the consequence of all that hasn't been uniformly positive for the people of Florida.
So I think that posted up on the mouse a little bit will in order to our long-term benefit,
even if one particular development didn't get done.
Let me go to Mr. Patrick, go ahead, and then I've got a few questions.
Thank you, and a pleasure speaking to you, Congressman.
I keep it short.
What I want to know, I mean, I'm based in Florida, living in Miami,
and we all know that Governor DeSantis really won Florida by a landslide.
But I...
I, but based here and listening to people, I mean, it's still Trump land, right?
So, and I cannot speak for the whole U.S., but in my opinion, in my personal opinion, I think that Trump definitely will beat DeSantis in the primary.
So my question is, what do you think will?
If Descentes will lose this primary world, what will his career look like?
What will that mean to Florida?
And an additional question, do you think that Trump, Desantis as a VP ticket is possible
with the big egos they both have?
Thank you very much.
I do not believe that they will run together in no small part because they're both Floridians.
And I think there's some question as to whether or not electorates at the same state can serve as president and vice president.
I also think that, you know, the bad blood that is developed over the lead up to this contest.
is unlikely to be quelled between now and when the vice presidential selection is made.
And I agree with you that it's going to be made by Trump.
I think that it's not as if Trump has like a double digit lead.
He has a two to one lead.
And the.
element of Trump politically that we know is he's got a really really really high floor folks
aren't going to leave him over the news of the day like they might over someone that they're just
getting to know or just getting to like or don't have the depth of connection with and you know
when desanis is not successful in the primary
He'll return to be the governor of America's third largest state, the best state, in my opinion.
I think he'll still probably be very well liked in Florida.
And I don't think he'll be done with politics, whether it's sitting out for a few years, making some money, which by the way, he's never done.
You know, and I don't say that as a negative.
I've never made any money either.
I think that he might want to take a few years to go to the private sector and think about the presidency later in life or...
if he's well thought of in Florida after two years as the governor,
he may make the decision to run for the U.S. Senate.
He's run for the U.S. Senate before.
He ultimately got out of that race when Marco Rubio returned to it
after his own failed presidential conquest.
So I think Ronda Sandals will have a long history in Florida politics and a national politics,
and he may have to lick his wounds a little bit after the loss I predict his around the corner.
So just before I go to you, Doc, guys, we are reading the questions.
So put down any questions you have for Congressman, and we will get to those questions and read them out.
But just before we do, Doc, go ahead.
Give us whatever question you want.
Yes, Congressman, given the sort of lawfare that's being prosecuted across the board,
mentioning the earlier convictions of the J-Sixers, but I see the prosecution or potential prosecution in Georgia,
of course, the indictment in New York, and whatever the special counsel returns on the Bar-a-Lago rate and the documents there.
Right? And sort of disappointingly heard you say and understand now why Joe Biden has not been impeached.
It's just because there's not enough votes there for it. So as a practical matter, I guess your calculation is why do it.
I would suggest one reason why it should be done is, number one, it's the right thing it is. He's completely a traitor.
And I could go through why I think that is guilty of treason. That's why I accuse him of being a traitor.
Why not?
effort that, even though you may lose, as a sort of return lawfare against, you know, just bring
that the personal attacks that he's perpetrated on the Trump family and others to his door.
Why should he go and challenge that way, at least from the effort? Thanks.
Thank you.
Yeah, the way I've efforted that belief of mine is by introducing articles of impeachment
against Joe Biden as it relates to the border and Majorcas, the same.
It's not just that we don't have the votes to impeach Joe Biden off the floor,
and it's not just that we don't have the votes to impeach Majorcas off the floor.
We don't even have the votes to impeach Majorcas out of the Judiciary Committee.
There is a sense among many of my Republican colleagues, maybe even close to a majority of them, that what the Democrats did with impeachment is gauche and probably backfired against them and that if we were to impeach Biden...
or if we were to open an impeachment inquiry that didn't result in an impeachment,
that it would distract from the factual development of our existing oversight.
I don't share those views. I think he deserves impeachment. We should impeach him.
And I'd love to be one of the impeachment managers on trial in the Senate.
But it's, you know, I'm describing to you and presenting the argument of my colleagues,
one of whom said to me,
You know, Matt, we can do anything we want in the majority.
We just can't start all the horses.
An impeachment would do just that.
Hope you guys have had fun chat with me.
I do have to go.
My wife is done with work, and I'm going to depart.
So have a great evening.
Have a great chat.
Enjoy my good friend, the Lauren Bover, who's a few time zones to the west of me.
Thanks, Congressman.
Thank you, Matt.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Matt.
We really appreciate it.
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
As Congresswoman.
Congresswoman Bobert is now up on stage, so that was perfect timing.
Congresswoman, great to have you.
Thank you so much for coming.
Hello, it's great to be here.
I was able to catch the end there of Congressman Gates speaking, you know, proud to work
with him and alongside of him in Washington, D.C. there's very few.
who can really stick it through to the end
and have the American people in mind as they're fighting
and being pushed back against.
So he's a great friend and I'm really glad to serve with him.
So, Congresswoman Bobert, the topic of the day is obviously DeSantis announced yesterday that he's running for president, not really a shock to anybody, against Donald Trump. What are your initial thoughts? And we're going to have plenty of questions about that for you.
Sure. Well, I was on the Twitter space yesterday and gosh, I thought the fielded questions,
you know, most of them were more directed towards praising Elon, which I think the praise is certainly deserved.
But they were more excited just to be on there with Elon Musk than this presidential announcement.
Right.
We knew that he was going to run for president.
I have endorsed President Trump.
I'm supporting President Trump.
And I think Governor DeSantis has done a fantastic job in Florida.
And I think he needs to continue doing what he was elected to do and govern Florida.
Administratively, he's done phenomenally there.
And he needs to keep Florida great rather than just trying to jump in this.
I see him winning the primary and the general and getting back in the White House and finishing the job that he started, which was a heck of a thing that he did the four years that he was there.
Congresswoman, I want Vice President Lauren Bober. Can we get Trump?
No, no, no, no, go ahead. I'm sorry, Joel. Go ahead.
I'm just saying I would totally vote for Trump Bobert. We need that ticket. Vice President Lauren Bobert sounds great.
I'm supposed to be unbiased up here, but you know, that would be an interesting ticket, that's for sure.
But I do want to ask you, Congresswoman, you know, does this hurt, based on what you just said, you know, talking about the fact that that Ronda Santis is doing a great job as governor of Florida?
Yeah.
you know, does it hurt him to run now against President Trump?
Should he have waited until 2028?
And, you know, would you say that this actually hurts his chances of even winning in
28 should he run again?
And Congresswoman, your mic is muted.
You've got to unmute bottom left corner.
Thank you.
Perfect.
Thank you.
Sorry.
I'm driving, y'all.
I'm trying to get home.
Actually, I got a bone to pick with Mayor Pete because this is the third time I've had to drive from Denver instead of getting my connecting flight.
Thanks, Petey.
So anyhow, with...
As far as him announcing now, I was certainly hoping that he would wait until 2028 because, I mean, there would be no one who could challenge him at that point.
And I don't know if this hurts him.
It really depends on the debates and how much President Trump goes after him.
If President Trump keeps at top level and, you know, this is what I'm going to.
go to the White House and do and finish the job that I started.
Maybe it doesn't hurt DeSantis too bad, but I mean, we see how those blows from President
Trump affect people for quite some time afterwards.
So I do think that there is...
There's a potential for reconciliation after the primary.
I would hope that everybody could come together.
You look at Senator Cruz and President Trump, you know, they get along now.
So there's still hope there.
But I do want to see DeSantis run in 28.
Yeah, I'm not one of the DeSantis haters here.
I'm not I'm not one of the DeSantis as a rhino and what the heck is he doing.
I think he's done a really great job.
He's a member of the Freedom Caucus founding member.
But not right now.
This is not the time.
America is still in love with President Trump and mourning the loss of 2020.
And, you know, they're really owed four more years.
Do you think Trump's attacks on Governor DeSantis are working thus far?
I know Trump has hit him on his performance down there in Florida,
saying that he's pretty much right along there, you know,
the average Republican governor.
Do you think that is resonating with the American voter?
I guess we'll find out.
I just think that there's room enough in the Republican.
I don't know.
more of that. And that's just part of it. That's what these primaries are for to give people an option and to debate out the issues.
But yeah, I think President Trump is pretty effective when he highlights something that is going on in someone else's life and in their policies and how they're acting performing.
Congresswoman, you're cutting in and out, but I know you're driving so it's all good.
Can you hear me okay or is it cutting out for you?
Yeah, I'm through.
Yeah, sorry about that.
Now, all good, it's all good.
I think we'll just give it a few seconds.
You're back with us now.
So it'll be in and out, so it should be fine since you're driving.
Congresswoman, I'll take this opportunity to ask you a question.
I should have asked you last time you were on this space.
I want to get your thoughts.
You know, we saw the Santis announced on a separate space,
and we were streaming it here as well.
His run for presidency.
Okay.
And you've seen us cover a lot of topics.
You're with us now.
You're answering questions by a panel that's liberal and conservative.
The questions are unscripted.
I want to get your thoughts on what we're doing here with space.
Spaces in general and the concept of citizen journalism and what we're doing on this space.
I didn't ask you last time.
We asked Congressman Gates earlier.
We'd love to get your thoughts, Congresswoman, before we go to other questions from the panel.
Yeah, I think this is great.
This is the public square.
And we could come on here and ask tough questions and hopefully get the answers to them.
I love being able to communicate here with your audience.
I mean, gosh, when I first joined, we had 11,000 people.
I'm not sure what we're at now.
But, I mean, where else can you go and just get an audience like that?
Almost 12,000.
Yeah.
There you go.
And so, I mean, you guys do a really great job with your Twitter spaces and you have a loyal listenership.
I have people sending me messages all the time, you know, asking me to get on and it doesn't always work out.
But I think this is fantastic.
And credit to anyone that comes on because the questions are unscripted.
And talking about a liberal panel, let's go to a liberal question before we go to Doc.
Joa, and you've got a question for congresswoman?
Yeah. Hi, thanks for coming on.
I'm not as familiar with a lot of your stances, so excuse any mistake. I might make, just correct me.
But I've seen you're really passionate about small business. I see you also have passion about crypto.
And so I'm confused why backing Trump, because of those two, Ron DeSantis wouldn't be a better choice.
That's all.
Yeah, no, well, I heard Governor DeSantis' stance on crypto last night during his announcement, and I mean, it sounded lovely.
There's certainly things that all disagree with President Trump about, but President Trump, for the most part, his policies are right on, and they had our...
country in just such a solid place. You know, there were no wars. We had peace through strength.
Our economy was amazing. We had energy independence, energy security. We had, you know, our service
members and our military were proud to serve under President Trump. And now we have recruitment
rates that are just declining because of all of this bocism that is in there. And everywhere
that you go, I mean, President Trump did such a phenomenal...
phenomenal job on a national scale, including with small businesses.
I owned a small business while he was president, and it did great.
You know, I mean, it's unfortunate that some governors decided to shut us down over, you know,
the China virus.
That that was pretty frustrating, and I kind of...
I don't like the COVID amnesia that a lot of people have from these overreaching tyrannical governors.
I'm getting a little off track here, but kind of hit a nerve.
there's a lot of COVID amnesia where they're like, oh, it wasn't that bad or, well, it's okay, we got over it.
Look, we got our freedom back.
It should have never been taken from you in the first place.
And, you know, and there were some things even with President Trump that I disagreed on the stance with COVID, but it was new.
We didn't know.
You know, you can make all the excuses.
But, yeah.
Yeah, just all of this impacts small businesses and the economy.
And I think President Trump will do an even better job in the next year.
I want to go to Doc before. Go to Tom.
Doc, the mic is yours.
Thank you, thank you, Slayman.
Congressman, thank you for your passionate service.
And I wanted you, if you could, address the narrative that I hear from the left frequently in this room,
that one of the reasons Trump should not be selected as either the nominee of the party or as president is
It's because of his poor management personnel choices in support of certain candidates.
I do take note that there's a New York Times article out at the time of the speaker elections.
I watched you and others with great glee from the Freedom Caucus.
I noted that New York Times article mentioned that 17 of the 20th.
that were with you that day in those days were all endorsed by President Trump.
So that's question one.
And the follow up is of the policy agendas that were set in those meetings to support finally Kevin McCarthy for speaker,
which of those policy agendas do you see moving forward?
Which of them do you think will bear fruit at the end of the day?
Thank you.
Yes, thank you.
So, yes, President Trump, you know, he's got some great endorsements under his belt.
But, yeah, PR hasn't always been his greatest attribute.
He's had a lot of people who have failed him and failed our country in positions that they were placed in.
And, I mean, we could go down a list here with sessions and bar.
And, I mean, we could just go on and on.
And then even just candidate endorsements.
But it's really hard in Washington, D.C. to know the content of someone's character.
And oftentimes you just don't know what you don't know.
And there's a lot of manipulation that goes on in meetings that take place.
And people, you know, sell their soul really quick and will flip the script and suddenly...
abandoned what they said that they would stand for.
And unfortunately, I see that all too often.
We see it in the Senate all the time.
I saw it in the Senate when in the last Congress,
when it came to our Second Amendment rights
and red flag laws and all of this.
I mean, these are Republicans voting for this nonsense.
So, I mean, that's a really tough thing to navigate.
And actually, you know, I think it's really bold of President Trump to,
to go out on a limb and support some of the people that he does.
He trusts the people around,
around them and tries to make the best assessment.
And unfortunately, you just can't get it right all the time.
But us House Freedom Caucus members, for...
for the most part, we are all supporting President Trump, and he supports us and has supported us in the past.
We like his policies, and we're the ones who go to bat for him and make sure that his positions are being defended.
And then as far as the Speaker's race with all the policy issues that we had, Matt listed some of them off.
I heard that.
but I think the single subject legislation and being able to amend legislation on the on the house floor is one of the most powerful things that we were able to accomplish before if you wanted an amendment to a bill had to be done in the committee of jurisdiction we don't serve on every committee as members and so it was really hard to have input on individual pieces of legislation if you didn't serve on a particular committee and now we could go to the house floor I've passed a
10 amendments now on the House floor.
And, but what makes it all so powerful is that motion to vacate.
Speaker McCarthy's done a fantastic job.
So far, I always want to be more aggressive and do more.
But so far, he has...
held up those commitments that were made.
But that motion to vacate is what's ensuring that there's that check and balance
and keeping him in line to fulfill those commitments.
My phone cut out when Matt was telling you all about the Holman rule,
but that's the tool in our toolbox that I am most excited to use,
and that'll take place during the appropriations process.
And Congressman, thanks for joining us.
I have a question.
One thing that we find, which is in the monies.
Yeah, go ahead, man.
I said Congressman, by accident.
You missed gender to explain, man.
I thought I said woman, but anyway.
Congressman's gender neutral.
We'll just call me they.
I love that attitude.
That's the perfect answer.
All right. So yeah, so one thing you find that is prevalent within the marga base is this notion that they're generally speaking anti-war and America first.
Do you think that the fact that Ron DeSantis has not been committal about this and has changed his position will affect his possibility in the GOP race and then later the presidential race?
And I'm sorry, what position is that on Ukraine or what?
On Ukraine and Russia.
So the fact that he hasn't been committed, he's not committal at the moment and he's not
laid down his policy and position.
Right.
No, that's something that he's definitely going to, we'll need to come forward with because
I work with non-committal people on a daily basis who won't commit to actually doing
something about Ukraine and Russia or just enforcing an opportunity.
audit of the hundreds of billions of dollars that we've sent over to them and are even
wanting to send more money to Ukraine.
So, no, I do think that he needs to come forward with that.
The whole...
This is another reason why I left President Trump, because if he were in office today, this would not be taking place between Russia and Ukraine.
We would be energy independent.
We could export our clean, liquid natural gas, our LNG to our allies across the world and export freedom.
He executed so much peace through strength.
And that is what we need.
President Trump is a wartime president who...
Didn't have any wars because he was so powerful and they knew not to mess with him.
Let me go to Tom. Tom, go ahead.
Well, Congressman Bobo, good to talk to you.
Safe driving.
Tom Fitton, which is to watch.
I promise I've been called worse.
Right.
I just want the record to reflect that despite there being a debt emergency,
virtually every member of Congress and the administration has fled Washington for the next five days.
So just remember that when they tell you it's an emergency next week.
I'm sure everyone laps in Congress about it.
I'm sure I've told you this probably privately, and I'll tell you, you know, just to be sure.
I think one of the potential mistakes that I'm seeing happening now is that we aren't doing anything about the corruption.
Yeah.
And exposing it is useful and valuable.
But right now, people are being censored.
Right now, they're trying to jail Trump and other innocents.
Well, now, Tom, now, you're the judicial expert here.
What would you suggest that we do?
Well, things that you already probably support impeachment.
cutting off funding for abusive prosecutions in the Justice Department,
stopping censorship, immediately cutting off funding for censorship operations by the federal government.
So all of this is happening now, right?
And my view is if it's not curtailed, that the election will turn out, you know,
in a way that doesn't reflect the will of the American people,
our voter intent because of the corruption involved and the rigging involved that we saw in 2020.
And, you know, it doesn't mean I want a specific outcome, but I want an outcome free and clear from government interference.
And I'm not seeing any urgency to take care of that and to stop the abuse of the American people now.
I'm not saying there's not a desire.
But, you know, I do know that when I've raised this earlier in the year with colleagues of yours in the house, we'll cover that in appropriations, right?
Right.
Well, I don't think it's being covered in appropriations now either.
So that's my concern.
Thank you.
That's actually really helpful.
Part of that is the Holman rule that we've discussed and, you know,
targeting individual bureaucrats.
And, um,
And yes, in the appropriations process, I know in my office, I have dozens and dozens of appropriations requests to defund woke and weaponized programs and even agencies entirely.
And so, I mean, this is something that we're working on in the appropriations process.
That's when the Holman rule comes up.
But also, you know,
This is why we're trying to fight for some cuts in this debt ceiling and this negotiation.
Like, none of us want to increase the debt ceiling.
I don't want to fund a tyrannical, weaponized federal government.
But I also can recognize that there are obligations that are made.
And in that, you know, I would have loved to see in the Department of Education.
Right.
defunded in our debt ceiling negotiations.
But unfortunately, I have too many weak colleagues in my own party who would never go for that.
Congressman, I'm going to ask a quick question before we go to Joe.
And by the way, whenever you arrive home, we have to jump off.
You know, it's very casual.
Just say, guys, I've got to jump off.
The question is more general, and I want to make it more personal and moving away from politics.
What do you think is the biggest risk?
And I asked the same question to Congressman Gates.
What do you think is the biggest risk that the US faces?
The examples I gave is obviously the Ukraine war, tensions with China and Elon's concerns
with Elon and others concerns with AI and AI.
What keeps you up at night?
Well, gosh, when it comes to our federal government and our well-being, I mean, China is certainly a threat.
And one of my biggest priorities is American energy.
I serve on the Natural Resources Committee.
And I mean, this is imperative to our national security.
It's imperative to the debt that we're facing to lower inflation, to actually generate revenue again.
And...
and be a strong country.
So I mean, I think all of that goes hand in hand.
You know, we, I can't even count how many bills we voted on in the last Congress to support Uyghurs in China.
but that's all virtue signaling.
Well, China uses Uyghurs to mine cobalt with their bare hands.
They're using child and slave labor, and we're buying solar panels from them and cutting off
American-made energy that's cleaner, more reliable, more efficient.
So, I mean, this is one of the things that is top line for me, but I mean, you know,
you posed this in a sense that this was more
of a personal question and not political.
So I think as a mom of four boys,
as a brand new grandma, they call me Gigi,
you know, the future of our children is really
what motivated me to serve in Congress
and is what's keeping me there.
There are sacrifices that are made.
I mean, my public life has blasted every seven seconds.
And, you know, I mean, things get tough, but I've talked to my children and they know why I'm doing this, what I'm doing this for.
And if I could protect America for them, then damn it, I'm going to do it.
I'm going to fight for liberty and freedom and for us to once again be a safe, secure, sovereign country that doesn't have a southern border wide open and fentanyl flowing in and our children dying.
Right.
I want to protect the pureness of Americans' children and make sure that they have a great country to grow.
Congresswoman, let me ask you real quick, just a quick follow-up on that.
Do you think a border wall would solve a lot of these issues?
I will say I spent a week at the southern border while Title 42 was expiring.
And I went over into Mexico.
There were thousands.
I mean, tens of thousands of migrants hanging out right over the border, waiting to cross over.
And they will cross over, but obviously Texas has sent a lot of resources down there.
Federal government has not.
What do we need to do?
Right.
Do we need to put a border wall?
What would be the solution?
Yeah.
I mean, certainly a wall helps.
There's still going to be some, right?
But I've talked to Border Patrol agents, and I said, hey, I'm from the federal government.
I'm here to help.
What do you need?
Oh, that's, well, you know, the Congresswoman.
All right, that's what you're supposed to do.
So I got this pretty little pen that gives me the power to help.
Anyway, talking with these Border Patrol agents, they say, listen, we don't need infrastructure.
We don't need more resources, more personnel.
We just need the policy that allows us to enforce our job.
enforce the law and do our job.
These border patrol agents go home demoralized each and every day.
They are unable to fulfill the job that they swore to do and to secure our country just because of policy.
Secretary Majoricus needs to be impeached.
You know, I share Matt Gates's sentiments.
You know, this goes two ways.
Like I want to see these impeachment inquiries started.
And maybe we could convince our colleagues once they're started to actually vote to pass the dang thing.
But I don't want it to fall flat on its face and fail.
And then the left take that as a victory lap and say, oh, look, Secretary Majorcas is doing a fantastic job.
Joe Biden's doing a fantastic job.
Nobody wants to impeach them.
Well, I mean, honestly, these are a bunch of wusses who just care about their next election.
And that's all there is to it.
It has nothing to do with what they believe is right.
But if we just got the policy right and we're able to enforce the laws that are on the books with our southern border, that would drastically reduce the amount of illegal immigration that's taking place.
So I want to remind everybody in the audience. We're going through audience questions. We've asked countless audience questions at this point. So put your questions down on the bottom right-hand corner.
But I also want to, I guess I'll go to, oh, he's still connecting right now.
So I guess I'll jump to Joa.
Jump in real quick, Joe.
Yeah, I just had two questions, comics woman.
I would have loved to have seen a Trump to Santa's debate.
I think he's already announced that that's not going to happen.
I know you've mentioned a lot of the things you believe Trump would be stronger on,
and I agree with most of what you said.
Are there any points for voters that are single issue voters like I am where you think
DeSantis might be stronger?
Well, what's your single issue?
Me is just I want to stop CBDCs.
But that's my personal.
That doesn't mean other people don't have their own issues.
I think the only single issue that really gets people away from President Trump are people that don't like how.
how honest and brassy is.
I think that that is the one narrative that I hear that turns people off.
I personally love it, as do many of the people who are on here talking and speakers and listeners.
But if there's going to be a single issue, that would be the one that I hear of the most.
Right.
And they could easily perceive Governor DeSantis as, yeah, you know, I'll get shit done too.
But I'll do it in a professional way without calling people names, even though he does call people names.
He just doesn't get blasted for it like President Trump does.
So I think that's the one.
And then I got,
I probably got time for two more questions
because I'm going back through Silt.
Let me,
let me ask you a question and impression.
I'll probably go to you afterwards.
Congresswoman,
my question is I like to ask non-political questions
and this is more personal curiosity.
You know, I just, and without getting political again, the US just seems very, very polarized.
You know, we do these spaces, we try to bring both sides together to debate, whatever the topic is.
And whether we're covering the Israel-Palestine conflict, we're covering the Ukraine war,
we're covering the China tensions or other topics.
The most contentious topic has been U.S. politics.
The biggest economy, the biggest power in the world is the most polarized topic we cover.
Right.
I don't see that changing.
Can we change it?
Is it systematically, are we going to just be stuck?
Is that how democracy works?
Because we look like we're heading down, we're questioning the judicial system,
we're talking about corruption, the three-letter agencies are getting attacked,
right and center by both sides of the aisle recently as well.
Genuinely speaking, could we see that change, or is that just democracy in action,
we just have to live with it?
I would love to see some of that change and most of it is
is what comes out of the media.
That's what polarizes so many things
because the media is telling you what to hate
and what to fight over.
And then they're distracting,
they're distracting Americans from the real issues
or gaslighting them on who the issues,
like any crises that are coming up,
who's to blame for those?
The left is so extreme right now
and the media has convinced...
millions of Americans that it's Republicans that are extreme.
But you look at the left's policies and
It is all absolutely unhinged.
You know, they want abortion on demand and with no limits as to win.
I mean, there's, you go as far as post-term abortion.
They want a wide open border.
They want amnesty for all.
They're soft on crime.
And...
All of their positions are just so extreme, but yet they have the media and they're able to flip the script and say that Republicans are extreme or only talk about January 6th and, you know, gaslight however they want about that particular day instead of talking about the riots of 2020 with the BLM riots in Antifa.
And so I think this one, just to sum up this, this answer, I think what we're doing here tonight can help depolarize some of this by having real conversations that's not directed by a producer in a newsroom.
This is real. This is raw.
This is Americans getting together hearing different ideas and formulating their own opinions rather than being told what to believe.
And I truly respect that. I really do because you as well as Congressman Gates came up here knowing that you didn't have scripted questions.
You didn't know who was going to be on the panel and you just went for it.
And this is exactly how...
American politics should be right here.
And that applied not only that,
they didn't even request it.
Lauren or Matt didn't say,
hey guys, we don't want this person on stage
or we have to check the questions.
There wasn't even a request to do so.
And they knew how these spaces work.
Congresswoman, and you've been on here before,
Matt has been listening many times.
So I hope this pattern continues.
And I hope this does lead to change as more people
you know replace mainstream media in shaping the narrative without censorship without bias as much as possible
Jim yeah so Jim you have worked with uh you know you're actually uh you know personal friends with
congresswoman bobert uh so i want to bring you in uh you know what are your thoughts well i certainly
miss the western slope loren so yes that's the place to be
Hey, do you feel like that there's a change in the way that things are working in the house right now since all that went on in January?
And you were probably nearly the strongest opponent to the old way and advocate for the new one.
How do you feel things are gone?
I think they've gone good.
I say we're at a B.
I want to do more with what we did.
I'm tired of just admiring the tools that we fought for.
I'm ready to get some dings in them and put them to work.
There are, but it's evident that what we fought for is working because anytime something starts to go back to the way it was,
We get together as a conference or a few of us go and speak to leadership or the rules committee and say, hey, no, we made a deal in the beginning of the year that we're not going to operate this way.
And, you know, I mean, we work all closely together. And so sometimes those conversations get heated.
But at the end of the day, they recognize that.
No, this is what we agree to, and we cannot go back to that because there will be consequences.
If we revert back to Pelosi's speakership and strip individual members of Congress away from their...
of their influence and authority that they have in the house.
We empowered each individual member.
And so to take that away would be absolutely devastating.
And there would certainly be a showdown if that were to happen.
But the communication is there, this Congress, unlike it was in the previous Congress that I served in,
because it has to be.
Because 85 people can take down a bill.
Any five people can take down a rule and completely disrupt the legislative schedule for the day or the week or the month.
So there has to be this tight communication and agreements with what we're moving forward on.
So Nick.
Jim, I'm just going to give the mic to Nick.
Just a kind of final word, Jim, and I'll give the mic to Nick because Congresswoman has to jump out.
Jim?
Yeah.
No, and in years past, Lauren, when we had these fights, you know, after the Tea Party...
effort and that sort of thing. There was this massive tension between leadership and those who
were opposing what was going on. Do you see that being a little bit less this time than it has
been in years past when you're there? Yeah, clearly I wasn't there then, but I don't see that tension.
And I think Speaker McCarthy has been very gracious, communicative.
And he's, I mean, he has seemed very eager to work with us.
We'll see, you know, what this debt ceiling looks like.
I don't know everything that's going to be in this deal.
I'm hoping it's not something that I have to vote against.
I want to vote for the bill.
And so I hope that they don't give us crap to vote on.
But no, I think that leadership has been very tolerable.
Congressman, Nick, I'm going to give you the mic, and then you'll give the mic to Congresswoman to wrap up the space.
Just for the audience, we're trying to support Twitter as much as we can.
And one thing we're trying to do is the subscribe button.
And I'm mentioning it now because I've got to mention it before.
The subscribe button, I think you should all activate it on your profile.
It's a great way for you to monetize your audience.
and for Twitter to create a new source of revenue.
So we've added it on my profile.
You can go in there and subscribe to my account.
It's a dollar a month,
and we'll probably donate that money as well.
We're not doing it for the money.
And we'll run exclusive spaces with...
A lot of the names that you see on the panel today where the audience can come up and ask questions as well.
There'll be very small spaces just for subscribers.
So go on my account, subscribe, and I don't mind chilling it because it's not for our benefits,
more supporting Twitter in that case and giving value to the audience.
So I just wanted to mention this before Nick, you wrap up Congresswoman's appearance and the space as well.
The Congresswoman, I do want to say you have been one of the most influential members of Congress
this year.
There are 435 members of the House of Representatives, and you have made a huge impact this
year.
Regardless, left or right, that's a pretty objective statement.
But I do want to ask you real quick, and we do ask a lot of our special guests.
What are your thoughts on Twitter spaces in general?
And, you know, do you, is this the future of media?
What's your opinion?
It's almost the future of radio here.
You know, I mean, this is fantastic.
Look, I mean, I've been driving around in my car with you guys,
and it's just like I'm talking to my radio.
So I think these are very beneficial.
They're very convenient.
It's easy to see who's on there and click and join and hop off
when you got to go, come back if you can.
I'm so grateful that you guys host these Twitter spaces,
and I hope they continue to grow,
and that you all see a success in them, because I do.
Thank you so much, Congresswoman,
for just coming on here off the cuff
and asking questions from our entire panel.
So we appreciate it.
We really hope to have you back on suit and have a safe drive.
You got it.
Thanks, everyone.
God bless.
Thanks, Congresswoman.
Thank you.
So I think we had a good space here, Mario and Sway, man.
What do you think?
It's been 48.
Like you guys, I thought today I can skip the space and finally get some sleep and you guys could lead it.
Literally, four minutes into the space, Mario wake up, Congressman Gates, and then later
Congresswoman Beauburt will be coming on.
And another night of no sleep.
I want to give a shout out real quick just before you wrap up Mario to Joel Valdez.
I mean, you are amazing.
Beast, thank you, Joe.
amazing comms director.
Anybody would be lucky to have you.
We literally coordinated this four minutes before the space started.
I messaged the back chat and was like,
okay, start it right now.
You know, we have Congressman Gates coming on in four minutes.
Okay.
and Joel helped us coordinate that.
So yeah, I'm always trying to advance these mediums,
whether it was clubhouse or Twitter spaces.
I wanted to get the congressman in on them early
just because I knew how much of value
that they were always going to bring.
And so, I mean, you guys see it clear as day.
Who does better on these spaces?
And it's because he uses the medium.
But he just really enjoys it.
And I know that Nick and Mario are the top Twitter space leaders right now.
And so anytime they have a space, always welcome to jump in, bring another congressman.
And who knows, maybe one day we'll be hosting it with Donald Trump.
And let me make it happen, Joel.
Make it happen.
Let me add Slim Man's name as well.
I think the news is that.
I think the news is that.
Two seconds.
I'll give you the mic.
But.
Slyman as well, just want to give you a shout out for, you know, I know you stepped in early, Nick,
you've been there since the early days about Slaman, you've been moderating a lot of the spaces without me.
So shout out to you, and Joel, I've just sent you through my numbers.
The Slamans about it.
Okay, okay, go ahead.
Let's not push it now.
And Joel, I've just sent you through my number as well.
Not sure if you use WhatsApp or you just text me, if not.
I would love to jump on a call just to have a chat and also to thank you for making this space happen
and contributing to other spaces as well.
So it's a pleasure to have you.
Matt.
Yeah, absolutely.
Tom, Matt, go ahead.
I think the news from the space is that, and based on my intelligence, I think Gates is right,
this debt limit negotiation is going to end up in a place that most conservatives will be unhappy with or grudgingly accept.
So...
the question is
will we part left be happy with it
Kevin O'Leary said one thing
is that a good
outcome of a negotiation
is when both sides are unhappy
now a better outcome
is both sides are happy
but that almost never happens
so if both sides are unhappy
I would consider that a good outcome
if one side is happy and one side is not
then it's not in my opinion of fear
well i mean if it's if it's hitler and solid
i think that's probably good rule of thumb
but if it's light and dark um maybe not
uh okay
chief any any final quick words and then i'll
wrap up the space
No, it was awesome space.
It was really great to having both representatives.
It's very rare for public officials to hop out these unscripted questions
and really just hear from the people.
So, you know, thanks to the co-hosts and, of course, to Mario for putting this whole thing together.
And especially thanks to Bober and Gates for hopping on and Joel for organizing this.
Cool. Jim, final words, and there seems to be a trend of thanking me and Nick without Slayman.
So please do that as well.
It's funny.
Jim, final quick words as we wrap up the space.
Yeah.
First, I think.
Yeah.
Before Jim, sorry, I said Jim, I'm going to give the mic to Kim.
Just before Kim and Jim speak, I just want to tell the audience to make sure, oh, you subscribe, I already said that, comment.
You've done everything already.
We're going to see you again tomorrow.
But Mr.M.com and then Mr. Puff, the mic is yours.
Mr.com.
Yeah, good space yesterday about the Desantis space and then today having Matt Gates here that was really good and Lauren, great stuff to listen to, learned a lot, so fantastic.
Pass.
Yes, sir. By the way, great work, Mario.
Joel, as a former chief of staff on the hill for about eight years, dude, I know what you go through as a comms director.
It's amazing. Everyone should be following you.
It's huge. So, thanks for making all that work.
Thank you so much, brother. I appreciate that.
We got really good times coming. I actually, there's some good.
things have been happening in D.C. and it's bad and it's good. It's just interesting. We're
going to have a fun year going through the rest of legislative session. So thanks for putting
this year. And Suley, what do you think? Last quick word, what do you think will happen
tomorrow, man? We had an incredible space yesterday, an incredible one today. We seem to having
a pretty full-on week. What should we cover tomorrow and what do you expect to have tomorrow?
We'll have to get your thoughts, man. And then we'll wrap up.
Yeah, I mean, first of all, these 48 hours of
Speaker
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