Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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What do we have personal indeed, we do truly a jam packed show this morning, so hopefully we can get through all of this. We've got a new Biden ad hitting Trump for being a criminal. We've got Americans apparently warming to the idea of mass deportation. Biden also preparing a new executive order with regards to immigration. That's interesting
as well. CNN is officially announcing their debate criteria. It seems tailor made and designed to guarantee no one but Trump and Biden could possibly make the stage.
She'll break that down for you. We have New.
Jersey doing very new Jersey things, massive racketeering case against one of the strongest power brokers in the state, so lots is very interesting there.
CNN once again lying.
About the details of October seventh, and specifically the details of mass rape on October seventh with regards to They also brought on W. Wasserman Schultz for an assist. Kamala Harra is doing an event where she's also lying, so we want to break that down for you.
We have a.
Bombshell new report revealing that the Israeli government and the IDF new specific details about the planning Baijamas for October seventh in advance and did nothing to stop it. So that is a massive bombshell here. But also of course in Israel. Sager has a monologue. Maybe you should preview it for us.
It's hard to It's basically, wells Fargo made the dumbest deal of all time, and then a new minted billionaire which decided to cover upseid deal and portray himself of an innovator. It's an amazing story and people are really good.
I'm excited for this one. I'm excited to hear the details on this one. And we've also got Matt Stoller coming in to talk about his newport about how dramatically different Trump's rhetoric with regards to businesses is now versus twenty sixteen.
So very excited to talk to him about that.
Yes, that's right, before we get to that, the debates are actually very soon. Can you guys even believe at the very first CNN debate we're going to go over some of the rigging that's involved in that with respect to RFK Junior. But nonetheless we will be covering it live here on the show. So if you want to become a premium subscriber, you're going to be able to have some exclusive benefits and more and input on that. So Breakingpoints dot Com for the live presidential debates and
you can join us for our coverage. But with that, let's go ahead and start with mister Trump.
Yes, indeed, so fresh off of we actually had those exclusive word clouds revealing that in the wake of Trump's guilty conviction, the number one word that people are associating with him is the word criminal. Biden campaign leaning into that with a new fifty million dollar add by across battleground states pegging him as a criminal. Let's take a listen to that.
The courtroom, we see Donald Trump for who he is. He's been convicted of thirty four felonies, found liable for sexual assault, and he committed financial fraud. Meanwhile, Joe Biden's been working lowering healthcare costs and making big corporations pay their fair share. This election is between a convicted criminal who's only out for himself and a president who's fighting for your family.
So, based on those word clause that we showed you before, the American public basically feels this is an election between
a criminal and an old man. So the Biden campaign, I think, given who Joe Biden is, given that he's unwilling to actually run on like an affirmative economic agenda or anything approximating that, given that he's unwilling to change his wildly unpopular foreign policy, I think this is probably one of the stronger things for them to lean into, here, Sager, and really try to make that word criminal and Donald Trump be the number one connection that people make in their minds.
This is the twenty twenty two reducts where twenty twenty two were subbing criminal in for stop the steal. What they really both, you know, come to, is this idea about what people hate the most about Trump about clearly what we saw in our word cloud, the so called criminal tag, you know, getting added for his name, the
convicted criminals, when they're gonna be putting on billboards. There's a reason they're putting a lot of money behind this ad I just saw, even though they're putting as much as one hundred thousand dollars just on News Nation, you know. I mean, they're doing adviys and throwing money everywhere behind this thing.
And the main reason is that this is the best that they got, you know.
I mean, if you look at the so called accomplishments about lower it's like, yeah, okay, whatever, But it's not really about his record. It's about driving up all the negative towards Trump, and to be honest, that is the best that they have. It's abortion and quote unquote democracy when we pair for those who watch the show a lot. If you look at our polling yesterday, the reason that seniors are gravitating towards Biden is they like the status quote.
The reason that younger voters, Black, Hispanic voters and others are graving towards Trump is they don't like the status quo. So when you want to win over possibly more status quo like minded voters who vote a lot seniors, you know, much higher propensity. You want to lean into the things that they care a lot about, like democracy, like a trust in the justice system. You know, if you're under forty years old, you really trust the justice system like
all that much. But if you're like sixty five plus you said this yesterday, you have a real reverence for like capitalized institutions in a very different way than most people do.
Yeah, and a lot of that sense that you're describing is much more based on vibes than it is reality, which we know from the fact. Would talk to Stoler about this. I mean, there's a big reason why Wall Street is now shifting back towards Trump, getting comfortable to with Trump. The reason why the Wall Street Journal editorial board has been at war with the Biden administration, especially with Lena Khan over his anti trust policies. That's been
a real thorn in their side. It has, you know, undercut their ability to get gigantic bonuses every year.
So there is upset.
In the Wall Street crowd and in the billionaire crowd about some of those policies. But you know, Trump of course has and also by the way, it's also vibes on the Democratic side about quote unquote preserving democracy, since these are the people who were perfectly willing to destroy democracy in their own primaries to guarantee that Joe Biden once again ascended to the nomination in spite of the fact that a majority of the Democratic base was like,
we would really like some other options. So let's just be clear about what we're talking about here. But you know, from the Biden campaign strategic perspective, we saw some pulling a little while out a week, two weeks something like that ago that said, Okay, if voters view this as a referendum on Joe Biden, forget it, he's toast, it's over. If they view it on as a referendum on Trump, then he wins, and wins relatively easily. If they view it as a choice between the two, it's really quite close.
It's a jump ball, I think, you know, one point two point in either direction. And so they want to push things as much as possible in the direction of making this a referendum of Trump at best for them, or at least a choice, because then they're in the ballgame. And so, you know, the other advantage this narrative has I mean, first of all, Cantoniet, he is a convicted criminal at this point, so it has the benefit of
matching with reality. But negative attack ads always work best when there's something that a you know, average viewer is inclined to believe. And that's the other thing we've seen about Trump. Whether or not it's changed people's votes, you know, people a majority people do feel like he has committed crimes. That he has committed the crimes that he was convicted
of and likely committed other crimes. So it's a tag that fits, and I do think the more that they can apply that label, it probably does inforb some theme to their benefit. And you know, so that that makes the argument that some of what's going on in the you know, with the trial and the guilty verdict could have an impact on the election. It was not the total upending game changer that Democrats may have hoped, but we do have some indications that this is an issue
for Independence and could shift them towards Joe Biden. But the up on the screen, this is from Politico, So you have twenty one percent of Independence saying that Trump's conviction does matter to their vote. All right, that's you know, that's not nothing. Again, I think people are kind of bad really breaking down what matters to their vote. But you've got a good number of independence here saying that this is an issue for them. Let's put the next
one up on the screen. You have less than half of respondence believing that Trump was prosecuted to help Biden. So it's not a majority position. That being said, you have, you know, forty three percent is not nothing that does think that the prosecution was directly political and directly motivated to try to help Joe Biden. And then just another interesting note here, which is not really directly related to the campaign, at least not yet. But let's put this
next piece up on the screen. Of the various pieces of the legal system, the entity that people have the least faith in is Supreme Court justices worthy. In the context of the Trump guilty verdict, the entity or the group that they have the most trust in is citizens serving on jury. So the fact that you know, jury of his peers found him guilty, I guess, isn't nothing.
You've got a majority of people fifty four percent, saying that they have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in citizens serving on Jury's so.
There you go. In terms of how people are what people are making of the trial.
I don't know how I feel about that one. I'll just put that aside. I look, iman served on a jury. I think it's fair.
Maybe I would trust you. It depends on the county, depends on the state. My hometown college station, I don't know.
You know, Simeon was actually mine was in Manhattan, Manhattan.
But you were federal grand jury. Yeah, no, it was local.
It was local Manhattan grand jury, and people buy and large took it very seriously.
Well, yeah, maybe my bias is too colored here and this has nothing to do with Trump. I've long been very skeptical. I guess I would say, of what's going on, I think what we can see from here is we would have been stupid to say it was going to have no impact. However, I still think it is relatively marginal. That said, if it is marginal, it's gonna be marginal in the Biden direction, and we shouldn't dismiss it because
this is the marginal election. If we look at the five thirty eight polling average, you have the projection of Trump winning fifty out of one hundred times and Biden winning forty nine out of one hundred times. That's as close as to a toss up as you can possibly get. Donald Trump only lost the election by some one hundred and fifty thousand votes across three separate states. Yesterday I was doing a little bit of playing on the two seventy to win website. I mean, we really need to
internalize this. Donald Trump can flip Nevada, he can win Georgia, and he can win Arizona. But if he loses Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, he will lose to Joe Biden, who will get two hundred and seventy electoral votes to his two
sixty nine. I mean, that's it, that's all. It could be a race towards So we could be talking about the margins of tens of thousands of votes, or it could be like the year two thousand and we could be a couple thousand votes in some hanging chad nonsense, you know, rules who actually get to take the White House. So let's not dismiss the marginal in this respect. But you know, I do still think electorally, the ones that
they really had going for them. The January sixth case and the Georgia ones those because they're going to be after the election. At least from what we can tell at this point, what they were really hoping for has not materialized.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's certainly the case. Let's go and put this next piece up on the screen from the Washington Post. We had an interesting, interesting report here, had a lot of great quotes from voters a region, one or two of these. But it's also interesting because you know, we tend to have this that you can just leave
this up on the screen when I'm talking. We tend to have this idea in the modern political era that basically everyone is locked in deer are hard partisan divide negative partisanship to we're just voting against the other side. There are very few swing voters, et cetera. And you know this indicates that's not really the case. You've got sixty one percent of voters who are not saying that they're definitely Biden, who are not saying that they're definitely Trump.
They are truly still weighing their options.
Now, this would.
Include people who say they're likely by likely Trump, They're leaning one way or another, but they're not yet willing to say I am one hundred percent riding with Biden or I'm one hundred percent on the Trump train. And I think that's that's really noteworthy into that mix. We could put the next piece up on the screen. They have this broken down. You've got amongst sporadic voters eighteen to twenty five. That's eight percent voted in twenty sixteen
or twenty twenty, not both. You've got twenty four percent. So you know, you've got a mix of types of voters that fall into this category among uncommitted voters. So if you break this down, okay, well, who are they leaning towards? Probably Biden is thirteen percent, others seventeen percent, Probably Trump is fifteen percent. So it's relatively mixed there as well. So I guess this is all just a long way of saying that, you know, this thing's very
much up in the air. As we discussed in yesterday's show, you have a lot of people who just are really unhappy with both candidates, don't feel like they have a lot of great options, are you know, reluctant to kind of commit because they just don't feel excited or happy about the choices that they have. They interview this this one woman Riki Denning. She says, by her own account, she's torn up about the November election.
She's almost certain.
She'll cast about, but just might leave the presidential line blank. She says, I just hate both of the candidates, and there's no third party candidate that stands a chance. This is a twenty six year old resident of Las Vegas.
Obviously Nevada, key swing state where Trump seems to have made up a lot of ground he lost the state last time, appears to be in the lead there by some poles significant margin at this point, they say, forced to choose between Biden and Trump, she said she would lean toward Biden, then added, but I just don't agree
with him as president at all. Her dissatisfaction includes her belief he is too old for another term, hasn't delivered on a promise to eliminate her student loan debt, and that he supports Israel in the war in the Gaza Strip. So you know a host of issues there that, especially for her age set, I think you would hear very commonly in the dissatisfaction against Joe Biden. Now, if you're a Biden person, soager you would look at that and say.
Yeah, I support all that She's.
Going to come alone.
Yeah, she's going to vote, and she's leaning towards Biden. And at the end of the day, she's we're going to convince her that you can't risk another Trump term. She's aware that none of the third party candidates have a you know, have a real chance, and so she's this is the type of person we are going to be able to persuade. And that's why the polls right now don't really reflect our ultimate strength in November.
And listen, they may be right.
If I had to bet, who would you bet that this person ultimately ends u voting for Yeah.
I mean, I don't want to be rude, but it's like, lady, you're probably going to vote for Biden. And that's why it's one of those where, uh, this is the difficulty of the system really that we live in. But you know some of the other data about who the quote unquote deciders are more likely to be back black or Hispanic and nondeciders. One third of deciders are non white, compared to about fifth of other voters. Deciders are more likely than non deciders to live in urban areas and
are more likely to have no religion. So this really is like the new secular America. These are people who are probably predominantly working class, just based on you know, a purview of like a quick look at their demographic and.
That kind of tracks and makes sense to me.
I mean, these are the people who Trump in general was able to activate or increasingly is bringing some people over to a side who traditionally never would have voted Republican. At the same time, the abortion issue is going to wagh you down. If you are predominantly more secular, well what are you going to do, Like, you're going to be pretty upset about some of this Christian right stuff that's going on. So it all depends on the media
that you're consuming and what you're looking at. And so again, like when we look at this and we say that the top issue here is the economy, but number two is quote unquote threats to democracy. That's one of those where when I see I could see the tie, I could see fifty going towards Trump, and I could see them going to Biden as well, which is why I'm still just I cannot count Biden out despite all of
the bad news that we see. As Yeah, I never want to bet against old white people in this country. I'm just I know, you know, I live around these folks.
They love voting.
I mean, they've got obscure signs in their windows, and I'm like, how do you even have time to give a shit about who the you know, like deputy mayor council is.
They're the people have the most time, and Christ, that's what I'm saying.
They're posting signs all of our neighborhood.
They're trying to renew parking rules to only allow people to park for two hours instead of four. I'm like, who cares? Why do we care about this?
This is the biggest thing.
In their whole lives and the people his wife or beefing with.
Literally they're lobbying against an apartment building nearby, and I swear one of the posters says they're gonna flood nine one one calls you can't make this stuff up in terms of what they care about. But living around these folks, I'm not counting them out.
They will vote. They will always vote. Oh yeah, no.
Doubt about that, No doubt about that.
Okay, Well, let's see if this next pole changes your mind in terms of the other in terms of Biden's prospects.
Because this is a doozy. Put this up on the screen.
This is a poll of Iowa from the Des Moines Register. This is Anne Selzer who does this poll. She is the highest rated polster in like Nate Silver's ranking of all the posters.
Okay, she's number one.
She is famous in political circles in terms of her ability to closely predict the results of Iowa elections in particular. Now, just keep this up on the street. No one is saying that Joe Biden ever had a chance to win Iowa.
You know, it's crazy. Barack Obama one.
Iowa doesn't seem like that long ago, but the state is trying to read. Democrats have given up on rural America and so no one was expecting Joe Biden to win Iowa. However, this poll has him clocking only thirty two percent of the vote to Trump's fifty percent. RFK Junior with a not insignificant nine percent, and other third party candidates, you know, combining for another six percent. There, so thirty two percent for Joe Biden this time around.
That would be if you extrapolate these type of numbers across similarly situated Midwestern states like Wisconsin, for example, you're looking at a bloodbath. Like so, the fact that some of the best polsters like Ann Selzer, like New York Times is considered a very highly rated polster as well, the fact that some of the best polsters are coming out with some of the worst results for Joe Biden not a great sign for him.
Zager. Yeah.
Look, and that's the other side of the coin. That's why I also can't count out Trump in this race. I'm looking at this deswin rechiester Pole, the highest quality poll allegedly in the entire nation. You take this, and Trump was going to win Wisconsin by five points, which is an insane position. So we are either in a place where the highest quality polster in the US is totally wrong, and you know there's gonna be some.
Well there's some huge shift which right now I'm.
Not on event or massive you know shift in between now or uh Trump is going to win and it's like, I don't know that said, we've seen enough craziness just here at the desk that can't count it out.
Yeah.
Well, so, just to give people a sense of how dramatic this is, last time Trump won the state, okay, but it was fifty three forty five exactly fifty three forty five, so an eight point margin versus this was fifty what did I say, thirty two? I mean, if we've seen that kind of a shift in these intervening years, even in a state that isn't really in play, it's over.
It's over.
I mean, if this poll remains, if it's accurate, all of that, this is dire. And keep in mind too, I mean, listen, Iowa is a state filled with old white people, Like this is the place where he was supposedly this is the demographic among which he was supposedly gaining ground where they're kind of betting the farm at this point to you know, do better with seniors than they did last time around, actually win the senior vote
first time in modern history, et cetera, et cetera. That's the rationale for why they think the industrial Midwestern states, the former like blue Wall states are their best bet because they have more of an old white population than the younger and more diverse Sun Belt states. But you know, if this holds, it's it's looking pretty rough.
It's grim, yeah, I mean, our goal always to just give you the ultimate like both sides of the coin to not just be like, you should not walk around and have any certainty whatsoever about this election.
I could genuinely see this election going in any direction. I could see Biden winning all the swing states. I could see Trump winning all the swing states. I could see it being, you know, split in different weird ways that were. I could see any result at this point, just depending on the way the lens turns in that given day. But in any case, that's the info we have to bring to you today. We also could not leave this one out with.
Some of the screen.
So just incredible Washington Brain. Here, incredible Washington Brain opinion piece written by Kathleen Parker. Democrats are wrestling with an age old problem. Maybe Hillary Clinton could come to the rescue. And this piece is really funny. I read it yesterday because it starts off with some solid analysis. It's like, you know what, Biden's really old. That's a problem. Voters have a problem with that. We can see him slow down. It's not just spin. She wasn't trying to say it
was a medium whatever whatever. She's like, No, we can see right. And part of the issue is that people don't have faith in Kamala.
Harris's vice pride.
Okay, true, and she even made a point to say, this isn't about our race or identity, it's just they haven't seen her to be a competent actor. Okay, I'm with you so far. Then the final analytical leap that is, just, like I said, the most incredible example of belt Way brain. And she says, so what they should do is drop
Kamala from the ticket and sub in Hillary Clinton. Now I want to correct myself because I think on Monday, I think I said that Joe Biden might be the worst possible Democrat to have at the top of the ticket. I don't think that's correct. I think Hillary Clinton would be worse than Joe Biden from an electoral perspective. I think she would actually be worse. So congratulations to this calumnist for coming up with one of the worst ideas I've literally ever heard.
No one has mentioned her as a possible running me for Biden as far as I know, But why not replace Harris with Clinton at seventy six?
She might want no.
Part of it, but it's hard to retire when you feel your job isn't done. If Biden needs to step down, even those who didn't vote for Clinton would have confidence in her ability to keep the country on track.
Oh, it's just the thought. But worse ideas have you dealt with?
Confident in her ability to keep the country on track.
Somebody, actually, some pro Clinton person, was like, this should have been the last year of Hillary's presidence.
You know, Oh my god, thank god that didn't happen. I mean, I can't imagine.
Okay, but also just I think on the most basic level, Okay, the most basic level, this woman has a literal track record of losing.
To Donald Trump.
So if you're trying to solve the problem, just the discrete problem of like, we want to beat Donald Trump and we don't think this is the ticket that's really designed to do that, why do you reach to the person who already lost to him.
It's amazing who is arguably less, you know, less popular than Kamala Harris in terms of her negatives, like for unfavorables. Yes, we showed everybody a graphic yesterday. The hate both parties the highest it's ever been was this year, this election. Guess what the previous hire it's ever been Hillary. It's like, why would you pick somebody who explicitly is hated by so much of the public that said Hillary's not going away.
She raising some eyebrows, made a surprise appearance at the Tony Awards.
Let's take a listen, great evening.
I have stood on a lot of stages, but this is very special, and I know a little bit about how hard it is to make change. So I'm extremely proud of this original American musical by Shana Taub.
And of course it is about.
Some American originals, the suffragists, who fought so valiantly for so long to give women in our country the right to vote. It's almost impossible to think about what a challenge that was. But now it's an election year and we need to be reminded about how important it is to vote.
You know, she may want to take those words back, given that we just covered the fact that are going to Republicans.
So that's right. Look, I don't know everyone.
I think it's generally like low IQ nonsense when they're like they're going to replace Michelle, They're going to replace and so I don't think that's gonna happen unless Biden literally dies like dies or has a debilitating stoke. And I hope that doesn't happen. But with Hillary, I don't know. She's always positioning herself. She's always working in the angles. That's like the Clinton m O. And she's ready. She's there if she wants to assume. So maybe that's the calculus.
Maybe she enjoys I don't know, she.
Wants a cabinet position the next time around. Oh my god, would you put it out?
Yeah, that's yeah. You imagine we get her back in the cabinet. That'd be a nightmare.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
The ticket is what it is like all this the fantasy I've our position on this show has always been that Joe Biden is going to be you know, is not going to leave.
He is.
There's no you know back room where they're plotting this up himount for Michelle Obama or you know Ryan's idea they're gonna put in Barack Obama on the ticket with them or whatever. Like Ryan doesn't think that's going to happen. He's just saying they actually want to win. That would be a smart maneuver. None of that is, None of that is happening. This is the ticket. You know, it's not gonna be Hillary it's not gonna be Michelle Obama.
That's the weird Conservatives are obsessed with this idea that they plot weird to sub in Michelle Obama. And yeah, you know that. I think you guys have a lot more confidence and like the desire of the Democratic Party to actually win than you should have.
So in any case, that's where we are.
That's right. Oh and one other thing we want to get in here this day. Driving me nuts.
The White House spin on the Biden videos is they've convented a new term. So you Chris will remember misinformation that you know, took over everything, then industry, Yeah, misinformation, then disinformation, right, then there was malinformation. Malinformation is video is information that is true but it's bad information or it's not complete. So you guys will remember the term deep fake.
Right.
So now the White House is done is they have coined a new term served up by their media masters and they're working together called cheap fake, where it is a video that they don't like and doesn't for both podcasts.
So we have a video.
Here of the White House talking about how angry they are about these videos showing Biden being old, and they're like, this is so out of context.
This is outrageous. Let's take a list.
Ironically, several recent chief fakes actually attack the president for thanking troops, for thinking troops. That is what they are attacking the president for. Both in Normandy this happened and again in Italy. And I think that it tells you everything that we need to know about how desperate, how
desperate Republicans are here. And instead of talking about the President's performance in office, and what I mean by that is his legislative wins, what he's been able to do for the American people across the country, we're seeing these deep fakes, these manipulated videos, and it is again done in bad faith.
Deep fake they changed that, by the way, because they didn't understand what the term. So there's this guy, Andrew Bates. If anyone has Twitter, I encourage you go to go and follow him. His entire fear is trying to debunk these Biden age videos. And yeah, and she works with the White House. You know, he works at the White House. That's his whole job is just out here and he's like cheap fake, cheap, fake chip, deep fake cheap. These
people have no sense of reality what this is. So anyway, keep an eye out.
You heard it here first.
Cheap fake is the new misinformation, disinformation, whatever, that's what they have to come up with.
And she was specifically responding to the video play.
Yes, in full context, by the way, show everybody play the whole video.
Yeah, but yeah, like you said, and so even to call it a deep fake, is it autrageous?
That word has a meaning. Yes, The meaning is that it's actually altered, right, and.
It's fundamentally we said manipulated. That's not manipulated video. Okay, you could say it wasn't clipped right out of context. You know, words half meaning the actually do not to these folks. So anyway, cheap fake, you guys heard it here. That's the new mal information. Just wait, you're gonna see it everywhere. I already do Google chief fake. This morning, Washington Post stories citing the cheap fake PolitiFact, cheap fake videos of Joe Biden.
It's everywhere. It's this is the new media that we live in.
Just flasting on this. It would be one thing. You might have some credibility to say that if it was one moment, thank you, Yeah, who played you multiple just yesterday, We've played you multiple moments that are you know him wandering him, dazed him confused, doing weird you know head thing with the pope Like anyway, people, we're not stupid.
Like that behind the wheel, squint that way change land change.
Even Democrats the number one word they associated.
Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, that's reality.
Thank You's not a cheap fake.
This is a big electoral issue, So economy number one. We've seen a lot of the polling sometimes immigration this now immigration at the very least number two, genuinely number one for GOP voters. There's been some interesting shifts in coalitions to put this up there on the screen. This was a new poll from the CBS You Go America that is conducted June five to June of it and
actually asks about mass deportation. So it says a majority of registered voters favor a quote new national program to depart all quote his words, undocumented immigrants currently living in the US illegally, sixty two to thirty eight percent. But the real shock, I guess to the people here in the media is that even among Hispanics, a majority of them now favor mass deportation at fifty three to forty seven.
Let's go to the next part here, because this has been an interesting trend that in the last month or so has really began to materialize where the share of Americans who say that they support mass deportation has basically exploded over the last four years. So you can see there that the top general public number is at fifty one percent. This poll is from a month ago, just by the way, and then we look at it by
race and ethnicity. In this one they found it was fifty six percent of whites, forty five percent of Latinos, and forty percent of Black Americans. But if you look at political affiliation, you have sixty eight percent Republican, forty six percent Independent, forty two percent Democrat, and then generationally there is a massive split. You have Boomers at sixty, gen X at fifty three, Millennials at forty eight, and then gen Z at thirty five. So generationally there is
a big split. But Crystal, I think that this is really over is upturning a lot of the ways that we're watching kind of the media and everybody else grapple with this young and Hispanic move towards Trump, and specifically
also amongst Black Americans. Immigration politics has been flipped over really on its head, where it's both that the you know, first of all, the migrant situation today is just so out of control that, you know, to any previous situation kind of I use the Marx term heightened the contradictions in terms of people really kind of had to choose a sign. But second and foremost, the identitarian view that you could just rely on Hispanics to vote for you
because you were like pro Daca or whatever. That's gone. Those ages are totally gone. Trump obviously broke that in twenty twenty. But I mean, to me, it's just such a titanic shift in the way that people are even approaching the immigrant situation, the migrant situation, and then this blows identitarianism like out of the water, and people are people. I've seen democratic elites responding to the district being like,
what happened. It's like, well, you know, Trump happened, Honestly, rhetoric happened, policy happened.
There's been a lot of stuff that's been happening.
Well, I think I think there's a lot of things that go into this. First of all, your right to note that the biggest divide is not there is a race divide. Yeah, but the biggest divide is actually age, not race.
It's all age.
So you have older people.
Who are you know, increasingly hardline on immigration, and younger people are still, you know, in the same more open and open to increased immigration as they were, say four years ago, back when the whole Democratic Party was embracing that position in opposition to Trump. So I think number one, you do have, you know, just a reality of an
increased number of migrants. Now that has actually gone down over the past couple of months, but notwithstanding, there has been undoubtedly a large surge of migrants in the Joe under the Joe Biden administration. So that's number one. You do have reality of Okay, there's a lot of people coming in, what are we going to do? Number two, you have an increasing sense of economic anxiety that if you look throughund history often pairs with increased views hardline views on immigration.
So you've got that.
But I also think really critical to this is the fact that I mentioned before Democrats under the Trump administration they were very oppositional to the Trump immigration positioning. Now they're trying to position themselves as immigration hardliners. The overwhelming majority of Democratic elites, starting with Joe Biden, and so you basically have both parties making a very similar argument
about immigration. So I'd be curious to see I would bet that the bulk of the movement in openness to policies such as this actually comes from Democrats, because you've got forty two percent of Democrats here in that Axios poll saying that they're open to quote unquote mass deportation under if that was coming under a Trump and then you know way it would be totally different. So the
political landscape there matters a lot. The other thing I want to say about this poll is I think it's important to understand the you know, the shifts in the electorate and how they're thinking about these things and where the issue stands, et cetera. You know, I've done plenty of commentary before. You guys probably already know that. I believe that Biden's immigration mistakes here are fool hardy because for people for whom this is the number one issue,
he's never going to outcompete Trump on this issue. He's going to continue to exacerbate his problems with young and progressive voters. I think that shows up in the polls here as well. So I think it's an electoral loser for him ultimately, but nevertheless, it's important to.
See this polling.
But I also feel about this poll sort of the way that I feel about the polls before Trump was convicted, of people predicting how they would feel about a particular policy. Because it's one thing to you know, telepolsy, like yeah, sure, let's do best deportations. It's another thing when you have the reality of Listen, we're talking about some twelve million
people roughly you're talking about. You're not talking about, you know, criminals or gang members or whatever like caricature of an immigrant, of an undocumented immigrant is. You're talking about people who've been here for ten years, twenty years. You're talking about potentially a million children. You're talking about community members, you're talking about a huge cost. You're talking about, you know, crazy scenes of you know, things that people under the
Trump administration were like sort of repulsed by. You're talking about. Also, if you're serious about this policy, which I don't think anyone is, including Trump, if you're serious about this policy, you're also talking about like economic suicide. A majority of
farm workers in this country are undocumented immigrants. So you know, if you were worried about price hikes during the Biden administration, like that would be nothing compared to if you actually implemented this policy, which is why you know Trump didn't try to do this in his first administration. I don't think he's even dumb enough to do it in a secondministration.
Okay, it's complicated. So first of all, unfortunately I do agree with you. Americans don't have a stomach for mass deportation. It's not going to happen. I'm not the one saying that. You can ask the most hardline right wingers Jesse Kelly, Ryan Gerdusky, who's an immigration hawk, all of us have come to the terms with the you know, no one's no GRAMDMA on TV's gonna be able to watch some kid get sent back, you know, allegedly just because they're with their parents.
It's fine. It is what it is. America is what it is.
That said, there's a lot that you can do Mandatory verify boom. People are not going to stay if they could literally can't work. If you have mandatory verify, If you remove the public charge rule on welfare, people are going to do a lot of self deportation. So that's really the policy that the Trump administration, as I understand it, Trump two would coalesce around. That's our Ryan talking about
that this morning. So in general about the politics and all of that, it's complicated because I would be stupid not to acknowledge.
We just let's put this up there on the screen.
Joe Biden is really leaning into the dynamic that you're talking about. He's got a new policies announcing this morning giving legal status to quote immigrant spouses of US citizens. So, and this is the thorny part of allowing millions of people to live here who are illegal is that now you have millions of people who are US citizens who are then married to people who are illegal immigrants, and whose children are US citizens by birthright citizenship.
So it's like, okay, well, now what the hell do you do?
His new program would quote offer work permits, deportation protections, and open a path to apply for a green card in the future. This is basically like a DACA plus style program. For those who are like think that this is a done.
Deal, there's no way.
It will be challenging the court system, and it will It's going to be months and or years if any of this even makes it through, there'll be rules just like they had with Dacas. But more importantly, this is
the dichotomy of the immigration conversation. So in the previous times, whenever illegal immigration was relatively low, like the Bush and iministration, appetite for basically pathway to citizenship is much much higher these days, when you have some six to eight million people who are here illegally just in the last four years. Not to mention this like crushing migrant insanity across all of the cities. The conversation is all about enforcement, and
the pathway conversation is low. Biden is trying to flip it where he's trying to get some enforcement increase from what you were talking about, at the same time trying to tug on the heartstrings and say, well, what about these folks. Apparently that's everybody who's here illegally. Again, I don't think that any mass deportation program will ever happen. Both Congress will never fund it. That's part of the reason that Trump never did it with the Ice Force.
And it's complicated, but basically the way that works right now is that unless you're like a convicted felon, you're not getting deported, you're basically just left alone. So there's a level of enforcement priority position or whatever it's called.
I do think it's interesting now.
I had been looking for some possible counter evidence to some of the stuff you've been talking about about European parties.
There is one counter example which is interesting. This is a Washington Post as has written out, but it's a common dynamic how progressive Denmark became the face of the anti I migration left, where basically Denmark is one of the only neoliberal left parties that remains in existence in power in Europe, well popularly elected, and it has one of the most hardline immigration stances that exist, including telling like Muslim kids like you're not allowed to pray the
Quran in school or whatever, like some crazy stuff that would never even fly here in the US.
But what I'm saying is that in Denmark, what they.
Successfully at least were able to do is the so called left basically paired and paired off a lot of the anti immigration voters. But they did it five ten years ago, so they have some credibility on the issue and they've been able to be reelected at this point. Though I think that effectively a lot of the policy stuff is irreconcilable. And so the immigration voter is probably going to vote for Donald Trump just because they don't have any other choice.
Absolutely, I mean they do have another. I mean Biden is clearly in some ways there's like a Nixon goes to China a phenomena, or like a Bill Clinton. You know, the Democrat is the one who kills welfare.
If you if the.
Democrats actually you know, were appropriated the money and we're very hardly immocrat, I actually think they could get away with a.
Lot more than Trump could.
Because you see that in the polling Mber Like again, now you have forty two percent of Democrats saying, sure, deport all twelve million undocumented immigrants, which again, like if you take that policy seriously, it's actually insane. The level of surveillance, intrusion, deep state infiltration that would require NASS detention centers, arresting grandma's like you said, kids, hold that the cost in and of itself would be insane.
You know, people, it.
Would it would not fly, Okay, that actual policy, But that just shows you that when you have the Democratic Party and they're just like following the leader, well all they say, they say this is fine, so we'll go
along with it. It actually creates more political space. But you know, to your point, like I think it is very clear Biden's moves with regard to immigration are not going to solve his issue with immigration hardliners because those people are just Republicans at this point, and not just on immigration, right, There's a whole host of issues on
which they likely disagree with Joe Biden. So on the political front, I did want to mention with regard to this executive order because you do have a real you know, you have people have complicated feelings about this issue. So on the one hand, there is a new at least theoretical embrace that again I think if it was implemented, would completely flip, but theoretical embrace of more hardline positions.
But you also had the last poll had seventy four percent of people saying they support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who've been in the country for a lot of years and pass background check.
So I have no.
Expectation that this executive order is going to provoke a backlash outside of you know, people who are just you know, hardline already on immigration. I think if you pull this specific executive order, which, by the way, if it did go into effect and makes it through the courts and all of those things very much up in the air.
Sagas right.
It'll take months for this all to be adjudicated. It's going to be called into question, et cetera. The Biden administration thinks that they have a good legal argument. I don't really know. We'll see, but the estimate I saw is this would apply to some one point three million people, So it's not nothing like this. This would be a significant number of people who would be getting work permits
and a pathway to citizenship. And I you know, based on the polling that I'm seeing, you would have a pretty large majority support for such a program, just as you had very significant large support for the DACA program the other questions they asked. This is a Wall Street Journal poll from like two months ago. Sixty six percent of voters support creating a mechanism for immigrants brought into the country legal is children often called dreamers, to gain citizenship.
Fifty eight percent, according to this poll, back actually increasing the level of legal immigration to the US. So the polling on this and the political dynamics on it is far from from straightforward.
I would say absolutely.
Look, I mean, nobody's saying that anybody supports like shutting things down. I'm not naive, like I just said, my mass deportation, it's not going to happen. I know what this country looks like, I know how television works, how the media works.
But it's not that. It's also I mean the morality. Listen to me.
The morality part is very important. But I also think even Donald Trump would realize, like economically, it.
Would be such a disaster.
Half of farm workers just that's it, no more, you know, crops rotting in the field. If you think prices where I recently like, it would be nothing compared to that. I just take the supply chain issues. You'd have meat processing plants shut down. You'd have you know, construction, like housing costs are already astronomical. You've got some twenty percent of the construction industry that's undocumented immigrants, cooks, restaurants, food prep.
I mean, just the widespread economic chaos would be political and economic suicide.
This way, it's bad for American GDP to go into a trade war with China. I still support it, I fully admit and believe that it is bad for top line GDP.
I think it's bad for a lot of businesses. I don't care. I think it's a good right thing to do. Same thing here.
It's like, so our broken system employs a bunch of people who are here illegally and who are unskilled. It's like, yeah, deportation or forcing them to leave through self deportation matters. Through you verify. Will there be a higher cost, yes, true? Will wages go up?
Yeah?
I do believe that. I mean, will it be bad for Tyson food? Meat processing will cost coort history, chickens stay five.
Dollars, bad food for families who are trying to buy Tyson food?
I agree, Yes, it's true. Yeah, the price will go up. Let's be let's be very real here. The price will probably go up. Do will be a more cohesive society? Will we have better supply and demandage and better wages?
Yeah?
I believe that.
So you sometimes we just have to sit here and like lay out the full truth. And also I believe the full thing should be laid out to the American people, like I said on the China issue, if you ask them, are you willing to pay higher prices?
And your stuff doesn't come from China.
Most people say, yes, there's a lot of polling on this, so on the same thing, it's like, well, what do you want?
What do you want? What country do you want to live in?
So the cohesive society thing I just want to put to the side because I think that's, first of all, I just wildly disagree, Like I mean, actually, the poll numbers support the fact that you don't have. Actually, racial divides have never been less in terms of political partisan identities than at any time I know in our lives. But so I want to put the cohesive society part to the side because I think that is very fraught and also very subjective. But you know, we really disagree
about the economics of this. Sure, First of all, the typical view of just a supply and demand of workers, and so you know, if you increase the supply, it's going to create lower wages.
It's not that there's.
Nothing to that, But the real picture is much more complicated than that, because you know, if you think about, for example, okay, you now have deported or in the process of deporting fifty percent of all farm workers.
All right, Well, that's going to have.
Huge economic implications for those farmers is going to have huge economic implications for the consumers.
It's not really likely to increase.
Wages because why because workers don't really have enough power in the country to be able to claim their share of the you know, economic pie. So that's why I always think it's a red herring to focus on immigration as the soul. And this is I'm not saying this necessarily about you, Socign, because you do embrace unionism and
other things. But most people, most politicians on the right, embrace reducing immigration as the sole path to increasing wages when they have no other demonstrated interest in raising wages in any other policy area. If you look throughout history, most consistently, the thing that has increased wages has been
worker power. If you look at the charts, if you look at you know, when unions started to decline and workers start to have less power and then the New Deal coalition starts to fall apart, that's when you see wages decline. And it's not up and down with regard to what the immigration levels happened to be at that point. So if the actual concern is wages, yeah, I'm not going to deny that levels of immigration have an impact there. I think that would be you know, I think that
would be dishonest. Although again I think it's much more complicated, and if you look at the studies, they would suggest it's much more complicated. But the real thing you would want to do is increase work or power so that they can claim their share of the record breaking corporate profits that we've seen. So, you know, to take up your example with China trade, which I'm also sympathetic to that,
you know, to that direction as well. You know, for me there you have a real which is demonstrated than the pandemic. You have a real problem in this country, which is that we have outsourced so much that we are really vulnerable. And you know, it's a problem for consumers. We saw when the pandemic hit and you couldn't get things and there were short and prices escalated, et cetera.
But even more to the point, you know, we were making our own face masks, like our industrial capacities and so stripped that it really creates a national vulnerability and I don't see a better way to deal with that. Then, you know, some of the near shoring and friend shoring, and you know, reshoring and some of the programs, the industrial policy that's being engaged in under Joe Biden, which
does have the potential to somewhat increase prices. Here, if your concern is wages, I see way better ways to go about this that aren't you know, cruel, and don't require massive expansion of the deep state, and are much less costly, and are ultimately you know, and don't massively you know, create potential hyperinflation in food prices and meat prices and housing prices, et cetera. So to me, you know,
the solution of all let's just shut down immigration. It doesn't make sense for that to be the solution if the problem you're trying to.
Solve is wages, I think it's a yes.
And I mean if you look at a lot of those times, there are also at times where we had historically low levels of immigration or it's what type of country do you live in at that time, So it's very unfair to compare high levels of immigration combined with a mass industrial economy. We have six to eight million people who have arrived in this country in the last four years, who we are lucky if they are literate
in Spanish. Let our own English, don't speak any English in a society which is rapidly de industrializing and going towards a service based economy and knowledge based economy.
It just doesn't work.
It's one of those where then there is a huge amount of competition in the lower wage and lower skilled sector. So not only that million billions of dollars being thrown at basically, you know, allowing these people to live here rent free and charity wise. I mean you can look it up if they unless they have a work permit, they literally aren't have to live on charity, which.
Is right, why should permit?
But why should they have work permits? You arrive here at it's bullshit? I mean they're coming here from countries. By the way, El Salvador just solved all of its crime problems. Do you know what the crime rate and is now? It's lower than like Manhattan, so you can go back. You don't have to fear for your life anymore. Honduras is building a ten thousand person prison to implement
the exact same thing. This, this whole idea that these countries can't solve their own problems, which they are now solving, is now is bs like this TPS status for people who've been living here. But again thy five thirty years, it's outrageous.
But again, so you view migrants as a net negative. I don't view migrants as a net negative whatsoever.
It depends on the migrant, it depends on who are But come on a second.
We have a looming demographic issue in this country, as do all developed nations, of an aging population and a dwindling workforce, aged population and the native born population is you know, you're the first point out. Yeah, birth rates are a lot, right, we don't have a replacement rate.
Places.
I've lived in places in the country that have seen the population and go away. Those places are in crisis, Like we need workers. We need workers. So you know, the idea that they're just a burden and a drain, well, a core part of the problem is the fact that
you know, they do need work permits. They need to be able to work, not in the shadows, so they're not exploited, which does have larger impacts than on the low wage workforce, because if you can get an undocumented worker who's being paid under the table and not going to take you to OSHA, if you're violating labor laws, et cetera, that's a much larger issue. So listen where
I am personally. I don't know if I'm quite ready to go where Ryan is with the full open borders, because if you think you have an open border guy, which I respect, but you know, I do have questions about, Okay, well, if you just did open boards, how many people are we talking about it, and how many can you really, you know, deal with There is a limit I think to the capacity at one given time. But significantly increasing the legal pathways to citizenship here I am wildly in
favor of. I think it'd be good for the country. Obviously, be good for those mirants, but more importantly, I think it'd be good for the country.
I think it would be good overall for workers.
I think it has to be paired with a stronger labor movement, which we're already seeing come into fruition. But you know, just to talk about the last few months, like, we have had very high levels of migration, as you would point out, over the past few months, and we also have had wages for the first time in quite a while that have risen at a faster pace than inflation. So if migration was just the like blanket disaster for workers and that was the reason to deport everybody. And
you know, lock the gates, et cetera. That hasn't been the experience of our economy just over the past you know, year several months.
I looked, it's been twenty five year issue.
This is not you know, we can't put three months of data and say that's indicative of everything.
If we By the way, if the.
Biden administry, I call them the Biden administration, to release the true economic number, how much we have spent on these people. Get on an airplane these days, I'm flying from Phoenix. Half the guys on the plane are illegal getting paid with taxpayer citizens with their little packets flying to watch to DC because they get free whatever shell.
They don't want to be charity case.
They work.
To pay work, pay taxes.
By the way, you are welcome to work in the country that you're born in. You know, otherwise you can apply for a quote unquote path.
But these aren't like people who want to be welfare moutures. But they are wanting their work, They want to contribute. They do pay taxes overwhelming. I do not begrudge them for wanting to work here.
Everybody wants to work here over a billion people who've been pulled over the United in the world say they want to move to the United States. But that's why I would say to Ryan, that's insane. You can't allow a billion people to move here, and nor should we. The demographic argument is a different one, and that's one where again, we should be able to choose who gets to come here and or not, and what type of society and people that we want to allow into our
economy and thus become future citizens. That is something that should be decided by democracy, not based on whether you can walk across Mexico and pay a drug smuggler to enter the United States.
To lead again, why are off somebody from Africa?
All right, so it's not fair. Let's bring in more people from Africa. That's when I'm down.
Actually, let's be lots of Africans now flying to Mexica.
There you go, so it's more egalitarian. You should be happy.
That's not again, Listen, the reality is that in terms of migration, if you look not just now, but historically, like people typically want to go to countries that are nearby. In fact, there's far more migration between South different South American countries than there are South American migrants coming here because there's more cultural infinity, You're more likely a family, ties, etc. And so you know, it's not just the fact that
you happen to be able to walk there. It's also that you're more likely to want to move to a
place that is closer. But you know, the bottom line for me also is just when I look at the when I look at the immigrants that I know in my life, when I look at the contributions of immigrants across society, I think we would be so foolish to not embrace the contribution of a group of people who just my nature, like, is not an easy thing to pick up your whole life and move somewhere and try to make it and know that like they are in a lot of ways. I know this sounds hokey, but
I really feel this. They are in a lot of ways like the embodiment of the American dream. And to shut your doors to that, to like, you know, kick out people who have been here in ten, in twenty years, who have families, who are deeply enmeshed in society, who
are contributing members of their communities. I don't just think it's wrong morally, I think it would be so catastrophic in terms of the economics and politics of society that again, even Trump didn't contemplate such a draconian move in his first time, and wouldn't contemplate such a draconian move because he relied on undocumented immigrants in his own businesses. So this is a man who is acquainted with the reality.
Of what needs to occur.
I think the way actually works.
I support a law called everify, which would require Donald Trump and all employers to verify that their employees are not immigrants.
I support easy that plus a much large legal If you have a much higher level of legal migration, where there's an actual pathway to citizenship, you're in a much less chaos at the border. You can then have more enforcement. Right, there's a path here that you know, there's a way to do this, and you're not doing it the right way as of now. You just have you know, it's completely broken down for people coming from most countries, there is no pathway to citizenship. We all know the asylum
process is completely broken. And so you know, that's how you end up with Americans looking at and saying like, ah, we got to do something.
Here, Okay, well, agree to disagree. I'm not going to solve it here. As usual, the immigration section goes on first. It will contact the producers are but yeah, maybe Trump will win and we'll get to find out.
All right, that could be an interesting possibility.
All right, let's go to the debate section and talk about how CNN is rigging the debate rules.
Let's put it up there on the screen. So what do we have here?
They have announced the official mutually agreed upon rules. Biden and Trump have agreed to mic muting to podiums and in an empty stage. So quote the debate, which will be hosted by CNNs Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, who we will get to later in the show. Well mark the very first in person showdown of twenty twenty four campaign. Now, the rules that the two have agreed upon include two commercial breaks. The campaign staff will not be allowed to
interact with their candidate during that time. Both candidates will appear at the uniform podium. Their podium positions will be determined by a coin flip. Microphones will be muted throughout the debate, except for the candidate whose turn it is to speak, while no props or pre written notes will be allowed on the stage.
Candidates will be given a pen and a pad of paper and a bottle of water.
Some aspects of the debate, including the absence of studio audience, will be a departure from previous As in the past, moderators quote will use all tools at their disposal to enforce timing and ensure a civilized discussion.
But here let's get into the nitty gritty.
In order to meet CNN's qualifications for the debate, candidates must satisfy requirements outlined in Article two, Section one of the US Constitutions Service President. Both Biden and Trump meet those requirements, as does RFK Junior, Cornell West, and Jill Stein. Participants must file a formal statement of candidcy to the FBC.
All five have done, so here's where they get RFK.
All participating debaters must appear on a sufficient number of state ballots to reach two hundred and seventy electoral vote threshold to win the presidency and receive at least fifteen percent in four separate national polls of registered or likely voters that meet CNN standards for reporting. Okay, so let's be very clear here about the polling in the two seventy requirement. Because here is how they are getting RFK.
Let's go to the next part please. As you can see clearly, the Kennedy campaign has said he's submitted thirty three hundred signatures in Minnesota. On Friday listed the states nineteen states with two hundred and seventy seventy eight electoral votes where he claims ballot access, but at least half of those states have not yet verified that his submission
is valid. So that, crystal is how they are really rigging it because outrighteous this because officially he's not on the ballot in those states half of those states, which why do they have any incentive to approve him in the interim?
Why would you do it?
They're like, no, we're keeping him off of the debate stage. He technically has qualified. He's going to qualify for two hundred and seventy eight electoral votes absence some crazy shenanigans.
So this is my other thing too, when you look at.
The rules, why is it that you're allowed to pull up to fifteen percent in non you know, there's no such thing as public polling in NBC poll whatever pole, So we can take like non official polling but officially you have to be on the ballot in for two hundred and seventy yeah votes, How does that make any sense?
It sound right.
It is just straight up rigged, like to keep him out.
That's right.
It's one hundred percent rigged to keep him out, There's no doubt about it. They're trying to put a pretense of neutrality on it, but they've made the criteria such that it is literally impossible for him or any other third party candidate to be able to to gain access under that criteria, because yeah, these states are all run
by Democrats or Republicans. Neither group wants RFK Junior to be on that stage or to be on their ballots, by the way, and so they can drag their fee and take as long as they want to certify his signatures, et cetera. And so yeah, this is their mechanism in order to make it appear like, oh, we have these neutral criterion, you just didn't meet it. I'm sorry, you know, try harder next time. No, you made it literally impossible,
and it is outrageous. I mean, I'm not surprised or we knew the moment that CNN announced that they were doing this debate and Trump and Biden greed, et cetera.
Et cetera.
We knew what it was going to look like.
But you know, this should be something, these debates should be something that is really protected in a democracy, you know, But the Biden people want to talk all about preserving democracy, et cetera, et cetera. It is dramatically anti democratic to block out the most significant third party candidate that we've had, what since Ross.
Perot, literally since Rossboro. So it's ninety ninety two, so it's.
Fifteen percent in multiple polls. You have a lot of we covered earlier the number of quote unquote deciders, people who you know are still contemplating which way they want to go. A disproportionate number of them are open to RFK Junior, And you just want to shut out the ability of American people to hear what this man has to say. Now, you guys know, I'm not an RFK Junior fan. I'm not voting for him. I got all kinds of issues with him. So this isn't about him
his politics, but support for him specifically. This is about a democratic process that they have no regard for, and it really is outrageous. People should be outraged and they
should be disgusted. And CNN knows that if they actually understood what was happening, it would be a problem for them, which is why they go to lengths to try to hide the fact that they just rigged it and made it impossible for him or again anyone else, any other third party candidate to have a chance of making it on that stage.
And it's not fair too, because the Trump people are like, he's in this to hurt Trump. The Biden people are like, he's in this to hurt Biden. By his own words, he's in this to hurt quote unquote, I want to be damaging to both candidates. He's really running on his own name.
Take a listen to his recent comments on Piers Morgan.
If the three way race occurred today, president Trump wins, and if I if I drop out of that race, president Trump wins even more. He wins two extra states, which are would be Maine and Virginia. So I think my presence in the race helps President vind at this point, I'm hoping in the long run that I'll be very
damaging to both of the candidates. So but also, you know, all of our palling is showing that I'm bringing in a lot of people who had given up on the political process, people who weren't going to vote this this cycle if I am not in the race.
So there you go, he says, I'm hoping in the long run that I'll be very damaging to both of the candidates. He's not, you know, the ammunition that both of these people really want for him, which is why it's kind of and the more he plays into that, the better off I think he's going to be. Because that gets to the critical I hate both parties demographic, which, as you and I just saw yesterday, that's a full twenty five percent of the entire electorate. That's huge. There's
tens of millions of people. If he was on the ballot in all fifty states. I mean, I'm not saying I would win any single state.
But I think he would get a good portion of the vote. I think you get twenty twenty five?
Do you think so?
Yeah? I think so.
I don't think so, but I think he would.
Get twenty five.
I think he would.
I think it would get double digits potentially in that astonishing right. I mean, double digits would be would be very significant and a real break from you know, recent history. I just say that because I do think when you come down to it, people recognize the sys to political system we're in, and that unfortunately, we're in a position where you really, at the end of the day, it's gonna be one of the other, and people kind of feel like, all right, well, I got to pick between
one of them. Third party candid support falls off, et cetera. Not to mention that because he so far, the polls are really mixed about who he quote unquote takes more from. And I think he's right that a significant number of his voters too just probably wouldn't vote yes otherwise, So I think he's correct about that. But it has been very mixed over which side he takes more from, which
means that he's also taking incoming from both sides. And I do think, you know, at a certain point that we've already seen that he's taken on water from that. If you look at his polling over time, there has been a downward trend as he's getting hit by the Democrats and by the Republicans, and so you know, I
think I think that's been a challenge for him. The other challenge for him, I think Dave Smith made this point, and I think he's right about this, is he had a very compelling and very unique positioning as a quote unquote anti war candidate when he was speaking out strongly against Ukraine, and then when October seventh happened, and he is, you know, at least as like zionist in pro Israel
as Joe Biden, let alone Donald Trump. I think that really undercut his appeal among people who not only are anti war, but who just have that instinct of like, why are we spending all this money over here when we got problems back at home. I do think that his you know, the fact he isn't at all differentiated from Biden or Trump when it comes to, you know, the key foreign policy issue of our of the time right now, I think that is really limited his appeal.
I think it's especially limited his appeal among young people, who otherwise, I believe would have been quite open to him. And so he also in that Peers Morgan interview, you can just hear like even now he's against a ceasefire, which does actually technically put him to the right of Joe Biden on this issue as well, really hasn't changed his tune at all vis a vi Israel. Let's take a listen to how he sounds today.
Yeah, what point does this desperation to eliminate the last members of her mass get overtaken by the sheer volume of civilians being killed in the process, which I cannot believe will do anything longer term than ferment the ideology that drove for mass in the first place.
Yeah.
I mean, you're asking a lot of questions, and I you know, I'd like you to give me time to answer them, you know, and you could ask the same You brought up Nazi Germany as a kind of an analogy for what's happening in the middies and not, you know, in nineteen forty five or forty four, at Casablanca, A. Churchill and Roosevelt had an argument because Roosevelt said, we have to denacify Germany, and if we don't denosify Germany, it is going to you know, the Nazis is going
to rise up and do the same thing.
Again.
Churchill did not want an unconditional surrender for the Nazis. He said, we'll have to kill too many civilians to do that, and everybody will fight for the death. But Roosevelt won that argument. We killed about about two million Germans during World War Two in order to get to Berlin and d Nazi. Today, Germany is the richest country in Europe. It's one of the most powerful economies in the world. I think it's the fourth most powerful. And
nobody's scared of Germany because of the peaceful country. So I don't see how people who are saying, well, you should have a ceasfire, then what and what you've You've rewarded Hamas for taking hostages, and they're going to keep taking hostages to get more and more advantage.
So in any case, he really hasn't changed his tomb. We're still doing the World War two Nazi comparisons. I guess theoretically then we should be maybe, you know, considering nukes in Gaza, as others have also suggested. And you know, I just I do want to grapple directly with this idea that you can be quote unquote rewarding Hamas if you had a ceasefire agreement. You know, allegedly Hamas doesn't
want a two state solution. Allegedly Hamas doesn't care about Palestinian civilians, So in what way does it quote unquote reward Hamas.
To have a ceasefire.
I mean, it's also just at this point, it's like, how many people, how many dead civilians is acceptable to you because we are at just insane levels of death and destruction annihilation, you know, far more than actually dressed in in World War Two.
But in any case, this is where he is.
He's not moving is even now he's against a ceasefire. This is this is not a popular position, by the way. I mean, if you look at the country, if you ask what percentage of people are in favor of a ceasefire, it is overwhelming majorities in support. And so somehow his you know, anti war positioning and his rhetoric about you know, wanting to spend that money instead of overseas, focusing it at home, there's a big old car vaunt when it comes to Israel.
Yeah.
Look, I mean, I guess the only thing you can say about it is he definitely believes it, because there would be really no other reason to say it at this point electorally.
So.
At the same time, Titanic story in the state of New Jersey, in a plot line straight out of the Sopranos, where a democratic power broker is accused of working with real estate developers to jack up prices on the city waterfront, and then attends the press conference where the new Jersey Attorney General indicts him to his face, let's take a lesson.
We're here today to announce the unsealing of a thirteen count indictment charging George Norcross with leading a criminal enterprise, of which his five co defendants in this case, along
with several unindicted co conspirators, were allegedly members. The state alleges that defendants George Norcross, Philip Norcross, William Tambussi, the former mayor of Camden, Dana Redd, Sidney Brown, and John O'Donnell committed the crime of first degree racketeering conspiracy, among other offenses, to further the purposes of the Norcross Enterprise.
The abandoned industrial sites along the Campden Waterfront had the potential to serve as the city's salvation, but, as the state alleges, the Norcross Enterprise manipulated government programs and processes designed to attract development and investment to instead suit their
own financial desires. Instead of contributing to the successes of the City of Camden, through a series of criminal acts alleged in the state's case, the Norcross Enterprise took the Camden waterfront all for themselves, as George Norcross himself allegedly said, quote, this is for our friends.
End quote, this is for our friends. The details of this nuts, let's put this up there on the screen. It is so funny. In this recorded phone call, he literally has a developer who asked him on the phone, are you threatening me? And that he says absolutely recorded phone call and look, let me just repeat like this is this quite literally is a plot line out of
the Sopranos. The indictment accuses mister Norcross of bullying rival developers who were trying to capitalize on a push to revitalize the waterfront in Camden, a poor city outside of Philadelphia, long plagued by violent crime. And they talk about how he showed up to the press confer like I said, we have a photo of that.
Actually, if we want to put that look out, it's right there in front row.
As he gets redicted, Yeah, I know this is I don't know what's happening in this country, but whatever he's bringing his he lives in Florida right now, so apparently he's bringing his Florida bullshit to New Jersey. That's not how we dressed in our suits here in the East Coast, mister Norcross. But you know what we see here is that Norcross basically controlled the state for twenty years. He was reportedly quote a close friend of House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi and also a member of mar A Lago. Now, I mean, this is the epitome of the wheeler dealer. The state of New Jersey never elected to anything major to Chris Christie, too super close to Chris Christie. He knows everybody who is in the state, has helped half the governors of the last twenty years get elected, and
he's milked them for millions and millions of dollars. And it's just shocking to me that that it almost fills like the meme and the like the fictional the fictional plot lines, and it's all actually happening in reality.
It's like, that's what this was. It's the real story that we could see very clear.
Yeah. No, I mean the movies get their ideas from somewhere, right. We actually just finished rewatching Sopranos, so straight out over there. Oh, it's so it is so great. We watched Boardwalk Empire this year as well.
Great show.
Straight out of there as well. This corruption Neil straight out of there as well. The wire They also had their property.
And why is waterfront always being revitalized?
This is just this is classic bread and butter corruption because yeah, it's like, okay, well, the government officials have advance knowledge of this big revitalization effort or whatever, and then they controlled the bidding process to make sure it's their friends and their buddies who were positioned to cash in on this new development. And this guy got away with it for years because he was buddies with Chris Christy, he was buddies with the Democrat and he was buddy
he was with Nancy. But he was connected across He was truly bipartisan, truly by parts of real unifier across both the parties, even though obviously because Democrats usually aren't control of New Jersey is more closely affiliated with the Democratic Party. Was just like South Jersey power broker again
across the aisle. It was only when he sort of got crosswise with the new administration that suddenly this became an issue, and so he and the current Governor Phil Murphy apparently they were at it and then this attorney general who's announcing this prosecution.
They had issues with each other.
Now, reportedly, according to the news article that I read, he and Phil Murphy, though the governor, have reportedly reconciled, and perhaps part wise because Phil Murphy is now doing his own tax credit development scheme, so maybe he doesn't want to be so critical of what was going on here with Norcross at this point now that he may also be vulnerable to these charges of political favoritism. Just suggesting that that could be something that's going on in the background.
Here're not too sure.
It's like, is it possible to do business in this state and just not.
He's doing business, you know, yeah, It's like, oh, he's doing business.
Do business in the state, and people can get elected and people don't have to be constantly bilking water at this point, any waterfront development.
I'm like, this is a scam, like anything that's happening in front of this thing.
So anyway, well, Trump might have to I'll say about that, well, you certainly.
A spokesperson for mister Murphy said the governor had no comment. In addition to mister Norcross, his brother was also charged again fulfilling the the mean. His lawyer was charged to the CEO of the quote Camden Community Partnership, a chief executive of the trucking and logistics company, and someone who
had been in the executive leadership of residential development. So again literally out of the mob, you have trucking logistics, you have waterfront development, real estate, you have tax dollars being illegally allegedly funneled across. And then you have this man who is so flagrantly like working the system that he shows up to his own indictment press conference. And remember with Menendez, Menendez got off. You know, this guy, he's got a lot of strings. He's probably helped, got
a lot of judges on the bench. I wouldn't count him out just yet. This is a state case is on his turf. He may survive.
You never know.
He's got a few million in the bank. You know, it probably cost two million to defend. He's probably made twenty million or whatever off the deal. Probably a good transaction.
Apparently he's also threatening to run as an independent, Oh smart, which would you know, could scare the Democrats, and then that could you be used as like a chit to try to you know, work the system in terms of his political issues.
So that's the theory of what he's up to at this point.
But you know, when I ran for Congress, I'm doing my what they call call time where you're like cycling through trying to beg these people for money a day in and day out.
Which is horrible.
And you get a list, you get a sheet that has at this you know, this was fifteen years ago, so I'm sure the process has changed somewhat. But me so, you get a sheet that all their political giving history, so you can see, you can get a sense of their ideality. Oh, they gave to the you know, conservationally, they're environmentalists, they gave to Emily's Lost, They you know, are into women in pro choice or whatever. And you can see what Democrats they gave to a Republicans. And
I was so naive at this point. I would see these people who gave like fifty to fifty Republican a Democrat, like.
How does that make any sense?
How does it make any sense?
This is how it makes sense because and it was a lot of times it would be like developers, you know, because they want to be connected and have access and have that forward knowledge, that insider knowledge of what's coming up. They want to be in line to get you know, priority picking when there is a bidding contract process, or when you've got the opportunity to get these tax credits, et cetera. They want to be the front of the line. They want you to pick up their calls, whether they
don't care whether they're a Democrat or a Republican. They're a member of the Green Party, but not the one that Jill stat is affiliated with, the one that is the color of our money. So you want to talk about some of the real influencers in high roles or politics, they look a lot like the dude right here.
Yep, very exactly.
That's why we covered it because it's like, this is the real insight how do politics works? Yeah, those fifty to fifty guys, they're not doing it and out of the goodness of their heart.
It's just all about business. So yeah, there you go.
And astonishing bombshell report coming out of Israeli media. This was actually first obtained by an Israeli public broadcaster. You know, there has long been discussion of what the IDF and the Israeli government may have known in advance of October seventh, you had a group of actually mostly women, who were observing preparatory activities of Hamas in advance of October seventh,
who claimed they had warned their superiors or basically ignored. Well, now we have an IDF document that has been revealed that was distributed two weeks before October seventh, that had granular details of the way that October seventh would unfold. I'm going to play you the report that aired in Israeli media. It was originally in Hebrew. We have a dubbed English version. Now, we hadn't been able to specifically
verify this translation. However, we did check the key details and they match up with other reporting, which is why we feel comfortable showing it to you, But just wanted to give you that disclaimer that we have not been able to officially verify this dubbed English translation. Nevertheless, let's take a listen to this.
Report, almost nine months to the return in October, while the IDEF still hasn't published the investigations of the default, we are tonight revealing the intelligence document of eight hundred minus two that was distributed only two weeks before that Sabbath and gave the Southern Command an accurate picture of the raid plan on the OTEF, including the exact number of abductees, that was rehearsed in advance by the terrorists.
The document that came to us was compiled in the Gaza Committee and was given the title Detailed End to End Raid Training. It was distributed on September nineteen, twenty twenty three, less than three weeks before the Hamas plan went into effect.
Of death.
The person who wrote it reveals in great detail a series of instructions from the elite unit of Hamas, the Nakfa, to attack military outposts Kibbutzim. This document starts by discussing Hamas's military arms company training sequences. Sweating Division's intelligence staff meticulously trailed every tiny detail kim. At eleven in the morning, several companies were observed gathering for the beginning of the faith,
not before prayer and lunch. At twelve, equipment and weapons are distributed to the fighters, and then an exercise of when the company is ready. At two o'clock, the raid practices begin. The authors of the document detail a series of exercises carried out by Hamas forces before the attack ah. The military arm of the organization practice ground and air raids on Israeli territory in front of the eyes of
the members of the Southern Command. The first step in the exercise, according to the document, is to open loopholes in the day Metsali situation built in a strip that's simulates the outposts in the Gaza envelope. After breaching the fence, they attack m The exercise was carried out by four
companies and each company was assigned a different station. The Israeli intelligence officers who followed the exercise formulated in the document the next steps after the break into Israeli territory and the takeover of the outposts, the handing over of the soldiers and prisoners to the company commanders. The expected number of hostages was written between two hundred and two hundred and fifty people. The military targets of the raid
that were also practiced were described in the document. The headquarters of the bases, control and control headquarters, the synagogues at the bases, the squadron headquarters, the communications headquarters, roiure systems, and the residences of the soldiers and female soldiers. And if what you have seen so far is not creepy, enough.
Now it turns out that the intelligence of the Southern Command and the Gaza Strip was not only aware of the Hamas kidnapping plan, but in that document there is an ex exact breakdown of the conditions of the hostages detention, including instructions for the kidnappers and what to do in an extreme case, how to hold them and under what conditions the kidnappers can be executed.
So you can hear from that report the level of detailed knowledge that they had just two weeks before October seventh.
We can put this Jerusalem.
Post report up on the screen that again verifies a lot of the key details. And that report that dubbed English report we just brought you they say. For example, report detailed that Israeli intelligence officials monitored the Hamas exercises, documented the steps Hamas planned to take after breaching is Really territory and taking over military posts, the expected number
of hostages. According to the documents, between two hundred and two hundred and fifty people quote Israeli intelligence officials who monitor the exercise detail the next steps after breaching into Israel taking over the post. Determining that the instruction is to hand over the captured soldiers to the company commanders. The expected number of hostages, it states, is between two hundred and two hundred and fifty people. Now, we just to go back to that time, Soccer, because we talked
about this a lot at the time. We've known from reporting early on that they had some indications that Hamas was planning something. We did not know the level of detail that they had, and it makes even more insane the decision to move a number of IDF soldiers from that area around the Gaza envelope to the West Bank to protect settlers, so leaving them exposed. And not only was there no anticipation, no planning, the security response on
that day was an utter disaster. We now have confirmed that some of the Israelis who were killed on that day it was by the Hannibal director directive by friendly fire.
But not only is that make that decision completely insane and outrageous from an Israeli security perspective, it also makes the decision, if you remember this at the time the Nova Music Festival where so much of the so many of the massacres and whrrors of the you know, atrocities committed on October seventh occurred and so many of the
hostages were taken and people brutally murdered. That festival was supposed to be over, and the festival organizers had petitioned the IDF in Israeli government to extend for a further day, and even having this document in their hands, knowing what was being planned, they allowed it to be extended a further day and it ends up being this you know,
soft target that is the location of some horrific massacres. So, you know, as bib Net Yahoo is fighting for his political life and had really he was mister security his whole thing.
I can control the level of the flame.
He also directly propped up and you know, supported effectively Hamas being there because it served his interests of keeping the West Bank and the Gaza stripped of I did, and then he could point to them, saw we have no partner for peace, like he liked this state of affairs.
So I have to think domestically in Israel, as there's increasing reckoning over what transpired on October seventh, how this was able to occur given the massive investment in security and high tech weaponry, all of that on the Israeli side, that this is going to be a very challenging piece of information for BB and Ana.
No question is this is why he wants the war to continue, because then we just stop asking questions what about this? What about the intelligence chief? Why were all the troops in the West Bank? Why didn't if he knew so much about it? I mean, this is basically on par with nine to eleven. This is I was telling our producer before. This is on par with bin Laden determined to attack the US intelligence about multiple agents here in the US. CIA know these guys have US
visas living here in Los Angeles. Saudi's basically knowing and helping some of the nine to eleven hijackers. Every piece was there to prevent the attack if we wanted, and somebody looked the other way, we decided to invade Iraq and then everybody just.
Forgot about it. But that's what they want. That's why he want some war with Lebanon. That's his Iraq. He just wants everybody to move on, right, That's it, That's exactly right.
At the same time, we wanted to highlight for you, you know, as we focus on the US's role in all of this and how we're getting you know, dragged further and further back into the Middle East, not that we had ever extricated ourselves, Kenklippenstein. With this report, Ken again has gone independent. Support him over at his sub stack, but he gets this scoop. Biden deploys record number of troops to Jordan in a quiet build up. And you know, there are now a record three eight hundred and thirteen
American troops in Jordan. That's according to the White House's War Powers Report to Congress that it just released. That is a six hundred and twenty five troop increase over December, with the number of soldiers and airmen exceeding the number at any time since the Second Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq. A review of past War Powers reports reveals.
And it's just something to keep an eye on.
And if you look, he has a chart Zaga that shows the numbers of American troops in Jordan over the years, and this is the steepest increase that we have seen over the time period that he tracks.
Yes, it's crazy, it's one which again, why are these guys even here for Syria, for Israel?
What is it?
Do you should tell Congress report to the American people. But they just get away with it. They just you know, the troops go over there, nobody ask any questions. Yeah, then three of them end up dead, and then we just keep sending more troops over right, and nobody asked.
Yeah, these individuals are at risk.
Literally no, I mean three of them died. About that, they already died. People died. We all just completely moved on from it.
It's nuts, Yeah, that's right.
So we also had to bring to you some outrageous propaganda courtesy of CNN. You know, I really wish they would stop saying the stuff so we could stop talking about it. But as you guys know October seventh, as we just discussed, there were genuine war crimes, atrocities, massacres.
Which were committed.
However, there were also incidents that the Israeli government promoted that turned out.
To be lies.
There were the beheaded babies, there was the baby cut out of the woman's stomach, etc. Okay, And among what appears to be those fabricated tales was the story of mass rape as a weapon of war used by Hamas on October seventh. Now this is not my words, this is now the indications of that Times of London report that I brought to you. This is what Pramila Patten
at the UN. This is what she said that the recent UN report that came out also confirmed that while there was gender based there are indications of gender based violence. The allegations of rape, mass rape, rape as a weapon of war are unfounded, unproven at this point, lacking evidence. Okay, now, you would think that would be important to a news organization, but if it's CNN or really any other of them,
it's not. So you have Dana Bash setting up a segment with Debbie Wasserman Schultz in which she proceeds to lie about seeing photos that do not exist in service of promoting a Kamala Harris propaganda press conference about similar content. So let's take a listen to the segment and we can react on the other side.
What's worse to get kidnapped, to be raped, or to get shot. That is a quote from Tolly Beiner.
It's what she said.
She was asking herself. I'm amid the chaos at the Nova Music Festival in Israel on October seventh, and she was a lucky one. She was able to hide from Hamas Terris as they raped and slaughtered scores of people people attending the festival to listen to music and to promote peace. More than two hundred civilians were taken hostage that day, including women brought into Gaza and sexually assaulted.
Hamas used sexual violence and continues to use it as a weapon of war, is violating women, Israeli women, and I hosted a forum with the Second Gentleman on Capitol Hill a few months ago, and the Israeli police came and showed us videos that were taken by Hamas terrorists themselves engaging in the kind of sexual violence that Cheryl's film shows, cutting off the breasts while raping their victims, and first hand accounts from first responders as well as
others and Israelis who were hiding from Hamas terrorists and the Denihalism is outragels have to we have to make sure that we knock it down.
So CNN should retracted apologize for this segment because those videos do not exist. The congresswoman is lying and again this is not my words. I'm reading from the Pramila Patent.
You when Special Representative Sexual Violence and Conflict Report, she says, the mission team specifically for forensic pathologist the digital analysts reviewed over five thousand photos around fifty hours and several audio files of footage of the attacks provided by various state agencies or an independent online review of various open sources to identify potential instances and indications of conflict related
sexual violence. She goes on to say, while the mission team reviewed that extensive digital material depicting a range of egregious violations, no digital evidence specifically depicting acts of sexual violence with found in open source the videos that DWS is claiming to see. That by the way, Joe Biden has claimed the same thing. Also, they do not exist according to the UN, according to the Times of London,
according to independent researchers, they do not exist. Okay, So again there is a reason why they persist with this, and because they're seeking to justify the atrocities they are committing in Gaza by pointing to these atrocities that they have invented. And again, there were atrocities on October seventh. I am not denying that, but I also require facts and evidence to understand what actually happened on that day.
I do not want to see a genocide justified by DWS and Joe Biden and CNN and others based on videos that they invented in their minds, So you know, at a certain point, so obviously they're railing as the denialists, etc. I'm sure they put me in that camp, even though again I'm just looking at the evidence that's been presented.
And by the way, let me make a distinction here too, there have been hostages who've been released, at least one who is directly testified to sexual assault while she's being held hostage. I think we should all take that very seriously.
Okay.
The allegation, though, that there was systematic weapon of war mass rape deployed on October seventh, has not been supportive, and if the Israeli government has such evidence, if they believe that that actually occurred, they should cooperate with the full independent investigation, which they have comp completely rejected and
failed to do. The last thing I'll say I get your reaction is, of course, we also can't take seriously that these people actually, including Kamala Harris at her event that she just did which screened the Cheryl Sandberg agit prop documentary quote unquote about this as well, that they actually care about sexual violence in any context. Let alone
in the context of war. Is because we do have evidence that there has been a persistent pattern of sexual violence committed against Palestinian hostages or prisoners or detainees, whatever we want to call them. None of them ever says a word about that, nor do they care about it. So this is all for blatant propaganda purposes, which is why it irritates.
Me so much.
Yeah, and it should. And now we've got Kamala Harris jumping in. Let's put this up there on the screen.
Kamala Harris is launching initiatives to provide support for quote sexual violence survivors, launching Dignity and Documentation initiative addressing global conflict related sexual violence and supporting them through you and efforts and leadership programs, but pegging it specifically to October seventh, and after a partial screening of quote Sheryl Sandberg's documentary film Screams Before Silence.
Soah, And also from Kamala, not a word at this This event is not supposed to just be.
About Israel R.
She mentioned, and again also without evidence that Hamas had committed rape and gang rape at the Nova Music Festival. Again, there is no evidence, according to the un no evidence to back up those claims. She claims that this event is about conflict related gender based violence everywhere, not one mention of the confirmed reports with regards to Palestinian. So obviously you can't take these people seriously in their supposed
care and concern and desire for accountability whatsoever. It's purely for their own naked propaganda purposes, and it's frankly disgusting. There you go.
As some longtime listeners may know, I love credit cards and credit card points. There is almost no way that I get more value from it compared to the value of the time that I put in. But few who dabble understand the absolute high of getting one up on the man and flying first class internationally for free. It's a hobby and I enjoy it partially because I hate the banks and I love at least the idea of getting one up on them, and because I'm in this world.
A card that's been making the rounds for a few years now is the Built Card. It has one of the best point value redemptions in the game for anyone who rents, and it has spurred their founder, Onen Core Jane, to a billion dollar plus net worth The only problem has been nobody can really figure out how does this company make money?
Why?
How did they somehow figure out a scheme that nobody else could make work well? A New Wall Street Journal expose reveals how exactly they made this work, and it is absolutely delicious for those who don't know. Built's major pitch to consumers is that you can pay your rent and you can get points for doing so on the card. Usually landlords don't take credit cards because they don't want
to eat processing fees. Built boasts that you can do so that they will eat the fee and they will mail a check to the landlord.
That way, everybody wins.
Landlord gets paid, you get to pay something that you would anyways, and you get to redeem points for potentially thousands of dollars in value on airlines, shopping, or wherever.
Now you might be asking, wait, how does this work?
It turns out Wells Fargo, the bank that helped Built issue the card, made a huge mistake. They assumed when they were underwriting the card that consumers would not be as savvy as they are. In fact, they assumed most people wouldn't take advantage of the rental provision, and that instead a huge portion of the credit card users would
carry a balance and that they could milk them for interest. Instead, a much smaller portion of card users than normal are carrying a balance, and a massive portion of them are just paying their rent with a card and immediately zeroing out the balance. This means that Wells Fargo is eating the processing fee, which has now led to a whopping ten million dollars a month loss for the bank. Since this card has been around for years, well it means they have lost hundreds of millions.
Of dollars on the program.
The best part is they are locked into this contract until twenty twenty nine, and they are doing their damnedest right now to get out of it, leading to major panic within the bank. Even funnier is that not only are they eating the credit card processing fee, but their contract actually requires them to pay Built every single time
a new person signs up. They assumed that the card would be a lost leader at worst, and that maybe they could just sell mortgages to build customers who are obviously renters, but then high interest rates.
Screwed that up for everybody. I'm not going to leave.
Built unscathed here, though, Even though people should take advantage of their card while they still can Their CEO on Core Jane recently had a gaudy monstrosity of a wedding where he were literally rented out the Great Pyramids of Giza. Has seemingly spent millions and millions of dollars. He has relished in his status as a billionaire, and he has bil built as a massively innovative financial technology company. But now that we know the truth, it makes a lot
more sense. So the last time he was on CNBC, he had a train wreck interview where he could not explain how this company actually made money without outing his insane deal with Wells Fargo.
Take a listen, Let's go back to the math of it, because I do want to understand the economics of it.
So you're collecting a fee.
You're a processing fee transaction fee every time, correct each person?
Which is what percent?
It depends on the type of payment met that you can pay by bank ach you can.
Okay, but we're talking between one and a half and three percent. We're talking Amex style. I mean Amex was three percent, MasterCard was lower.
It really depends if you.
Pay by Amex or pay by visa or pay by master Card.
If your bank was the lowest you can.
Get's right, and so you get different levels.
What's the rate for the lowest if you pay it depends on the landlord too and the property owner.
But just like stripe and any other.
But although, but go back, it's important important piece you go to.
Like a local merchant right right today instead of giving say like a ten percent local discount to bring in local customers on those off hours, off days, they can say, like with American Express, but hey, we want to focus on the neighborhood and if you come in, we can we can fund two, two and a half percent or five percent in rewards and introduce our business to all those people moving into the neighborhood every month.
So think about this.
Half of renters move every year. So you have all these people moving out of the neighborhood every year, and these merchants, these small business owners have no way to get in front of them. So now you can be in front of everybody when they move into the neighborhood.
You have a plug and play loyalty platform, and instead of giving the ten percent local discount, you spend a quarter of that and you actually attract the local residents through recurring rewards for coming in, and all the points they've earned on rent can now be spent at that local business.
Right, God, I love that so much. Well, some people pay some fee and there's this merchant program. No it doesn't.
It turns out the bank is just eating the whole fee. The best part is that the clip goes on for five more minutes, the entire time Andrew Ross work and he keeps trying to ask him, goes, wait, how do you actually make money?
And they can't say why.
Anyway, Clearly, this gravy train ain't gonna last past twenty twenty nine. I wouldn't put it past Wells Fargo to sue and try and get themselves out of the deal.
In the meantime.
This is not financial advice, but I can tell you that card is a pretty damn good deal. And it is just even sweeter knowing that those free flights come at the direct expense of one of America's horse banks, who are dumb enough to sign a deal like this.
Couldn't have happened to a better person.
We're going to skip the reaction because Matt Stoller is standing by and we are really running short on time.
Let's get to it.
All right, guys, very excited to have our friend Matt Stoller in studio. He is, of course the author a big by Matt Stoller over on Substack and also over he is at the American Economic Liberties Project and great on all things anti trust in much more.
Great to see you, Matt.
Good see man.
You had a piece recently you can put up on the screen that I really took interest in. The headline is why has Trump stopped attacking big business? In twenty sixteen, you say, Donald Trump went after CEOs so often that the Wall Street Journal set up a track of stocks whose leaders.
He had insulted. No longer what happened?
So take us through the shift from you know, twenty fifteen vintage Trump to the way Trump talks today, and has there been a policy shift that is accompanied that rhetorical shift as well?
Yeah.
So I was really surprised because I'm not a Trump hater. I mean, I'm a Democrat, but I'm not a Trump hater. But I went back to twenty sixteen and twenty seventeen because I noticed he hasn't really been attacking CEOs very often.
I'm like, is that a what is that a thing?
And so I looked at the last three speeches he gave, because you can't really trust the press and they're reporting on Trump is his dumb and so I just like read his speeches which are long and rambling.
But he didn't attack any CEOs.
He still was like against immigrants, and he had some of the traditional like stuff in there, but it was like that was gone, and I was like, okay. So I went back to twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen and looked at the stuff he had said, and I was I was surprised. I thought I'd paid close attention to Trump, but it was really surprising because of just how often and how aggressive he was about attacking like.
Ford, like Nobisco. He called for boycott of.
Apple at a certain point, he was like, you know, he went after Jeff Bezos for being a monopolist and not paying his taxes and said he's gonna have a huge anti trust problem under me. And he was like His final ad was amazing. It was like a two minute long ad that was like the global power structure and it was you know, is trying to defeat me, and they've outsourced your jobs and it was you know, as pictures of Wall Street, pictures of empty factories. It
was like straight up populist economic popular stuff. And then when he got into office, you know, he was not like he was not you know, FDR right to put it like he he he did do some real things though, like he was mostly like an orthodox Republican corporate tax cuts and stuff like that, or deregulation, but he actually did you know, the tariffs were different, so he did some tariffs, didn't close the trade deficity that got worse,
but he did change our trade policy framework. And there's some weird stuff in trade as well, like under Trump is the first use of environmental rules to stop illegal logging ever in Peru. Like it was crazy, and that was just because Trump is a protectionist and he was like, well, we want to protect the domestic Yeah, that's exactly right.
But it's like and there's like labor organizing in Mexico because of some of the things that Trump did, which is again protectionist, labor costs in Mexico go up.
Yep, more less offshore as part of the yeah I remember, yeah, yeah, And.
This is this is both the Democrats in Congress and Trump, but it was real, like not, you know, it's certainly like maybe I'm saying twenty percent of it was real and eighty percent of it was just like pro corporate but on anti trust you know, same thing. Lots of huge mergers, bad stuff. But he did challenge at and T time Warner right, which was the first challenge of a merger like that in like forty years. He did bring a suit against Google and a suit against Facebook.
These were huge. Remember when Facebook tried to start like their own currency. Yeah, rah, like he helped out.
To talk about it.
Yeah, yeah, like it feels like so long ago, but like he did, you know, he helped block that, right, So there was real stuff. But on the other hand, like you know, there there was standard deregulation and like inequality got worse. You know, it wasn't I don't want to like overstate it, but there was some populism there, right. It was certainly not what you would expect from a
standard Republican administration. And Wall Street actually funded Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden in twenty twenty more than they did Trump. Okay, today he gets about fifty percent more money from Wall Street or from securities industry and finance industry than Biden does. Right, So there's been this really big shift in the money and he is still talking about immigration, but he isn't talking about you know, the Wall Street establishment or anything like that. The populism has
kind of moved a foreign policy a little bit. He's kind of like, if I were in charge, none of this bad stuff would be happening. Right, So that's not like, you know, you could laugh at it, but it's like it's moved. It's I'm just looking at the rhetoric. Right In terms of your question about what's the policy change going to be, I don't know.
Nobody knows.
And I talked to my friends on the right and they're like, this doesn't look good, but we don't know. I mean, my friends are the writer are like realignment types, yeah, and they're they're just kind of like, uh, you know, we don't think he's going to be good, but they're not sure.
I think that Trump thesis is simple. He got more votes in twenty twenty than he did in twenty sixteen. He doesn't need any of that. You could literally pass TCJA. You can be very popular. He's currently beating Joe Biden in the polls. And he went to the business roundtable and was like, I'm gonna cut all of your taxes, and only people like you and me are even going to pay attention to any of that. Other people are going to go to the grocery store and say stuff
is too pricey or too high. So I mean, and reflected in your speech, what does he even say about the economy, like, other than the economy is bad. In terms of the speeches that you.
Read, well, he says, you know, it was awesome when I was pride.
Yeah, that's it.
He's like, I remember when it was awesome. And people are like, I guess, I get I do, Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, And you know, and that works.
There's any strange I'm I'm not saying like I'm not giving it elect analysis, but I will say this, the polling does show that voters think that Trump is on the side of Wall Street more than a lot more than Biden.
Oh, and so there is vulnerability there.
Yeah, that was really interesting in your report.
I encourage people to look at that pulling you pulled down because I hadn't seen that, and I did think that that was really interesting and I bet would represent a massive shift from the way he was positioned in twenty sixteen, where I would say core part of his appeal. I mean it was during the swamp and it was you know, the TPP was a huge piece of his appeal. Anti immigrant was also part of it as well then too.
But you know, has the in terms of the.
Wall Street money, right, is the shift exclusively that they're more comfany with Trump? He's not saying that stuff anymore. Also, you know, we were there during Trump and things were actually pretty.
Good for us.
Or is it more that they've been unhappy with some of the actions that Biden has taken, specifically in the area of anti trust where you focus. And also, I mean Biden. The other piece here is Trump was very in spite of you know, the talk of about labor. His National Labor Relations Board was packed with exactly the type of characters you wouldn't expect in any Republican administration, you know, standard approach towards actual labor issues.
The Biden administration has taken a different.
Tack there as well.
Yeah, I think it's kind of funny.
So, yeah, just to give you an example, like Trump, remember that the second Max Boeing, Max Crash right and Trump was so like deregulatory that he wouldn't even ground the Max airline like airplanes until every other you know, everyone else in the world that grounded them.
And I like saw that recently.
I was like, oh yeah, I remember like endless little decision after little decision that I was like kind of terrifying, you know, things like arsenic and water or like the Bowe seventy Max and I And it was really maddening as a liberal to see the like liberals focus on stuff that was stupid instead of the stuff that he like, I remember this whole thing about like, yeah, whatever.
But the point is is that.
There were there were a lot of like policy choices that I think we kind of ignored that I'm sort of like looking at and saying, oh, that's that's kind of a problem.
But on the button side of things, oh yeah, feel about him, because I'm sort of trying to draw you out because we do a lot of you know, by criticism here right right right.
And you recently tweeted that.
But then pretty good president part and in a certain sense, like I have major issues with him on foreign policy, on economic policy, the stuff you focus on actually agree in a certain on antitrust. I think it's represented a you know, significant shift on the labor issues that I care a lot about. He's represented somewhat of a shift as well. So what's your case for why he's been pretty good and why that may have rubbed Wall Street the wrong way?
You know, it's kind of funny.
I like to tweet like good but it's pretty good, just because it annoys everyone on Twitter, right, and like the establishment just kind of hates Biden. Like, what's what's interesting is that the establic it's like cool to support Trump now, right, whereas in twenty sixteen it was like cool to support Clinton on Twitter.
That's true. I don't know if it's true in general, but yeah.
If you go to like any group of young people and you're like, hey, do you like Biden, they'll be like no.
Right, like he sucks.
But if you're like, and if you see you just put a like you give them like a piece of paper, say who you're going to.
Vote for, they'll be let They'll they'll like write Biden. But it's like not cool to say it, right, right, But okay, so Biden.
Yeah, he's incoherent and his administration is incoherent, but in a number of ways, like you would think whilst you would really like him, right, because the stock markets at record highs, executive pay is good, like they're making a lot of money, but like they're really mad, and they're really mad because they're not allowed to merge. Right, There's been eleven trillion dollars of mergers that have not happened because there's an antitrust regime that says, no, you can't
buy up all your rivals and raise prices. They're also doing things like helping workers organize, which is not something that I feel, it's not the kind of law that I look at, but that is something that's happening. They're doing things like banning non compete agreements, which is really important.
Private equity loves to like lock up all the doctors in an area and not let them go work for someone else, or lock up all the vets in an area, our nurses are whatever, and the Biden administration is saying, no, you can't do that. Yesterday, the Biden administration just said we're not going to let Adobe like continue to make it impossible to cancel your subscription.
To their like products.
Right, and everyone in the creative field is like hates Adobe because they just charge you a lot of money and don't let you.
I think it's pretty sure in the back room.
But like if you try to cancel, like good luck with you, right, like getting on the phone, like all these junk fees that these guys are laying on you. The thing about those all that stuff is that there's like a billionaire behind every junk fee and they are really mad that like someone is telling them no because they're not used to hearing no, and so like having some now that most of the Democrats don't know that
their party is doing this. Like another example is the IRS just came out with its own free version of turbotef free, right, and you can you will now be able to like file your taxes and the people who will be like the customer service are like work at the IRS and like into its stock just like dive. Because but that's like one more thing that's much less annoying in our lives because of what Biden is doing.
But it's also like into it's going to be really mad and like they're all you know, all the lobbyist they're all friends with each other, and so that's what's what's going on here is like the nest of people with capital are getting really mad, not because they're losing money, they're actually making more money, but because someone's telling them no. And it's these random people in the Biden administration.
Do you have.
Confidence those things will continue in a second Biden administration because and I guess this gets to the question of, like what is his orientation towards those policies. This is not something he talks about a lot. They have certainly done a terrible job of selling these pieces, like they don't lean into this. So does Joe Biden know this is happening? Does he care it's happening? Is this important to him in terms of what he would do in a second term.
It's a little bit like Trump.
We don't know no, right, Like Ron Klean, who was the first white as chief of staff, was super into this stuff.
Jeff Science doesn't.
He doesn't care. He's also be rich because of the opposite.
He's like, you know, he's like anchorman, like Brick Tanlan.
He's just like he's polite and rarely late, and that's why he doesn't He's totally superficial. He knows nothing. Like their next chief of staff, after Jeff Science. If he's into this stuff or she's into this stuff, like then it'll be.
Biden just doesn't care.
We have no well Biden, no Biden. It's not that Biden doesn't care. Biden like has an instinct. He doesn't like people getting screwed. He doesn't like CEOs because he thinks they talk down to him. He like kind of generally is like where could people are getting screwed? But he's not that interested in it and he doesn't follow the details. So, like it's different than Obama. Obama was
very like hungry, aggressive and like straight neoliberal. The people are revolting and we need to like put our boot on their neck, right, like Bert in a cool way, right, like that that was his thing, Yeah, yeah, like and he's like an influencer type, right, Like Biden is actually has the opposite view, but he just doesn't His like interest is foreign policy, right where he's doing an awesome job.
Anyway.
But the thing is, there's a lot of legitimate criticisms of Biden, right, but I think a lot of the like vibe hostility to him is actually coming from big money, right, all of the people in all the people on Wall Street, and Silicon Valley and like they all pay off academia, they're all like, none of them have an incentive to say, yeah, I don't like Adobe overcharging you, right, because there's some group of people making money from that, and they're all
friends with group of people making money from everything. It's like you, if you attack the things that people don't like in our society and commerce, you will make people very angry. And that is why when I put up on Twitter, because I think of Twitter as like, you know, it's sort of like that's what organized money is talking about. When you put up something on Twitter like Biden's pretty good, Like you know, the rage, like the level of rage.
They're not like, oh, well, you know, but what is what about it? What he's doing there or there?
It's like here or there, it's the rage is aggressive and you can and it's out of it's out of like whack to what he's truly doing.
Yes, I think that's fair.
Last thing I'll question you on, though, is my assessment's a little bit different, which is that I think the things you're talking about, especially the antitrust piece, also the labor organizing piece, is very important to me. I think these could make a significant difference in our economy a little bit down the road, but it doesn't pay off for people by and large.
I mean the junk fees.
Stuff that's real right now, but it doesn't pay off right now in the short term. And on the other hand, you've had over the course of Biden administration, all of the COVID social safety net that was spun up. You've had that, piece by piece by piece taken away, so that you know, people are more strapped in terms of cash that the mountain.
Their bank account is lower.
You've seen net worth, especially among some demographics, continue to decline. If you're a young person, you're looking at the housing order, You're like, I'm never going to be able to afford house. You've had inflation, inflation as cooling somewhat. Prices are still
much higher than they were under the Trump administration. So I think there's some there there, especially among you know, people who were not yet at owners in terms of their sense of how this economy is for them right now in this moment.
Well, who cares about people who don't have ass.
No?
I yeah, No, I mean I think we'll end it there.
No.
I mean, well, look at something very basic which is gas prices.
Okay, gas prices have come down a lot, and they've come down a lot because of Biden policies, right, and very explicitly, like they figured out there was a big price fixing conspiracy in terms of withholding production the fracking companies, and then they released oil from the strategic petroleum reserve to break that cartel.
It worked, and gas prices are much lower than they were.
They're not as necessarily as low as they were before the pandemic, but they have come down a lot. Okay, the rent okay or airplanes, right, airlines prices are actually below where they were in twenty nineteen. You take something like rent rent is a huge problem, but the Bidenmistration is actually bringing an anti trust case against a company that has saw that fixes.
Right.
So you guys, you guys know, like yeah, of course, but like the you're one of the only people that know about it. If you don't explain what you're doing, right, then how are people going to know? I mean, there are real art Like Trump said I lowered pharmaceutical prices. It wasn't true, but a lot of people believe it because he kept saying it. Right, This is not a criticism of Trump. It's kind of like, if you don't explain what you're doing, there's no way for anyone to
know what you're doing. So it's true, there are a lot of huge problems that I think people are experiencing. There are always a lot of huge problems that people are experiencing. I'm not like a political expert or anything, but it does seem to me like if you are not explaining what you're doing, then people aren't going to know what you're doing.
It just seems very basic.
But yeah, all right, well it's great talking to you. Man, appreciate you coming down. People should read the piece and subscribe to the substack, otherwise we'll see you all later.