Welcome to the Megyn Kelly show live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at noon east. Hey, everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.Welcome to the Megyn Kelly Show.President-elect Donald Trump's disrupter cabinet is taking arrows from all over.
The Democrats, the media, but I repeat myself, and even from some corners of the right.
There's a steady stream of negative press about RFKJ, Tulsi Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth, but no nominee has quite the amount of knives out for them that Trump's attorney general pick, Congressman Matt Gaetz, has.
Meantime, we've got a lot of fallout to the morning Joe Grifter's visit to Mar-a-Lago.Joining me now, Mark Halperin, editor-in-chief and host of Two Way, and Dan Turrentine, a former Democratic strategist.
Together, they are hosts of The Morning Meeting on Two Way's YouTube channel. The October 15th deadline has come and gone.Are you prepared for what's coming?Do you owe back taxes?Are your tax returns still unfiled?
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Mark, Dan, welcome back to the show.
Okay, so I haven't actually spoken to you, I think, since election night.And let me start with you on this, Dan, as the Democrat.I don't think the Democrats are getting it.I don't feel like they're fully
grasping with what happened, grasping what happened and how badly they went.And one of the reasons I don't think they're getting it is because whenever you have somebody pop up to say, for example, I don't think the transition was a good one for us.
Like this guy in Massachusetts, Moulton, Seth Moulton, he gets hammered, hammered.Now he got hammered by me too, because the very policies he's now lamenting, he helped put in place, but that's a different issue.
The left should be saying, hmm, maybe the man has a point.Maybe we went too far.And instead, what you're getting is attacks on him and denials from the likes of Jen Psaki.I'll show you Sat 21.
But what I worry about is that in the course of all that soul-searching, some Democrats might reach the wrong sweeping conclusions.And there are a lot of issues that fall into that bucket.
But one in particular that stuck out to me is transgender rights.
Republicans spent hundreds of millions of dollars on anti-trans ads this election cycle, including one that showed Vice President Harris talking about government funding for gender-reaffirming care for prisoners and detainees.
If that sounds like a particularly obscure issue, it is, because it applies to a tiny group of people.
Another one of the lines that ran over and over again in those ads and throughout right-wing media is this idea that America is faced with a crisis of boys playing in girls' sports.
Now, these ads created this perception that the issues of trans kids playing sports was dominating schools across the country, which is completely false.There are just incredibly few examples. of transgender girls playing in youth sports.
And when we see those examples, there isn't evidence that these kids are a threat to safety or fairness.
No evidence that they're a threat to safety and fairness.I mean, my audience knows that's a lie.Tell it to the girl in Massachusetts who had all of her teeth knocked out by a boy on the field hockey field.
Tell it to Peyton McNabb, who now has permanent paralysis on her arm, thanks to being slammed in the head by a male player posing as female.
Tell to girls in Wisconsin who saw a male come in, completely intact male, naked parading around at 18 years old in their locker room as the freshman girls are trying to take a shower.
There have been multiple instances where girls actually have been hurt.Nevermind the thousand or so where they've lost medals and additional where they've lost scholarships.And this, I'm talking mostly K through 12.
If you want to go up to the college level, it's a much greater number.I mean, so in any event, they're not getting it, Dan.Why aren't they getting it?
Yeah, I think there's two different groups that I would think about here.I think the punditry class, and Jen is a friend of mine, and we respectfully disagree on this, is going to be the last to get it.
You know, they're almost like the Japanese soldiers on the island, you know, after World War II, who are still fighting the fight.I think if you looked at elected officials, both in Congress, around the states, those thinking about DNC chair,
There's silence.If you look at the left and you look at the AOCs of the world, J-PAL and others, and just look at social media, they're talking about, we're going to defend abortion rights.OK, that's, I think, fairly safe grounds for the party.
But I think that those whose job it is to get elected, to win races, are doing a lot of soul searching right now.
And I think there is a lot of agreement that on cultural issues, the party is adrift, that what they're advocating for is not popular with large segments of the country.
I think where the fight is going to occur is more on the economic message, the kind of Bernie Sanders wing versus the Bill Clinton wing. Um, but I think, you know, those in the media are still going to pound the table.
I think some of that's they're hoping that they get ratings.Um, but I think the party knows that they need to make a lot of change.
Well, I hope for their sake that they do it.I feel like I win either way beyond this issue, because either they change and they come over to my side of reason or they don't change and they keep losing.Either way, it's OK by me.
Let's shift over to what's happening on Team GOP, Mark, because it's so funny to me.Trump doesn't have to be doing all these cabinet appointees right now, but he doesn't like being out of the news cycle and he's got two months until he gets sworn in.
So he's like, Matt Gaetz, how about, let's name Matt Gaetz right now.Not to mention RFKJ and Tulsi, all of whom I like, but as the days pass, it seems like Matt Gaetz's chances are getting slimmer and slimmer.
There was a comment by Trump to the New York Times today saying he puts Gaetz's chances at less than even for getting confirmed, which seems to be a telegraph to the public and to the Times that Trump
anticipates Gaetz failing to get the necessary votes.How do you take it?
Well, that's pretty good read.My suspicion is, as you suggested, the Times didn't say Trump himself told him that, but I think you and I know that he probably did.Matt Gaetz is a fighter.Matt Gaetz has MAGA on his side.
He's now had a very supportive tweet in the middle of the night from Elon Musk, too, actually. And you don't have to withdraw a nominee until the committee votes him down, right?
So Donald Trump can just say we're going forward and dare the committee to vote against him.
But he does have a range of issues with Republicans, including Matt Gaetz has been, you know, comic the insult, comic the, what is it, the insult comic dog, attacking Republican senators by name.
I suspect, even though he's not been super outspoken, that Mitch McConnell would never vote for him and Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, which means they have to get every other Republican senator.
And since there's a dozen reasons to vote against Matt Gaetz, if you're a Republican senator who doesn't like Matt Gaetz, It's hard to see him being confirmed, but I don't rule it out.
Because as I said, if Donald Trump sticks by him and if Matt Gaetz wants to use his very prodigious talents to try to figure out how to get 50 votes, I don't rule out that he can do it.
But Trump's comments, I think, tilted the scale for me against saying more likely than not he's confirmed.
Now, what I'm hearing is that Trump is actually speaking to senators who might be on the fence and asking, do you think he can get confirmed?
And if there's any sort of a negative projection, Trump's messaging is along the lines of, gee, that's too bad, he's a good guy.Like Trump wants him to be confirmed and Trump hasn't given up hope, but is testing the waters.
And to me that telegraphs that Trump understands The Senate is a separate body that he doesn't control and isn't maybe going to go full jihad on them if they don't get behind gates.
It's not a you will confirm him or I will primary your ass and make sure you lose your next election, Mark.Like, do you see it the same way?
Yeah, he's not drawn that line with any of them.And while Gates has clearly been the one in the news this week, on the morning meeting we talked about the controversial five.
There's four other nominees who I think if it were a secret ballot and the senators could just vote how they wanted, none of the five would be confirmed. However, there is deference to any incoming president.
Donald Trump has revolutionized the Republican Party, even with a somewhat narrow victory.He's turned the party into a multiracial working class party, which people in Capitol Hill respect and appreciate.So I think that it's possible.
that he'll stick with Gaetz in order to allow the senators to say, OK, you didn't want Matt Gaetz.Now you've got to vote for the others.
Because again, although I think they're more likely to be confirmed than not in the other four cases, they are all controversial, not just for Democrats in the media, but for some Republicans as well.And that means he can't take for granted.
He doesn't want his entire November, December into January taken up with the media's obsession with confirmation politics.
I have a master plan of my own.No one's asked me for it, but I'm going to give it because I have this microphone.I think that if Matt Gaetz falls through and yes, we've like shifted the Overton window.I get it.
You know, like what's acceptable, what's controversial, what's too controversial.That's all moved.Thanks to our debating Matt Gaetz for all his time.Then he slides in Mike Davis. frequent guest of the Megyn Kelly show.
I'm telling you, this guy, he works for this legal group called the Article Three Project, and he clerked for one of the Supreme Court justices, and he's brilliant.
He said some incendiary things early on when the lawfare against Trump first got rolling, and I was like, Who is this guy?This is crazy talk, what he's saying.The more I looked into him, the more I'm like, oh my God, this guy's actually very smart.
Turns out he's actually really smart, has a very impressive legal background, has been very, very loyal to Trump.And can I tell you guys, he comes on here and debates Dave Ehrenberg, prosecutor for Palm Beach County.
And Dave, I think would be the first to agree, Mike's been right about everything. Maybe 2% Dave got him.No offense to Dave.He's been right about a lot in a different way.But this guy is not only very, very loyal to Trump, but he is brilliant.
So I'm kind of thinking, even though he's a shitster online, right?He says stuff that gets him in trouble online.He doesn't actually, as far as I know, have true controversies, you know, like we're talking about or about Gates.
I'm hoping he slides in Mike Davis.Okay.There's my theory.Thanks to my microphone.
So you tell me, Dan, Gates resigned from Congress last Wednesday when Trump announced him, you know, saying now that I'm going to be the nominee, I'm resigning from Congress, which put off the release, the public release of the House's investigatory document against Matt Gates, which was supposed to come out this past Friday.
But that thing's going to leak in what it's like.Tick tock.Here we are at noon on Tuesday.I mean, does it have another 24 hours before it leaks?
I can't imagine it's too much longer than that.And I think the issue is not just that Democrats are dying to get their hands on it.I think to Mark's point, there are a lot of Republicans that want to see him go down both in the House and the Senate.
And so there's kind of a collective incentive amongst all these people, whether it's formally released or it's leaked.And of course, if it's leaked, you're likely to get just
pieces of it, so then people are going to say, you know, what else is there?You need to put the whole thing out.So I have to imagine that this thing comes out.And, you know, I think this isn't really a Democratic issue.
Obviously, they're in the minority in the Senate.To me, the bigger issue, and we've talked about this a little bit kind of during this week, is
Does all the MAGA influencers on the right dig in and push, whether Trump is or not, and insist that Gaetz be confirmed?Because I don't think a lot of senators want to start this next Congress going to war with everybody online.
It's really hard to go home in the grocery store, town halls, and answer your own constituents from your own party about why you're against this guy.So that's what I think is very fascinating.
Of course, for Democrats, it's one of the few instances where we can smile and watch the other side be uncomfortable.
Megan, the thing about Matt Gaetz is he's not a normal nominee under siege.
He's not normal in part because of the downsides, because the allegations against him, because he's personally insulted senators, which is not normal for most people in Washington.But he's also not normal because MAGA loves him.He's a MAGA superhero.
There's a personal and emotional bond.But he's also, and again, you don't have to be a fan of Matt Gaetz to say this, People don't realize he's brilliant.He's strategic.He's tough.He's very savvy and realistic.
And so he's not approaching this the way a lot of people would, which is, oh, what's going to happen to me?What's going to happen to my family?What lies are going to be told about me?He's dealt with this for the last many years.
And so he can go he can go into this like, you know, like a cyborg walking through a storm of fire.He doesn't care.
All right, and I have more to say on Matt Gaetz.I'll save it till next hour, because I don't want to take up all of our time going through the intricacies of the Gaetz thing, because there's so many fun things to talk about.
All right, so once again, Halprin, you're stirring the pot by saying the following about the Hegseth nomination to DoD on the two-way show two days ago.I think it was, or maybe it was yesterday.I don't know, whatever, here it is.
is he was apparently accused in 2017 of sexual assault in a hotel.I'm very much, as you know, it's a presumption of grace, presumption of innocence.
I don't really relish talking about this stuff, but it's out there as something that I heard about a couple of days ago.And I've heard other stories about him.And again, I don't wanna be provocative.
I'm just saying, there's gonna be more about his life that comes out.It's not clear to me, the campaign sort of is mixed about, they knew about it, but they didn't know everything about it.They transitioned, not the campaign.
Okay.Other stories.What do you mean?
Well, I'm not stirring the pot.I'm just reporting.I'm just trying to be realistic.Because on the two-way platform, we try to be realistic, as you do here, about not hiding things from the public that people in political and media circles know.
Megan, you know a lot of people at Fox.You know the same stories I do.Some of them are purely personal, but some of them go to questions of judgment.
And if he goes forward with the nomination, I have every reason to believe that they'll be made public in some form or another.
Do you think any of that matters for sure?I mean, I've definitely heard things in the personal lane, I would say.But I'm not convinced that can sink you in 2024 MAGA country.
No question.And Donald Trump has, to borrow the phrase from George W. Bush, he's defined deviancy down.What's acceptable, what doesn't preclude someone from being confirmed.However,
the normal assumption that the confirmation gods demand one human sacrifice, say it's Matt Gaetz, and therefore the Republican senators will vote for the rest of Donald Trump's nominees.I'm not 100% sure that'll happen.
I think the dominoes could fall in the other direction.And they could say, look, we thought Matt Gaetz was unconfirmable because of X, Y, and Z. Now we look at this other person and we say, well, he's supposed to be in charge of the
of the Uniform Military Code of Justice.He's supposed to be leading all these people.We have questions about his capacity to do the job.And now here's a slew of personal accusations.
And they could say, look, it's not fair to say Matt Gaetz couldn't be confirmed, but this guy can be.Not all the charges are created equal.I'm not sure he'll handle them as well as Matt Gaetz.
I'm not sure that he'll want to go through the same fire Matt Gaetz is happy to walk through.So if you were teaching a political science course,
And whether it's 20 years ago or now, and you said, okay, students, this person's nominated for this job and here are the charges against them.I think some of the things they'd say, no, this person would never be confirmed.
Senators couldn't possibly look their kids in the eye and say, I said that person could be treasury secretary or Pentagon chief.
I think it's unknown, but a big part of it would be, well, how they handle it and whether they show deference to the president.And I'm not sure that they will.They might, but I'm not sure.
Hegseth reportedly didn't tell Team Trump about this woman who accused him of raping her in a hotel room.
And frankly, it looks like drugging her, that's her allegation, in a hotel room back in 2017 after he spoke to a conservative Republican women's conference. And therefore they didn't catch it in their vet of Pete Hexaf because it was private.
It was just between Pete and his accuser.And that's another case.We got into depth in that one yesterday for the listening audience, and you should listen to that so you can hear the full defense that Pete's attorney has offered.
But that's another case in which the Monterey police did not bring charges.
the woman's husband and kids were asleep down the hall in another room, and Pete said he had got swept up into some woman's guilt trip over the fact that she chose to sleep with Pete Hegseth, big Fox News star, while her husband was asleep down the lane there in the hotel, and she didn't want to tell him the truth.
And by the way, the thing about that one, Dan, too, is The cops chose not to prosecute.If they had found date rape drug in her system, because she says she had a date, a rape exam the next morning, they 100% would have prosecuted him.
So to me, that one smells and it smells bad.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's always hard when there's allegations and then the authorities don't bring charges.You know, in fairness, if it was a Democratic nominee, we'd be saying, you know, pointing to the same thing.
I think in Hegseth's case, the challenge really is, look, you've got two wars going on.You could have a third, you know, any day over Taiwan.It's the largest of all the departments.I think there's over two million employees that you're overseeing.
And it's not entirely clear that he is qualified.To me, and I know to certain Democrats, Noam, RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, it's policy differences, right?
I mean, just say that Kristi Noam, who's been a two-term governor and a member of Congress, isn't qualified to run DHS, or that you disagree with how Tulsi Gabbard views certain conflicts in the Middle East.
Peg's that there's less of a paper trail of both management and, you know, people have talked about his involvement with veterans issues, which is commendable, but he's not trying to be the head of Veterans Affairs.
And so I think, you know, there's both the lack of substance, which I think makes some Republicans nervous.And then there's all of this stuff that certainly, while there's no charges pressed, is a political headache right now.
So I don't think any of that stuff is going to stop him.I think most Republicans will say he's not going to make them read white fragility.He's not going to talk about white rage.He's not going to allow.
I'm a trans person and the daughter of two lesbians in the promo reels that are put out for recruiting.And that's good enough for them. He served as a combat vet in Iraq, in Afghanistan.He served his country honorably after 9-11.
He's written books about it.He's toured.He's spoken about it.Management, no, that's not something you do at Fox News, but he has an academic pedigree the left would like, and so would these elite Republicans.
I don't think any of that, what you just said, will wind up hurting Pete.I think it, if anything, it will be something that has yet to come out.I don't even, I don't even know, I don't think this allegation about Monterey is going to do it either.
Though I will say now there's a little bit more today as CNN's Key Young-Lai briefly met with the Hegseth accuser, apparently, and offered the following observation in SOP5.
with the alleged victim.And we did speak with her, but it was very briefly.We do want to stress that CNN is not identifying this woman because she is the alleged victim of a sexual assault.
But in that brief conversation, she was visibly distraught at the mention of Hegseth's name.She said that she didn't know what she could say.And before saying anything, she had to consult with her attorney.
And we have not heard back from her since that first meeting that I had with her.
So the bad thing that could happen for Hegseth, Mark, is the woman comes forward, right?She had an interaction with CNN and she does the tearful thing and she's perceived as credible by enough people that they say, I can't do it.
I mean, that is the thing that almost happened, but didn't quite happen with the Doug Emhoff accuser, right? came out anonymously.She wrote a first person thing with the Daily Mail, but she never came out like face and voice on cam.
Well, again, every case is different, but Christine Blasey Ford came forward and she didn't derail Brett Kavanaugh.So I don't think that one situation, no matter what she does, is just positive.
She took her best shot, man.
I will.I'll say this.If Pete Hexeth had his exact resume, but wasn't a Fox host and a friend of Donald Trump, I don't think he'd be plausibly considered to be Secretary of Defense.
And I don't know that being friends with the president-elect and being a weekend cable news host upgrades you to qualified in the view of traditional qualification or in the view of most Republican senators.
So again, I think he could handle some of these things in isolation.But if they're inclined to vote against him because of his lack of management experience and his non-traditional experience,
Again, I don't think he'd be nominated if he weren't a Fox host, and that's just not a qualification to be secretary of defense.Then I think there's a chance he'll go down.It's just, it's not.
Now, I will say one of the things they're looking at quite closely is having strong deputy secretaries, a strong deputy attorney general, other people who can handle more of the traditional management function.
And that's, and that's potentially a reasonable model. But I think the senators are gonna wanna know what the package looks like and be confident.And I'll say one more time, it depends on how the nominee handles it.
If they're willing to fight, if they're skilled in front of the committee, if they have skilled people speaking on their behalf, What you can withstand is not predetermined.
You can withstand anything if you handle yourself well and convince the American public and the senators that you still should be confirmed despite either allegations or proven facts against you.There's nothing that can't be survived in this era.
being the host of a Fox show will help him.
He's a professional talker.And Tulsi is well set to handle that.RFKJ obviously has done nothing but take criticism for a decade plus.
So of the nominees, the controversial ones, you know, the disruptors, who do you think is the most likely not to make it?Mark and then Dan.
I completely agree. Yep.I think Gates is, I think, as we've talked about here the last few minutes, I think that the MAGA world is going to dig in on Gates, even if the president is a little less.
And I think RFK Jr., like if I were the Democrats, I would tread very, very carefully.I think his vote was material.
I think we hear it on our show, the number of people who were his supporters, who were previously Democrats up until a few years ago and have left the party in kind of frustration.
And I think Noam and Gabbard, it really, they're substantive disagreements.There's no real issue of whether or not they're qualified.And those, to break off four Senate Republicans in that instance would be surprising.
But that's a very interesting rationale that the Democrats are going to need to get behind some Dems, the RFKJ for HHS, because they're voters like him.
Oh, absolutely.I mean, you heard Cory Booker yesterday came out and talked about support for RFK for what he's trying to do in terms of food.And Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado, came out about not mandating all vaccines.
I think there are a lot of Democrats who now realize it was a huge mistake to go to war against RFK. and they feel like they drove him into the open hands of Donald Trump.
And kudos to Trump for recognizing the opportunity, finding a way to work with him, and really making him feel comfortable on the Trump campaign.And that's what winning campaigns do.It's so true.
And he went, Dan, you remember, he went to Kamala too and said, do you guys want to talk to me?And she was like, no.
It's unbelievable.I mean, it's just, it is unbelievable that the party did this.And look, I understand, I worked for Hillary Clinton, not on her 2016 campaign, but a lot of my friends did.
And they will go to their graves that Jill Stein and the third party candidates cost her the election.And so I think going into this campaign,
the operating principle within the party was seek and destroy all third party candidates that may in any way, shape or form negatively impact the race.But, you know, RFK has enough voters that they were meaningful.They were material.
And they they didn't just like RFK.They dislike the Democratic Party.They're disillusioned with it.They're angry.And that is a problem.
Here's it's a perfect example of the gap.Sorry. It's a perfect example.It's a perfect example in the gap between the Democrats in the media and real people.
You didn't read any stories in the dominant media about the risks Democrats were taking by driving Bobby Kennedy out of the party, by trying to keep him off the ballot.You didn't read any stories about how that was anti-democratic.
But real people saw that.Real people who come on two-way say, I might have voted for the Democrats, but what they did to Bobby Kennedy was so outrageous.
that not only turned them against the Democratic Party, but I believe it built Bobby Kennedy up into kind of a superhero in their eyes.
And that's why his endorsement of Donald Trump, in part, why it was so impactful, because he was seen as an example of the extreme intolerance of Democrats towards dissent and the Democrats' extreme effort to protect first Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris from competition.
They also wound up downgrading the Democrats as protectors of democracy after what they did to RKJ.So like they shot themselves in the foot on one of their own favorite issues.
The other thing about RKJ that I like and I'm excited about is there's talk about him taking Dr. J. Bhattacharya of Stanford and putting him atop the NIH. be so amazing, you guys.
There are still a lot of people like yours truly who are very ticked off about the COVID insanity.
And Dr. J. Bhattacharya, with much risk to his own reputation, he was beloved in these elite circles, came out and pushed back at a critical time, and they tried to ruin this guy.Fauci tried to ruin him.
And that's reflected in the emails that got released thanks to the Republican House.So it would be wonderful to see that guy, who's not anti-science, he's pro-science.
He's the one who didn't let an ideological agenda lead him into just accepting what was being spoon-fed to these guys, to see him elevated. And that essentially would also be RFKJ saying, I realize I am not a doctor.
I don't need to be a doctor to run the NIH.Kathleen Sebelius, is she a doctor?Anyway, it's him basically saying, but I will find smart doctors where they need to be to run the medical facilities that Health and Human Services oversees.
So I like that whole thing.Okay, let's talk a little bit about media. your friends over at Morning Joe embarrass themselves this week.Mark Halperin, embarrassed.They haven't been the same since you no longer appear on that show.They need you.
You were the magic glue to keeping some sort of sanity over there.We talked to the audience yesterday about them going out there and they went to Mar-a-Lago and they bent the knee. No one's happy about it.
I mean, imaginary people that Joe Scarborough talks to are allegedly happy about it, as he keeps telling us each morning.No actual people from the left or the right.
The right doesn't want this reconciliation and can't believe Trump even took the meeting and is in no position to give them any quarter.
And the left, you've got the lunatics like Jennifer Rubin, who's an MSNBC contributor, she's a true loon, out there pushing for a boycott now of the MSNBC morning show, of the network that she's a contributor at, that's paying her salary.
So, they came out, they said their thing, and now they're getting some people being honest about how controversial it was, like your friends John Spicer, who said this on the morning meeting yesterday.
Here's my problem with this.Joe says afterwards, we told him we opposed him on this, we opposed him on that.First of all, I still say get in the back of the line.
Phone calls, there are people who fought hard for President Trump, they get to shake his hand first.Not these people who spent seven years, as Mika said, trashing the guy, lying about him, defaming him.This was a pure transactional ratings play.
This was Joe Scarborough realizing that his ratings are down 40%, 49%.Comcast wants to spin them off and them worried about whether or not they're going to continue to afford their place on wherever it is, Nantucket, Palm Beach, all those places.
So I was frankly disgusted by this.
Spicer with a truth bomb.Mark Halperin, where's he wrong?
All right.So first of all, there are, they are my friends, so I will not make this personal.You and I have some friends in common and there's some people we differ about.They are my friends.
I wish that before the election that every MSNBC host had said, let's see, Trump may not win.We don't think he's going to win, but he's going to get like 47% of the vote.
So maybe we should think about basically half the country thinks he's the right choice.What should that mean for how we talk about him, how we talk about his ideas, how we talk about his supporters?
I think that should have been done for months rather than waiting till after the election, because I think they have put themselves in a position now where people on the left are angry that they're normalizing Trump.I say the people on the left.
I'd say that 50% of the people who voted for Trump helped normalize him, probably more than Joe and Mika have.And the people on the right are resentful that they're doing it.Here's the reality for me, though.
Donald Trump was very gracious about the meeting. Donald Trump took the meeting.He did an interview with Fox where he's very gracious about it.
And although it's easy to tally up points and to raise questions about people's motives, I think it's better for the country to have communication with the president-elect by everyone in the media.He should be held accountable.
And I hope people on the left will say now, on a consistent basis, Policy disagreements, let's discuss them.But demonizing the person who won the popular vote and the supporters of that person is just not a good idea.
It's not consistent with the kind of country we should be.
I have a little prediction for you.This won't last. I've been through this before.The ratings always tank for the cable channel that was most behind the losing candidate.Fox News in 2012 was a bloodbath after Romney went down.
Our ratings went off a cliff.I remember being in the meetings.Even Roger was in a panic at that moment. They came back to heights we had never seen before.
And the way that that happened was Barack Obama started actually governing in his second term and doing a bunch of controversial things.
And then Fox got chugging again and wound up figuring out that it's actually better for their ratings to be in the opposition.Now, that may or may not be true in the era of Trump, where he just lifts everybody.
But in any event, my point is, they're not going to get the same returns by being fair and balanced about Trump. even though they desperately want access to power.I believe this is why they went there for two reasons.
They desperately want access to power.That's why they licked Joe Biden's boots, then quickly licked Kamala's.Now they're licking Trump's. Because they can't stand a world in which they're as irrelevant as they are.Don't believe me.
Look at their ratings and the voters who ignored their claims of Hitler.So that's one of the reasons why they did it.But once they start chugging again, their core viewership is very left.That's who watches that show.
That's why you've seen Joe Scarborough migrate out of the Republican Party.Now he's so-called independent, and he's obviously a Democrat.He's not really independent.What Republican is he voting for?
Anyway, and the machine will do what it does, which is force them to continue to go to the left.This thing veers to the left.All media veers to the left, especially MSNBC. All their cocktail parties, all their friends will veer them back to the left.
They will get absolutely no points for saying anything nice or fair about Trump, and they will do what they've been doing for nine years, which is back on the bashing train.Dan, am I wrong?
Yeah, I mean, I think it to me, it's embarrassing that the party, the Democratic Party and folks on the left are bashing them as like, how dare you talk to Trump?How dare you kind of insinuate that you're going to modify how you view him?
I mean, to Mark's point. What is still missing with a large segment of the party is to step back and ask, why is Donald Trump so popular?What is his secret sauce?
Why is he making inroads into literally every single constituency that there is, you know, demographically, geographically? And how can we understand this better and either try to co-op it or short circuit some of his progress?
Instead, there are still parts of the party, Jennifer Rubin and others, that literally just say, dig in.We are right.They're wrong. History is going to prove it very soon.And like, ha, ha, ha, we'll be right in two years.
And to me, that's just basically idiotic.And so I hope, you know, whether Joe Scarborough and Mika in the long run will prove to be successful, you know, courting Trump, obviously, I think you're much more likely that they will not be.
But the party has to stop saying these black and white, we're right, they're wrong speeches to everybody.
I have a message for Joe and Mika.You have no influence.This election proved it.Look at your ratings.They're in the toilet for a reason.If you had any influence whatsoever, would this have been such a blowout?
You thought you could persuade the electorate to stop him.You failed.You should spend some time in the bath on long walks, on a horseback, thinking about that reality, and then, then reevaluate.
You're still dealing with the trauma of realizing how irrelevant you are.You should really just soak that in and then come up with your game plan.You shot from the hip.It wasn't a good idea.It didn't please anyone, and it didn't make you look good.
That's my own take.Dan and Mark will be excused for having sat here through a rant against people they like, or at least Mark does.Okay.On the subject of Democrats dealing with the loss, Here's one of the things that's bothering me.
Those people who are coming out as though, I tried to warn them.I saw this coming.Nobody listened to me.Or equally bad, almost.God, she was annoying, wasn't she?God, she stunk.She really wasn't good.
where there are people like you, Dan, who came out before the election and sounded exactly the way you sound right now, right?Like able to defend your party where it's appropriate and able to poke holes in the strategy.
But now what we're getting from these leftist commentators is I was the whisperer.I was the Trump voter whisperer.Listen to me explain to you now all the things that I secretly knew.
I think the Morning Joe crew is in this mashup, but take a look at this sot in 23.
Every Democrat that we have ever sat down with dinner with over the past five years, who have kids that go to colleges, say their kids are afraid to speak in class because they'll be canceled.Now, if any of you, which camera?
Give me a camera to look at.Boom!I'll look at that one.If any of you out there say, oh, that's just like a conservative, white, Southern guy, da-da-da. That's what you're losing.
As we've said on the show a thousand times, Democrats should be smarter on the women's athletics thing.85% of Americans oppose men transitioning after puberty and competing against women.
The election that we just had was a repudiation of the status quo, an overly regulated system that is no longer responsive or delivering for the needs of the people.
When you did see stories about Trump supporters, they were often mocking them.They were interviewing them.They didn't understand the issues.They were kind of making light, making fun of them.
Like, why isn't Kamala Harris going out and talking to more factory workers?Why isn't she like putting on a hard hat and really talking to people, everyday people, a little bit more?
So that's Katie Couric saying they mocked Trump voters and they shouldn't have done that.She was on Bill Maher's Club Random podcast April 14th saying this, Sat 16.
And I feel like, to your point, Bill, that socioeconomic disparities are a lot, and class resentment is a lot, and anti-intellectualism and elitism is what is driving many of these anti-establishment, which are Trump voters, are anti-establishment voters.
I think that is a huge problem that we have to address.I mean, globalization and, you know, the transition from an industrial to a technological society.
I mean, I, and I don't know if you've ever been jealous of some, what someone else has or resentful.It is such a corroding and bitter, almost bile feeling.
They're anti-intellectual and they're bitter and jealous.But now she's going to be the whisperer of the Trump voters, Mark, and bring us home to try to understand them better and condemn people who were too judgmental and dismissive of them.
Megan, I'm a little bit sad that you left Brian Stelter out of that mashup. because I think he's been amazing in writing.I was curious to see how he would deal with analyzing the media coverage.
And he wrote this long thing that was devoid of the actual problems.And I think it goes back to fundamental credibility and awareness.They've been pretty muted since the election.
But until they come clean on their role in the conspiracy to cover up Joe Biden's mental acuity decline, I think it's just fundamental that it's going to be a challenge to have any credibility.And so far, there's been nothing on that.
Until they come clean on how newsroom, the actual qualitative and quantitative analysis of how negative their coverage was towards Donald Trump and his voters, it's very difficult to have credibility.
It is so much like what happened in 2016, where, as you said, they want to say, well, Kamala was a bad candidate.Hillary was a bad candidate.
You know, they don't want to address the real issues here, both in terms of the Democratic Party and media bias.So I hope it's better.I hope somehow it gets better.But the leading newsrooms have done nothing to account for the failure.
And I suspect it will continue and they'll just go back into resistance mode.
I think that's absolutely right.It's the nerve, Dan.They're anti-intellectual.And now she's like, I really wish people had just paid more attention to them.And she's like, oh, now she's like Kamala Harris with her word salad answer.
She endorsed Kamala Harris.She openly endorsed Kamala Harris. Okay, I don't remember you being honest about our word salad.Some of us endorsed candidates and also were able to be honest about their problem areas.That is what happened.
If you want to go into opinion journalism, you must continue to thread that needle, or you should just declare your connection to journalism totally dead.
Yeah, this one hits home for me because this was a tough last year for me as I started speaking out more kind of in the media as I joined the morning meeting.
I got a lot of feedback from Democratic friends when I started speaking out, going all the way back to March, that Joe Biden's age issue was real and legitimate.
Talking about the inroads that Trump was making with Latinos and Black men, because there was lots of data publicly and privately that he was making these inroads.
And when Kamala Harris got the nomination, I said after her convention speech, I thought she missed the mark, that she was not filling in the details of what she would do for people.
I said after the debate that I thought that while she might have scored a lot of points against Trump, she ultimately lost the debate because she didn't say what she would do for people.
the number of Democrats on the Harris and Biden campaigns at the DNC and just in general, who sent letters or emails and texting, you're not being helpful.What are you doing speaking honestly like this?
And I just said, look, guys, if you have data that shows I'm wrong, I will trumpet it anywhere and everywhere.But everything I'm seeing is that she is struggling and Biden was struggling.
And so, Megan, to your point, that all these people are now coming out and say, oh, well, we knew this and we've been talking about it.And it was you know, they are right.
It was obvious for all to see her weaknesses and frankly, the party's weaknesses. But there was such a collective.If we give an inch, it's helping Trump.
And we can't dare do anything that doesn't prop her up to the point where I used to joke with people.Do you want me to be Baghdad, Bob, and say the sun rises in the West?The answer is yes.Yeah.
I mean, if that's and we we have a line on the morning meeting that if that's what you want, there are plenty of places for you to go to get that.But it's just not who we are.And so, look, I hate that.I mean, I wish I was wrong.I wish Harris had won.
But, you know, it does kind of really get me.And I guess I should just laugh that all these people are now saying that they knew this was coming all along.And the last thing I will say is it drives me nuts.People who say this was not a winnable race.
I believe it was absolutely winnable.I believe if you looked at the data, that a lot of people didn't like Biden or Trump.When Harris came into the race, there was general openness to her.
And if you watch focus groups between July and October, there was excitement for Harris.There was kind of a like, okay, when am I gonna hear from you about what you're gonna do for me?Then there's frustration with Harris after that debate.
And by October one or so, it turned to anger and voters threw their hands up.
And you can just see the evolution of the data to the point where, as we talked about the last few weeks of the campaign, I think we did with you and on our show, I don't know how she's going to now turn this Titanic, right?
She had all these opportunities and she lost.But I never heard once on MSNBC or the New York Times or any of these places until maybe the last week.The New York Times ran that story like over a weekend.
She's having problems with black men and and Latinos.But Nobody was willing to say this.Sorry, that was a little bit of a rant.
No, you're exactly right.I want to support you with that.That Democratic official who's been making the rounds, she was on with Richard McEwitt, News Nation.She was on with Will Kane on his podcast.Lindy Lee, I think her name is.
She's been very upset about all the donations that she wrangled for the Democrats and for Kamala. with promises of, you know, a much better outcome, or at least, you know, best guesstimates of a much better outcome and the reckless spending.
And she said what you just said.She said, if you are going to take a position along the lines of what you just said, that might be more nuanced.
You can't get booked on MSNBC or CNN, that they will cancel you because they only want to hear fluffing, you know, which is not a nice term, but that's kind of what is expected.I'll give it to you in one second, Mark.I just want to say this.
Katie Couric now, who's having the come to Jesus moment.Here are some of her show names prior to the election.Gwen Walls on why this is the most important election of our lifetime.Why Donald Trump is a fascist and what that means.
All about abortion and what's at stake in the 2024 election.How to save democracy with Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor of Pod Save America, left-leaning Obama guys. You know, hashtag part of the problems, Katie.
You know, you might try having on a Republican or somebody who actually does understand Trump.
And even now, Mark, the solution over on places like ABC where you used to work is, oh, my God, we got to find an actual Trump supporter and put them into the seventh chair on The View.That'll do it.Talk about like a Band-Aid on a cancer.
Yeah, I mean Sean and I and Dan laugh at the Sunday morning public affairs shows.They still are having a bunch of Democrats and then one anti-Trump Republican on their roundtables to analyze the election.
It's really good for the country, I think, that he won the popular vote because it takes away the Democrats blaming not Kamala Harris but the electoral college.
But I think that the problem is, again, you cannot go around saying fascist and Hitler and then turn 180 degrees all of a sudden. They're going to have to come to terms with what's before them.
But I wish they would be more open to booking and then not book those people and then gang up on them on the roundtables, right?
That's not going to solve the problem if you book the people and then simply attack them for supporting someone who they will continue to call names.
or shame them the way Abby Phillips did over on CNN with Shermichael Singleton, who is trying to refer to trans girls, which is not a thing, as boys.No, no, you will not disrespect them.It's like, they don't get it.
It's just too massive a problem I've maintained all along.It cannot be extracted from the party.I'm telling you, Dan, you people are gonna have to do what we did to the never Trumpers.
They must be excised from the party, removed and put over here and then ignored, or you have no future.Great to see you both.Say hi.Thank you, Megan.To Sean Spencer for me too.Thank you.Thank you, Megan.
All right, we'll be back with that additional piece of data I wanted to give you on Matt Gaetz and then Richie McGinnis, author of a new book, Riot Diet.For those of us holding our breath for the past several months, We can finally exhale.
Doesn't it feel like that?Work can finally be done on the major issues this country is facing, and it will be.One of the most significant?Our national debt.
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Protect your savings with Birch Gold.Text MK to 989898 and claim your eligibility for free Silver today. Okay, so I wanted to follow up on Matt Gaetz.
It looks like, I mean, truly, we're going to have this leaked report from the House Investigatory Committee at any moment.
Just before we came to air, there was a report that it had been hacked already off of, I guess, the congressional website or some website, and that it's going to be put out.
And that they saw in the hacked alleged report that among those who testified before the House was a woman who though she is no longer 17, says she was 17 at the time she had sex with Matt Gates and that
There was money exchanged by Matt Gaetz and either this woman or other young women who were 18 or so.So there's two allegations, that he had sex with a minor and that he paid for sex with 18-year-olds and possibly with the minor as well.
That he allegedly trafficked the minor by moving her across state lines. and that we're going to read about all of this, including the firsthand testimonial from this woman who is no longer 17, but was at the time.
The allegation was that he had sex with her when she was 17.Then he learned after the fact that she was 17.Then he stopped the relationship.Then it resumed after she turned 18. Now, the media is in overdrive trying to prove all of this.
What you need to know is that the DOJ was unable to.The DOJ walked away from any criminal charges against Matt Gaetz because it did not feel that it had credible witnesses.
And I'm going to circle back to that after I show you what's happening in the media.And I am making no representation that Matt Gaetz will make it through.You heard the guys from Two Way.They think he actually might.
We talked about the report in Politico.I want to correct myself.It's not that Trump spoke to The New York Times and said Gaetz has a less than even odds of being confirmed.It's that The New York Times reported that Trump has indicated that.
So it's a little different.Trump didn't say it to them directly.But they're all reporting is that Trump also wants a fight.And he's been asking Senate Republicans to at least give his pick a shot, arguing that Gates is just the man to fix the DOJ.
That was per Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican from North Dakota, to reporters on the Hill yesterday.So he's still in the mix, this Matt Gates, and the media is not going to take this sitting down.It's definitely not.
So we will go through what they're putting out there for public consumption.Um, where did I do it?Oh, I got here.My, my sound bites there.They're everywhere.
There's a lawyer named Joel Leopard and he represents two young women who are not the one time 17 year old in question.
but they're somehow connected to her and are claiming to have been at some of the parties that she and allegedly Matt Gaetz attended.And this guy went on ABC News on Monday and said the following, stop one.
how many times, how many parties your clients went to and had sex with Representative Gates?
Well, not all of them were parties, but approximately perhaps 10 times, 10 to 15 times I think was the testament about the number of times they might have had sex with Representative Gates.So Mr. Gates paid them for the tickets to
to come to New York for the trip.He was there with another female individual already.And so they went to Broadway shows and things like that and met him, went to the Fox News studio, I believe.And they went to Broadway shows while they're there.
What show did they see?I'm just curious now.
I had not even thought about that.
OK, so that's him saying he's got two 18-year-olds, or they were at the time, who were at drug-fueled sex parties and that they had sex with Matt Gaetz, who brought them to New York City for this and to watch his Fox News appearance and to go to a Broadway show.
That's the allegation. The only thing in there that would be illegal, if true, is if he paid for sex, because these two girls he's representing, he says, were of age.Drug-fueled party doesn't tell me anything.Did Matt Gaetz take illegal drugs?
Did he ply women against their will with drugs?I didn't hear that.So, so far, what I hear is potentially solicitation of prostitution.Then he went over to CNN and said more.Listen to SOT 2.This is about the 17-year-old.
When she was walking out to the pool area, she observed to her right Representative Gates having sex with her friend, who was 17 at the time.And on this question, she's absolutely sure?
She's absolutely certain that she observed seeing her friend and Representative Gates having sex against what she described as a game table of some sort.
Does your client have any idea as to whether Matt Gates knew?
She testified to the House that Representative Gates did not know her friend's age at the time they had sexual intercourse.
And when he found out about her age, that Representative Gates stopped having sexual intercourse with her and he only started the sexual intercourse interactions later on when she turned 18.
So then it continued again?
Okay. So there he is saying that Matt Gaetz allegedly was seen by his clients having sex with a then 17 year old.The age of consent, I think in New York is 17.The age of consent in Florida is 18.I believe they were in New York, but
I guess we'll, we'll get the full vetting of exactly where they were and when, uh, in any event, uh, if it's, if they were in New York as the, as he alleged in that first appearance, these, this person would have been at the age of consent.Uh, okay.
Then here's more from Joel Leppard, the attorney for these other two who talked about payment and how it was handled on CNN on Monday.
he had paid also your clients for sex, he was paying for sex?
The testimony before the house was yes, that Representative Gates paid my client, both of my clients for sexual favors throughout the summer of 2017, all the way to the beginning of 2019.
Those were primarily through Venmo and PayPal payments.There was one payment through Representative Gates' adopted son through his PayPal.
Nester, the adopted son.Payments would come there too.
There was only one payment that was tested by two.
So that's some of what we're likely to hear about, read about when we see this leaked house report, which undoubtedly will hit the presses shortly and we'll take you through it.
But so far we have him allegedly transporting a minor, a 17 year old across state lines for the purpose of having paid sex with her. And possibly, if any of that happened in Florida, she would have been under the age of consent.
She would have been 17 when the age there is 18, which presumably would have been why in this story he stopped having his relations with her until then she hit her 18th birthday.Those are all allegations.Matt Gaetz denies them all.
Now, that sounds pretty bad.Certainly doesn't sound like our next attorney general.However, If it's so bad, and if you've got all these witnesses ready to testify, why were charges not brought?
And that leads me to, first of all, a great report by Molly Hemingway of The Federalist, which hit two days ago, November 17th, and you should definitely go to The Federalist and read it.
House probe into Matt Gaetz relies on witnesses DOJ found lacked credibility.But she links in that piece to a Washington Post piece from September 23, 2022, and when it was updated.Oh yeah, okay, so that was the date it was hit and updated.
And that is the Washington Post explaining why the DOJ did not wanna charge anybody, Gaetz, in connection with any of these allegations.And the headline there is, career prosecutors recommend no charges for Gaetz in sex trafficking probe.
And I wanna go through it with you. Okay, this is before they had officially decided not to bring charges, but they did officially decide not to bring charges shortly after this.
They say, career prosecutors have recommended against charging Matt Gaetz in a long running sex trafficking investigation, telling Justice Department superiors that a conviction is unlikely in part because of credibility questions with the two central witnesses.
It is unlikely federal authorities will charge Gaetz. in connection with this probe, which focused on his alleged involvement with a 17-year-old girl several years earlier.Gates, 40, has repeatedly denied wrongdoing, saying he never paid for sex.
He has also said the only time he had sex with a 17-year-old was when he too was 17.
Investigators set out to determine if the congressman paid for sex in violation of federal sex trafficking laws and have examined his dealings with the then 17-year-old.People familiar with the matter have said.
Earlier this year, a federal grand jury in Orlando heard testimony from associates of Gates' including an ex-girlfriend.So not only did the DOJ start looking into this, they convened a federal grand jury and it does not appear that
any true bill was returned or that that went anywhere.
They write in the Washington Post, the ex-girlfriend, the 17-year-old, was among several women on a trip Gates allegedly took to the Bahamas in 2018 that has been of particular interest to the investigators.
The 17-year-old at issue was also on that trip. though by that time she was already 18 or older.
She's been a central witness in this investigation, but people familiar with the case say she is one of two people whose testimony has issues that veteran prosecutors feel would not pass muster with a jury.
So the 17-year-old at the crux of all of this has been deemed not credible. by the DOJ, by career prosecutors there.The other is a former friend of Gates's, Joel Greenberg.And you're going to need to listen to a thing or two about Joel.
He's a former tax collector for Seminole County, Florida.You know, Gates is from sort of the panhandle area of Florida.He, Greenberg, pleaded guilty last year
to sex trafficking of a minor and a host of other crimes as part of a cooperation deal with authorities.So this guy was on the hook criminally and then started talking about whom else he could give up to the authorities.
Greenberg was first charged in 2020 with fabricating allegations and evidence to smear a political opponent.He made shit up to hurt someone who was opposed to him in politics.
That's what he was already charged with and dealing with when he pleaded guilty to sex trafficking of a minor. Prosecutors continued to investigate and added charges to Greenberg's case.
He ultimately agreed to plead guilty to six criminal charges, including sex trafficking of a child, aggravated identity theft, and wire fraud.Sounds like a very upstanding citizen.
In exchange for his guilty plea, prosecutors agreed to dismiss the other 27 counts against Greenberg and recommend a term within the federal sentencing guidelines, which are usually less than they could get under the statutory maximum.
If Greenberg provided substantial assistance in building other cases, prosecutors might ask a judge to deviate below the minimum required penalty, according to Greenberg's plea agreement.
It was in exploring Greenberg's conduct that investigators came upon evidence.They came upon it.Hmm.Could it have been from Greenberg?Potentially implicating Gates in sex trafficking.
Prosecutors had been exploring whether Greenberg paid women to have sex with Gates and whether the two shared sexual partners, including the 17-year-old girl at issue in Greenberg's case.
Gates, who represents a mostly conservative district in Florida's panhandle, is known as a strident defender of former President Donald Trump.Why is that relevant, Washington Post?What's that doing in here, huh?
The investigation into him was opened during the Trump administration and proceeded with the approval of then Attorney General William Barr.Greenberg has been providing investigators information about Gates since last year.
Just FYI, I am omitting all of the Washington Post's sourcing, virtually all of which is according to a person familiar with the matter.You can see it in the original report if you so choose.Then this.
Greenberg's credibility would be a significant challenge for any prosecution of Gates, in part because of one of the crimes Greenberg admitted to, which was fabricating allegations against a school teacher
who was running against him to be a tax collector.Now we heard that earlier in the piece.Remember, I paused and I read it to you, that he was charged in 2020 with fabricating allegations and evidence to smear a political opponent.That's bad.
He's got a history of doing that.Is that what he's doing to Gates?
Then they raise it again here saying his credibility is going to be a problem because he admitted to fabricating allegations against a school teacher who was running against him to be a tax collector.
What exactly were the allegations that Greenberg fabricated?Washington Post.Walk us through it.And they do.Greenberg had sent letters to the school falsely claiming that the teacher had an inappropriate sexual relationship with a student.
A similar allegation to the Gates case.You think? Yeah.A lawyer for the school teacher commented to the Washington Post saying, no one is going to believe anything that Joel Greenberg says by itself.
His statements would have to be corroborated by testimony or evidence. So that is Greenberg and this alleged victim, the 17-year-old, though there's less in this report on why the DOJ deemed her not credible.
But she was deemed not credible, and so was Greenberg, the two people against Matt Gaetz and who got this whole thing against Matt Gaetz started.
Are the two women that this other lawyer, Joel Leopard, the guy who was on ABC, CBS and CNN, as I just showed you, Are those, is that lawyer connected with Greenberg at all?I don't know.
Are those two young women connected with the not credible Greenberg or the not credible 17 year old?I don't know, but they're saying they were there when the alleged sex acts happened, that they witnessed them.
So I'm going to guess they're, they know her and they're all running in the same circles.And I'm also going to guess they potentially suffer from the same credibility problems that the first two do.Look, I don't know what happened with Matt Gaetz.
There's a lot around this guy, a lot.He's also reportedly been on the house floor bragging about his libido and stamina.He sounds like a crude guy.
There's no point in pretending otherwise, but accusing him of criminal behavior is something else entirely.
I do believe that if this DOJ had Matt Gaetz and the crosshairs, they would have done everything in their power to actually see through those charges.
And, um, the fact that they didn't, because let's, let's be clear while the investigation may have gotten started while Trump was still president, this is 2022 when they recommended no charges.That was Joe Biden's department of justice.
That was Merrick Garland's department of justice.There is zero chance those guys would have given up on the chance to get Matt Gaetz if they thought they were anywhere close.And it's obvious this guy Greenberg could be of no help to them.
What a hot mess he would be.But there must be similar problems with the 17-year-old because standing alone, just being a sex worker wouldn't do it.There'd have to be more.
So we really need to take all of this right now with a hefty dose of salt, not a grain, but like a boulder. of salt.Because look, these may not be credible people at all.This whole thing could be a shakedown.
The guy reportedly wanted Matt Gaetz, Greenberg, to help him get a pardon, and Matt Gaetz rebuffed him.And then suddenly he's opposed to Matt Gaetz and giving up Matt Gaetz in these discussions with the cops, with the DOJ.It stinks.
It stinks to anybody. Want to read the whole report?Have no doubt we will, but between now and then, remember the boulder, the boulder of salt.Okay.One other thing.We talked in the first segment about Katie Couric and we need to follow up on her.
So you heard the soundbite in which she was talking about, you know, the disrespect of the Trump voters and the way like they'd make fun of his voters as opposed to going out there and like talking with a guy in a hard hat.Okay.
You were the one who was calling them anti-intellectual, but fine.Now I guess maybe you see you were part of the problem.She went on, that was not the only Katie Couric insight into how things went so wrong for Kamala.
In this interview with Jen Dora, the explorer Saki, she offered more and so did Saki.
Like Brad Summer, which was cool, didn't work.Young people didn't turn out.
Although there was that three week blackout period, which I honestly could not understand that was making me crazy just from a consumer.I didn't understand.What was that?And again, I think she really did well in so many areas.
And I, I, I, but, but I was frustrated by her inability to really succinctly answer questions at times, Jen, and to kind of like if she was asked about changing the
uh, the Supreme Court at that CNN town hall, she, she had an opportunity to talk about ethics and what, you know, Alito and Clarence Thomas were doing.
And she answered like in one sentence and then like went on to something that had nothing to do with the question.You know, people notice that and it's like, answer the goddamn question, please.
This is my kind of like unsolicited advice to every person who may run for president.Sit down and think about why are you running for president?
Oh, Dora, you really stepped up your game from your last gig.Here.It's her.
I'm sorry, but it's her.I cannot take this person seriously.
They need to stop and think about why they want to be the president.You probably should have told her that while she was still running.Instead, we got drivel like this from you at the DNC, Jen Psaki.
This magical, charismatic quality in person.She just, that was fierce and fearless.She's like, in my view, an undervalued talent.She's a very fierce communicator.That's who she is. But there is a character out there.
There is, it's almost like public opinion hasn't caught up with what she is doing out there.And also we live in a country that is sexist and racist.
So now, you know, she really should have thought about why she wanted to be president.So she could be more clear in her messaging in town halls and so on with Katie Couric.But I thought she was a very fierce communicator.
Very, not just fierce, very fierce, fierce. Back to Dora.She's four.Jen Saki has the communication abilities of a four-year-old.Maybe we'll circle back.We'll circle back to what Kamala Harris could have done.Very fierce.And also magical.
She's magical fierce.Very fierce communicator.The gaslighting. What a ridiculous thing to say about Kamala Harris.Magical, very fierce communicator, but we're all sexist and racist, so she might not be able to get the ball over the line.
That clip is gold.That's a gold clip. So then she's on with Katie Couric, and it's like, you know, she really should have stopped to get the mermaid.I mean, to decide why she wants to run for president.
And Katie Couric, too, who's like, really, I was frustrated with her inability to answer the tough questions.Like, why didn't she answer the tough questions?I mean, another question is, why didn't you ask them, Katie?
Because we remember your interview with Kamala Harris.
I recently learned you're only 5'2".Is that true?That is absolutely incorrect.
Okay.I am 5'4 1⁄4".Okay, and I'm 5'3... Sometimes 5'4 1⁄2", and with heels, which I always wear, I'm 5'7 1⁄2".Thank you very much.Okay, Wikipedia, you're wrong, and we need to correct that.
I've said this to my team.Like, what?I don't know where it came from.I was 5'2 when I was 12.
They say I'm 5'1 on my Wikipedia page.
How tall are you?5'3 3⁄4".
shrinking like literally you they just want to just make a smaller in every way.
They want to make us smaller in every way, right?You are constantly being unfairly diminished, like by the Jen Psaki's who say you're a magical communicator, very fierce, but sexists and racists, so you never know.
Like I said to Dan Turrentine, they're not getting it.The post-mortem is not going well over on team blue.Good luck to you in your future endeavors.
All right, we're going to take a break and then we're going to come back with my pal, Richie McGinnis.Who is Richie McGinnis?Well, he has been all over the country over the past five, six, seven years in the midst of all the riots.
He's been on what he calls a riot diet in his new book. He did the Antifa stuff.He's gotten bruised and bloodied.There was an iconic photo of him in the midst of the J6 stuff that made it to the Times, and then they called him an insurrectionist.
Richie has been through it, and he's here next to talk about that new book, Riot Diet.Don't go away.
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Back in 2022, we had Richie McGinnis, then a journalist and former video director of The Daily Caller, on the show for an exclusive interview.He spoke to us just months after his testimony as a key witness in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.
Richie was in Kenosha the night of the violence doing what he does, which is document these riots.He put himself right in the middle of the danger.And the Rittenhouse shooting unfolded right in front of him.
His reporting that night launched him into the national spotlight in a way he did not ask for.
Richie was not only a witness to the violence in Kenosha during the summer of 2020, but he was on the ground for nearly every major instance of violence we saw that year.He was at Lafayette Park in D.C.
when protesters tried to bring down the statue of President Andrew Jackson.He captured Seattle's Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, known as CHAZ, on his camera and so much more. He was one of the very few real journalists who put his life at risk.
Every day, these things were being ignored because they didn't look good for the left.But Richie would go in the midst of these to bring us the events in real time.Well, now he's out with a new book that tells it all.It's called Riot Diet.Great name.
One man's radical ride through America in chaos. And in it, Richie shares never before heard stories of America's unrest during the summer of 2020, which some have connected to the election results earlier this month.Richie, welcome back to the show.
Thanks for having me on, Megan.I don't know how I'm going to fall out the door of Katie Couric, but you know, I'll try.
You're going to try to do your best.You're more like Bob the Builder.I would give you something. of how many parents out there fell asleep night after night with Bob the Builder.Can you fix it?Anyway, why did you self-publish?
This is interesting to me.
Well, in 2022, when I quit my job at The Daily Caller at the end of 2022, I started seriously writing this book, and I was shopping it around to publishers and agents, and they all told me a couple of different things.
The first one was that Trump was never going to make it through the primary, and he wasn't going to be the candidate. And I think in media, people have a tendency to think what they want to happen is what's going to happen.
And I knew that was not going to be the case.You know, I saw that his base was still firmly in line with him even, you know, everybody thought January 6 was the nail in the coffin.
And I was also told that I had to write it, pick a side basically sell it either to the left or to the right.But my story covering both the BLM stuff and then all the MAGA unrest after the election,
It's the story of being caught in between protesters and police, prosecution and defense, and the left and the right.
You know, my job was, my lane was to go on the ground, whether it's the Proud Boys or Antifa, or I call them the Umbrella Gang, the guys who use umbrellas as shields. And, you know, just show the audience what's happening without commentary.
So they were wearing this, they said this, and this is what happened.So if the police were beating up on the protesters, we'd publish it.If the Proud Boys were beating up on somebody, we'd publish that.
And same goes for the left-wing agitators as well.So, you know, the way that I wrote the story was really just like,
what I saw on the ground, and there's some personal anecdotes in there as well to tell you why I went there, why I worked at The Caller in the first place, The Daily Caller in the first place, and why I aimed my camera where I did, and why I often... So what have you learned?
How would you summarize what you learned?
I would say that what the main lesson that comes from the book is that, you know, the human beings who are on the ground, we're all whether they were from the left or the right, they were all desperate enough to go to the streets in the first place.
So there was a profound discontentment among all political ideologies.And the thing that I learned was how those people were used in short little soundbites as cannon fodder for political agendas on both sides.
And I'm just trying to like paint the picture of what I saw on the ground, who they were, what they said, why they said they were there, and then let the audience decide for themselves.
Okay.How do you distinguish between what you saw during the BLM riots, for example, and like the pure Antifa stuff?Because I realize Antifa was probably at the BLM stuff too, but like that, they're not entirely the same.
That's that's correct.And that line that you just drew right there was obviously muddied quite often during the actual unrest.And I think that did a disservice to the actual portrayal of what was really going on.
It was the simple reality was that there would be I think Portland is the best example.There'd be 5000 protesters out on a given night.They would come out right at sunset.
and they'd hear the speeches and then there'd be about 500 people left over by midnight smashing into the fence with the express intention of bringing the police out and then getting into confrontations with them in front of whatever cameras were rolling.
And the other thing about Antifa that's different from the Proud Boys is that if you go up to somebody and you're like, hey man, are you Antifa?They're not going to say yes.Occasionally you see an Antifa flag.Occasionally you see a little patch.
But I call them the umbrella gang in the book because you can tell who went out there with the express intention of agitating police because they bring umbrellas, they bring gas masks.
The Portland chapter is called the Battle of the Leaf Blowers because they had leaf blowers to blow the tear gas.And then it was actually so successful that the DHS officers actually got their own leaf blowers.
So our most viral video in Portland was these DHS officers basically on the other side of the fence aiming their leaf blowers at the, I guess it's safe to call these guys rioters, aiming their leaf blowers at each other.
That is so annoying.Just the sound of the leaf blower would make me leave the protest.Nevermind if they were using it to blow tear gas at me.I mean, you and I have talked about this before, but you have been in grave danger at these events.
And obviously Kenosha would be the top example, I think, but you kept doing it.You kept going back in and back in and back in.And to the point where, Richie, now I look at you as like a war correspondent.
I don't think you've escaped unscathed from all of it.What do you think?
I would agree with that.And that's a lot of what the book tells is the personal side of the story, which is, yeah, I'm the middle of three boys.So I'm used to getting knocked around.I play ice hockey, and I'm a surfer.
So you know, I'm used to some degree of chaos.But in the midst of it, you know, our mission was so simple, just go to wherever this stuff is going down and show everybody what's happening.And I thought it was all going to stop after the election.
But obviously, that wasn't the case.I think Kenosha was obviously the most jarring example.And Joseph Rosenbaum, who was the first man killed. was shot right in front of me and I actually carried him to the hospital.
And I didn't know who that man was at the time that the shooting took place.So, you know, the after action was, oh, this guy did all these terrible things.He sexually assaulted minors, which he was convicted of, served time for.
But what wasn't included was the fact that Joseph Rosenbaum was sexually abused by his stepfather and the kids that he sexually abused, some of them are in jail for the same crimes.And that
There's there's this intergenerational tragedy associated with not only like the general majority of people that are out there desperate enough to take to the streets, but also Kenosha specifically.
Kyle Rittenhouse, absent father, Jacob Blake, absent father, Anthony Huber, who was the second man killed, absent father. and Gage Groskowitz, who had his bicep shot off, absent father as well.
So there's, I think, a much deeper spiritual sickness in our country that is not addressed by, you know, just these kind of surface level Joe Biden is a poopy pants or Trump orange man bad.And so I wanted to
delve deeper beneath the surface level whataboutism of the Trump era and just kind of show the audience not only my own personal struggles with what I experienced, but also the struggles of the people who were in the streets and were affected by these American tragedies.
I mean, you did not have an absentee father and you write about losing him and being there with your brothers and his beautiful blue eyes and just coming to terms with his passing.
You think about that in the context that you just offered it, you know, of, um, how lucky you were to have him and gone too soon, but how lucky you were to have him.
Otherwise you would have been out in those streets potentially for a much different reason, Richie, given your, natural courage and, you know, that you're drawn to chaos as a reporter, like a moth to a flame.
Absolutely.And that's why I included that anecdote.
I told Shelby Talcott, my coworker who was on the ground with Jorge Ventura as well for most of these riots, and I told her the day after the shooting, when Joseph Rosenbaum died, he had gray eyes, but I saw
my dad's blue eyes when I, when I replayed it in my mind.And the key distinction there is that when Joseph Rosenbaum passed away, I saw him, his eyes filled with regret and him going to a place that he did not want to go.
Whereas with my dad, you know, he saw the nurse leave the room and decided that with his entire family around the bed, that that was his time to, uh, to go.
Mm-hmm.A friend of mine, I won't say who it is because I don't have his permission to share the story, but he told me about losing his dad and that he and his family, they were around him.
And he was an elderly man when he passed, that he looked at the son, who our audience would know, and said, it's not so bad.And he said the son's name.It's not so bad.It's actually really not so bad.
And it's just, it was the sweetest story because it's this dad on his way to the other side even with his last few breaths trying to make it better for his child, for the people who loved him.
I'm just tearing up just thinking about it, such a sweet gesture.
And yet you've been right in the midst of people going out, do their own choices, no question, do their own choices, but also their own circumstances who exit under very different, you know, in a very different situation.
And I think this is so interesting because every time we see one of these riots, we usually see a New York Post report after the fact, which I enjoy, showing who it was.
You know, you see like, they've got blue hair, they've got weird gender things going on.They are almost always rich, nine times out of 10 in these, you know, faux, faux tests.
You know, I don't know if they're the real riots where you get the rich ones, but they've all got like academic pedigrees that would match up with any cabinet level person seeking a job right now.
And I wonder about that piece of it, Richie, like what's your experience that they mostly meet this other profile that you're talking about with like, or I don't know you, I'll let you put it in your own words.
What, what would you say is the average profile, the folks who are drawn to this?
Well, definitely the BLM side versus the MAGA side, the BLM side is much younger.And I think it's everybody from the rich kids that you described to people who have nothing else out there.
But I think the commonality between all of them is the fact that basically you had a media who was drumming up all of this anger and effectively
You know, the common factor, I actually talk a lot is specifically in the Chaz about how the unifying factor was not necessarily, you know, Black Lives Matter per se so much as if they wanted to get the crowd riled up, they wouldn't say, all cops are bastards, they would say,
Do you guys like Donald Trump?And they'd say, F no.And so there was really like this never Trump aspect.And I think that that transcended all class lines, because culturally, you know, never Trumpism has become, I guess, half of America.
So I guess the answer to that question would be like, I usually wouldn't be asking these people like, Hey, are you richer?Are you poor?
But I think a lot of these kids were, you know, living in there with their parents, living the ideal stereotype, living in their parents' basement.
And they felt like they didn't have the opportunity, same opportunities afforded to them that were afforded to their parents.And so I think that that pervades across all.
the entire political spectrum, where, you know, people feel like they're not better off than the previous generation.And I think that really, that ultimately, is a class based issue.
And so when everything was focused on race, and everything was focused on orange man bad, we really lost the plot, which is black, white, brown, whatever, everybody felt like they didn't have the opportunities that Americans once had.
I feel like those people are all voting for Donald Trump right now.I feel like most of the people you just listed probably went to the polls for Trump.
And that's why I knew that Trump was going to win in 2016, and why when 2024 came around and they rolled out Kamala Harris, I mean, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz is like almost a direct, it was the exact same campaign that Hillary Clinton ran.
And so Donald Trump, like him, you can say whatever you want about his personal whatever, but he ran on a platform as a change candidate.And that's what people wanted.And there was a reason why Bernie Sanders had such widespread support in 2016.
And obviously the WikiLeaks emails showed that the Clinton campaign sandbagged him.And so I think you can only push, kick that can down the road for so long before people realize like, wait, are you really going to fix anything?
And Kamala Harris being asked that question of, would you do anything differently when she was on The View?And her being like, as if she didn't expect that kind of question at all on the campaign trail.
There is nothing that comes to mind.
I don't think so.But I did spend time at the border as well.And I think that was a key issue as well, where it was so in your face.I mean, you can only pull the veil over everybody's eyes until the issue becomes too big to ignore.
And so you saw her pivot in terms of her policy saying, oh, we're gonna secure the border.When after, for three years, they were saying, there's no problem here.
I went to the border during Joe Biden's administration and I saw people literally, where would they go?Oh, they'd go in the gaps in the wall.So I'd fly the drone up and see the people coming in through the gaps in the wall.
And I talked to literally hundreds of border patrol agents and every single one said, Yeah, a wall would definitely be a big help to fix the problem.
It's a no-brainer, and hopefully Trump will resume that when he takes office.The BLM riots were of particular note.
I mean, those were so jarring to many of us just to see the level of anger post-George Floyd, people saying the worst possible things about cops in a way that was just so untrue and unfair.
you know, forcing people to raise their fists and say Black Lives Matter out in the streets, interrupting them at their outdoor dinner spots, which we were forced to eat at, right, during that time because of COVID.
And it didn't, in fact, get violent.You're seeing some of that here.The clashes with the cops, by their nature, would be charged, given what they were protesting over.Was that unlike anything you'd been to?
Like, describe how the BLM riots compared to the others.
Absolutely, it was so I covered a Fair amount of civil unrest during the Trump years running the video for the Daily Caller and there would be little skirmishes here and there but really the Level of tribalism that I saw on the ground during that summer I think a lot of it was supercharged charged by what you mentioned which is everybody was forced by government mandate to stay at home businesses were shuttered and
people who didn't have, you know, the opportunity to work remotely either lost their jobs or still had to go out there.But this whole government basically telling you, okay, you have to do this, put on a mask, sit down, shut up.
And then finally, in May, you know, everybody had been locked down for a couple of months.And I think that really just amplified the level of, I guess, pent up frustration that there was.
And there's what I call like the Lord of the Flies effect, where if you go out there and you're protesting, and you're out there with good intentions, all of a sudden, somebody bumps into the police shields, and they get pepper sprayed, you see that person get pepper sprayed.
And then you get pepper sprayed and a whole different part of your mind turns on.And it's really easy for people to sit at home and say, Oh, I would have done this or I would have done that.
But there really is a primal part of our modern brains that we kind of ignore exists.And when I was out there in those kind of violent situations, you see that turn around.And that's when things get really scary.
Because in those chaotic situations, it's always the one who's either the biggest and the strongest or the most well armed who's going to prevail.
Mm-hmm.That's why most mothers say to their sons, do not go to that.You're not going out there.Sometimes it's a daughter or two, but yeah, of course she did.
That's what a normal mom would say to anybody, any son trying to put himself in the middle of that.Reminder to the audience I'm talking to, Richie McGinnis, and the name of the book is Riot Diet, One Man's Radical Ride Through America in Chaos.
You can get it on Amazon. Richie, what about the protests in Minnesota?They were such a big deal, well, to some extent anyway, during the early part of Tim Walz being nominated as her running mate, and he made the decision not to interfere.
on night one, and then barely on night two, as Minneapolis was burning, because he didn't want to be seen as heavy-handed.And, you know, we had a police precinct burn.
Like, can you speak at all of, like, the emotional toll that took on the citizens there?
Well, I could definitely say I went there, I guess it was in October of 2020, and the city was still dead.And the blocks that had been burned were still just charred out rubble.
And we went to George Floyd Square, which was still effectively an autonomous zone.So cops did not go in there.And it was like a mini version of the Chazz that was still going on in October.
But with respect to what happened with Tim Walz, right when the riot started, he actually came out and did exactly what the mayor and governor of
Seattle of Washington did when they ceded the police precinct to effectively just put armed protesters for a number of weeks.He said, you know,
we want to call in the National Guard, but we also don't want to escalate things by bringing out law enforcement in huge numbers.
And I think that that's the key mistake that was made time and time again in these Democrat run cities, which is like, well, Trump wants the National Guard.So we basically are going to do the opposite of whatever that is.
And like I said, in these kinds of situations, it doesn't take much for that spark to light a flame.And when you have people outnumbering police.I mean, it's very easy for what happened in that police precinct and was burned to the ground.
It's very easy for that kind of chaos to really unfurl.And so Tim Walz, actually Trump did commend Tim Walz on the way that he dealt with Minneapolis.
Although if you look within the state government, the Republican state senators had a much different tune.They had a lot of problems with the way that he handled it.Like you mentioned,
The National Guard was called on Tuesday, sorry, the mayor asked for National Guard on Tuesday and Tim Walz, actually they were technically present on the Thursday night that the police precinct burned on May 28th, I think it was.
But just like in Kenosha, the National Guard was there too.The question is, is what are they protecting?And they're not protecting the small businesses.They're protecting the courthouse, right?So there's a miscommunication between the
law enforcement on the ground and the politicians up top, who effectively, I think, were trying to avoid any kind of confrontation between police and protesters slash rioters that would be bad optics.
And that's ultimately, I think, what happened in so many of these cities, including Kenosha.
I really think if I were an executive running a state or a city, I'd be more worried about dead citizens than bad optics.And if you send in enough power,
you're going to be able to keep control even of an outraged crowd to see a large police presence there.So what would you advise?So President Trump is going to take office again on January 20th.
We don't know what the next four years will have in store for him, but if there is rioting along the lines of anything we've seen over these past four or five, I don't know, Richie, what would you tell him to do?
Well, I think when the National Guard is there and when you see these guys in camouflage, that certainly has a way of tamping things down.
But even on a deeper level, I just think that people need to recognize, especially now, that Donald Trump isn't just this fringe guy who's, you know, going to destroy the country and realize that, you know, part of America, actually, he won the popular vote.
believes that Donald Trump is an agent for change and they voted him in.And so this is a democracy and democracy dies in darkness for lack of a better word.So no.
So they tell us.Richie also was there on January 6th.We discussed that in our last episode together, which was episode 383 in August of 2022.Highly recommend you go back and listen to that one too.
And some of the blowback that Richie's gotten from some, even on the right, he's gotten, no one likes Richie except for our audience and me.
And your family, yeah.But that means you're doing journalism right, Richie, honestly.All the best to you.So then go to Amazon.com and get the book, yes?
Yep, Amazon, we'll have it on bookshelves.It's just me and the lowly pigeon, the pigeon press that I started, and not a cocky peacock or a penguin who can't fly.
This is the pigeon who's on the streets just delivering the message from the leg of the pigeon straight to the people, so there's no corporate interference in between.So we'll get it on bookshelves.
Yes, so you might have to wait a little bit to get it, but get it, support Richie.And, you know, the dangerous risks he's taken to bring us the story ought to be rewarded in some way, shape or form.
It's called Riot Diet, one man's radical ride through America in chaos.Richie McGinnis, thank you.
Wow.OK, we're going to stay on the Gates News and all the disruptor reporting.I'm sure we'll have an update for you tomorrow.We'll see you then. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
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