The Ricochet Podcast - Battlegrounds; Real and Imagined

Episode Date: September 25, 2020

Another jam packed week means another jam packed show: We’ve got the Ricochet Podcast’s Senior Court Packing and Confirmation Correspondent, John Yoo to help us sort out the coming SCOTUS confirmation hearings, and we’ve got Lt. General H.R. McMaster, U.S. Army, ret. to talk about his new book, Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World. Also, a Ricochet Podcast Presidential Debate Preview... Source

Let's just go. We have to end soon. We have to end soon. So let's go. I have a dream. This nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. if an opening comes in the last year of president trump's term and the primary process is started we'll wait to the next election i'm the president and your fake is mr gorbachev tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lalex, and today we talk to John Yoo because it's SCOTUS time

and General H.R. McMaster about the world. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, number 514. If you're keeping track at home, as the cliche goes, wish I hadn't said that, because it's a cliche, but not cliched ever. Rob Long and Peter Robinson, every single sparkling word, brand new, freshly coined, newly minted wisdom, wisdom and nothing but.

Gentlemen, welcome. How are you today? Rob goes first. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm a little, you know, I mean, at that point, which is actually rather late in the election cycle when I'm sick of it. Normally, I think I don't think I'm alone. You're sick of it right before Labor Day.

But this has been there's been so much else going on. I don't know if you've been following the news lately but it's been so much going on it's like you kind of have to remember oh yeah there's also an election that's right there's an election yeah i wonder how that's what how that's going um i'm sick i'm sick of it well as well as the idea that come november 3rd that's just the start of what will be a fortnight of pounding to the face oh yes yes i think trump supporters have to pray and hope that it's a long night. I think that is the only possibly, what seems to be the most likely scenario for Trump victory is a close election.

I'm not saying it won't be. It might be. There's a debate in four days. There are a lot of events that could change everything. No, that's not true. It's too late to change everything. But there are a lot of events that could swing things. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about that debate, because as you know, Joe Biden has declared a chapeau, a sombrero, a fedora. I just hate that term. When I found out that it came from the West Wing, it came from the West Wing from what I hear, which is just all the more reason to just shuffle along and find a new term. Joe Biden has not been seen in public in nine days. He's been prepping for debate. He's been learning all of his lines. So expectations are high that he'll be his crackling self. What do you think that Biden's got to do to win the debate? What do you think that Donald Trump has to do to win the debate? Two separate questions. Peter? Well, Joe Biden has to demonstrate a kind of

baseline energy competence and coherence. Listen, it feels terrible to be saying this about a man, any man, let alone a presidential candidate. But because he is a presidential candidate, we have to say it. I had a discussion about this with a friend of mine who's a doctor, and I said, look, are journalists overreacting? We get these selective clips, and they put them up on Twitter, and she seems to be searching for words and so forth. And the physician said, no, every time I've seen Biden, I never met him, but I look at him on the television and everything about it suggests to me early stages of dementia. Joe Biden has to show that he's up to the job. Honestly, as far as I can tell, that's really all he has to do.

He has to prepare himself for he has to remain calm when Donald Trump attacks, throw some a few punches, as I'm sure Trump will do, but remain calm, demonstrate coherence, a sort of baseline level of animal energy. And that's all Joe Biden has to do. So if they jab him in the fundament with a Kennedy cocktail before he goes on, should there be drug testing before these things? That's the question, I guess. That's over to Rob. Well, I mean, yeah, it's hard because I know that many of our listeners are Trump supporters, and I understand what it feels like to be supporting somebody who is having trouble in the polls. But this is the bad news. I think Peter's exactly right. Joe Biden doesn't have

to do much. He's ahead in national polls. He's ahead in a lot of the statewide polls. We're talking about states like now, like Arizona and Texas. I think Texas is a fantasy for the Dems, but I don't think it's a crazy fantasy. So yeah, he doesn't have to do much. The person who's got to do a whole lot and has to do a whole lot of not being his normal self is Trump. The Trump act is old and he is not winning. And unfortunately, I don't know if Trump has another act. So if he's if he goes on that debate and is a Trump to 11, that is not going to help his performance in November. And we know this is true because even his campaign staff are saying this.

They're trying to downplay whatever happens in the debates before the debates where you, when you know you're in trouble. So that's just the bad news. And I know people don't want to hear that, but that is in fact the bad news that is harder as I've been saying and saying and saying it's more uphill for Trump than it is for Biden. And we like to, we like to sing ourselves little lullabies like, oh, well, you know, Biden has to do this. He didn't have to do a thing, you know, for Biden. He should just think about not even showing up. That wouldn't hurt him a bit in the polls, I don't think.

So I suspect that that while we like to think that there are going to be big, big movements after debates, there won't be big movement movements after the debates. It's going to be what it is all the way to November. I think people have have seemed to have made up their mind. If you look at the polls, the poll averaging from six months ago, they're pretty solid. They're pretty stagnant. And I think that's a bad sign for the Trump campaign. And I'm not saying they can't turn it around, but the likelihood they'll turn it around at this point, beginning of October, when it requires so much change in part of the candidate, I just don't see it. I do not see it. The bizarre thing is that you have an election in which one candidate is just sitting in the basement and holding these rallies where people sit in painted circles six feet apart and the other is out there having fun before the crowds and luxuriating in the love and all the rest of it. But we're used to seeing at least both sides having rousing debates

and tub thumping barnstorming speed. But how many Biden voters, I mean, sure, there are some who are just checking the box because they hate Trump, because it's the only thing they're going to do. But how many of them have sort of incorporated into their vote the idea that he's not quite all there, that he's- Everybody. Everybody. But people have been doing that for Trump for four years. Look, the problem for the Trump supporters is you have, wait, let me finish. You have one candidate who's not even campaigning and the other who's campaigning full steam ahead. The one who's not campaigning is winning in all the polls. The one who's campaigning to his heart out is losing. What does that tell you? Right. It tells me there's a lot of people who want to vote for somebody, anybody but Donald Trump, because they hate Donald Trump or they don't like him or they think he's injurious to the country, et cetera.

But I mean, the criticism that were being made about Trump were not that he's lost his mind in the sense that it's faded, gurgled down the drain. It's that he's crazy. He's he's he's emotionally and mentally unstable. Right. All of those things. But that's that's different from somebody who's who whose cognitive decline may be such that they have to hand over the reins of power to Mrs. Wilson. And if Wilson would be an improvement, I think. Yeah. If that's the case, then you would think that our national press would have a little bit of curiosity about her as well. But the press is in curiosity about this is just it's's fascinating me. When Peter said reporters sharing the clips of Biden stumbling and saying this, I'm thinking, which reporters exactly? No, no, no. On Twitter.

Twitter. On Twitter. Right. On Twitter. Right. Which is where reporters are doing that. That's right. Get most of our news, apparently.

But yes. Anyway. Well, OK. Well, we'll see when it's it. It ain't over. Bear in mind, I know Rob will have an answer to this, but so I'll I'll toss in the answer myself. Bear in mind that Ronald Reagan in 1980 was trailing Jimmy Carter until one week before

the election. Now, what happened that one week before the election was the one debate that took place in 1980. And the Americans looked at Ronald Reagan and saw that he wasn't crazy. And the polls began moving toward Reagan from that point on. Rob's point, and I'll make the point too, because it is correct, is that in 1980, watching the debate gave millions of Americans new information. It enabled them to see Ronald Reagan for the first time. Joe Biden and Donald Trump are both pretty well known. And so for Trump to win, he has to make an argument. He has to be sane. Biden has to breathe. Trump has to be sane. You'd think these are relatively

low bars. I think there's a good question about. I mean, that's true. Biden has to show up and show that he's that he's got some marbles, but he can't just stand there and breathe. He can't just stand there and mumble some incoherent response to, you know, to some pot of fire that Trump just dumped over his head. Yeah, because then he will appear in every instance to be out of his depth intellectually and that he's not there. The number of undecideds is the smallest it's ever been. You know, I think people – What percentage are undecided according to whatever you just –

It's tiny. I forget what it is, but it's a tiny number. I mean, it's like this is one of those elections where, you know, it's a change election. This is what I think sort of this sort of thing happens. There's not that many. There may be some states that are up for grabs, but I think they're up for grabs for the Democrats to win that they don't need to win. There are just more paths for the Democrats to win for the House. I mean, the Senate and the White House than there than there were. I mean, part of it is just numerically. Part of it is just the hand that they're drawn. Part of it is that the person at the top of the Republican ticket is not popular. And nobody wants to hear that. Yes, he's popular.

He's not popular. And he has done nothing in three and a half years to change that. And that may be just what it is. I'm not saying he's wrong. I'm not even talking about his policies. I'm just saying that the general election is a popularity contest, period. And if you're not popular, you have a hard time. You have a hard, it's hard. And it doesn't seem to be any movement

one way or the other. It doesn't seem to be any effort one way or the other. It doesn't seem to be any. I'm going to make one more case. I am going to grant the weight of Rob's argument that the race is what it is and the numbers haven't moved much. And what I've been looking at is Ohio. Republicans don't win without Ohio. Trump carried Ohio by eight points last time around. It wasn't even close.

And Biden is ahead by between three, four points, something like that in Ohio. None of this looks good for Trump or the Republicans. However, I actually think this however is quite important. However, I can see events between now, events, not Trump, events that between now and election day would cut in Trump's favor

and the Republicans' favor more generally. Event number one, the decreasing concern with COVID, people becoming less frightened about COVID and more interested in the rebounding economy. That would help Trump. It would tend to help Trump. Number two, continued violence. There are cities in which riots and, well, if riots, they're riots. Unrest, violence, destruction is still taking place. There are a lot of people who just keep looking at that and shaking their head and saying, I don't like Trump, but maybe I have to vote for the guy. And then, of course, what we don't know about yet, we'll know, it'll move fast.

We'll know a lot about it beginning on Saturday evening at 5 p.m. Eastern. And that is the Supreme Court nominee and contest. And if it is Amy Coney Barrett, who is a brilliant judge, mother of seven children, five her biological children, two adopted from Haiti, in other words, a wonderful human being, and pretty hard to attack. And yet the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee in those hearings will not be able to prevent themselves from attacking because the left, the hard left and the Democratic Party will demand it of them. The thinking is that the Brett Kavanaugh hearings were so bad for the Democrats, they may have delivered three seats in the Senate to the Republicans that would have been questionable or that the Republicans might have lost badly last time around. So I can see, will it happen that way? I don't know, but I can see events tending

to help Trump between now and election day. Are there any events that could happen that would help Joe Biden? I don't see them. Biden's about as strong now as he's ever going to get, I think. And now Rob will pour a large pail of cold water over what Peter just said. Well, no, I think that's actually true. I mean, I agree with that. I'm just looking at the past, connecting the dots. We had a pandemic. People forget, in the beginning of the pandemic, Trump's popularity was high.

There isn't a fact, I think it's just maybe Boris Johnson just now. All of the democratically elected leaders pretty much, in Europe anyway, have had increased popularity during the pandemic, not decreased popularity. Trump had a moment, I think it was like almost four weeks, where people wanted him to succeed and he was looking like he was taking this seriously. The pandemic did not help him. The riots did not help him. The call to law and order did not help him. The death of a Supreme Court justice last week so far in the polls did not help him. Look, I know I'm a broken record on this, but I say this as somebody who does not want to lose the Republican majority in the Senate. Where I, a green eye shade, unemotional political operative, I would be saying what unemotional political operatives should be saying right now, which is cut the president loose.

Dump him. Every man for himself. Every Senate candidate in the Republican Party should run their own campaign. They should forget about trying to save this guy. He's going to go down and I don't want to go down with him. And if he doesn't go down, then fine. Then he's got to come. We got to make make peace. But, you know, like we can bang our spoon on the high chair all we want. But if we lose in November and we lose big, there's going to be hell to pay and we're going to be paying that bill. And there's no reason in politics to get sentimental. That's what the

left does. The right, we should be saying, push the guy off the cliff. But we won't because we have some weird sentimental attachment to him, even though he's done nothing for us. We would push Mitt Romney off the cliff in a second, as well we should. Susan Collins is not running with Trump. She's running from Trump. Right. Lisa Murkowski in Alaska. Cory Gardner, Cory Gardner in Colorado is running a Cory Gardner campaign.

Yeah, smart. From Trump. Yeah, these guys, they're professionals. They're looking at the polls. They're doing what they need to do. I'm not too terribly worried that Senate candidates on our side are going to be sentimental. That's a very good point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. When you put a few of these guys. Yeah, that's right. They background when Rob was talking there. Did I hear correctly, Rob?

New York, I expect, is not convulsed at the moment in violence, but a siren seems to indicate that something's amiss. We had them here as well. But what we have in Minneapolis right now going on is very interesting. I was watching some protests last night, and I was trying to pin them down and I could pin down the exact location of the Minneapolis protest by the building in back of it because it was a beautiful new structure that had gone up. It's actually a public services building, but there are all kinds of residential and office towers still going up in Minneapolis, anticipating that moment when people come back. And that's great. And I love to look at architecture. I love to look at buildings, but there's the other part about it. And there's that part that's investing in them. You've heard for years that it's important to have a diversified

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dot com slash Ricochet to have your first 90 days of advisory fees waived. Fundrise.com slash Ricochet. And our thanks to Fundrise for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, you guys had mentioned that the Supreme Court SCOTUS situation had moved Trump's bulls one way or the other. We should probably talk about that and the questions of hypocrisy and process and norms and the rest of it. And who better to talk about the Supreme Court than John Yoo, of course, the Ricochet podcast senior Supreme Court packing correspondent and chief pundit, well as being his professor at the Berkeley School of Law. He about the Supreme Court than John Yoo. Of course, the Ricochet podcast, senior Supreme Court packing correspondent, chief pundit,

well as being as professor at the Berkeley School of Law. He co-hosts Law Talk with Epstein and Yoo podcast. And he can tell you whether a cheesesteak sandwich is authentic simply by looking at it. Another one of his rare culinary skills. His new book is Defender in Chief, available at fine bookstores and McDonald's everywhere. And of course, he will, if you ask, proudly trot out the picture of himself in the Oval Office, smiling with the person that he wrote the book about, Donald Trump.

Welcome, John. How are you doing? Thanks. Did you guys think you could get rid of me just by not having any impeachments or no presidential powers? Do you really think you could get rid of me? Of course, the Supreme Court wasn't over. My first thought, Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies, and my first thought was, oh, nuts, we have to have you back on the show. My first thought upon hearing that was that I was looking for a photograph of John Yoo in the background with an umbrella full of ricin that he was going to, you know, just so he could get back. My first thought was to send him a condolence telegram and say, so sorry that you're not on a short list due to anti-Korean racism. John, here's a clip that I want you to listen to.

Even Koreans have anti-Korean racism. We hate ourselves. Here's a clip, Lindsey Graham talking about the SCOTUS nomination situation around election time in 2016 and 2018. Listen to this and tell me if you vet the hypocrisy or the principles or the norms or any of those things that we're so concerned about. I want you to use my words against me. If there's a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say, Lindsey Graham said, let's let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination. If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump's term and the primary process is started, we'll wait to the next election.

And I've got a pretty good chance of being the judiciary. You're on the record. Yeah. All right. Hold the tape. So, in other words, situational power politics may have trumped personal principle. Who knew that that could happen in Washington, D.C.? John, what do you make of all this?

Well, first, I think actually Graham got the rule wrong. And it's funny because the senator invented it is from his state. It used to be called the Thurman rule after Strom Thurmond. And the rule used to be and then became the Biden rule, whoever's rule. But the rule actually used to be if there's a vacancy in the last year of a presidency, the Senate will not have hearings or bring it to a vote if that person didn't have a chance of being confirmed by the Senate anyway. And it's sort of devolved into the McConnell idea of, well, if the president's from one party and the Senate's from another party, then we're just going to hold it open. But it's simply not true, historically, that people who, the vacancies aren't filled in

the last year of a presidential term. I actually went back and looked. And so I think there have been a number of vacancies that have occurred in the last year of a presidency. When the president and the Senate have been controlled by the same party, all of them have been confirmed but one, and that was Abe Fortas, which is a special case since he was basically corrupt. And then in all the cases where the president and the Senate were from different parties, I think only maybe one or two did get confirmed. And I actually went back and looked at who these people have been. So if Graham's rule had been in effect, or the rule that, say, Senator Biden wants to, Vice President Biden wants to put in effect now, which is just don't confirm anybody in the last year of a presidency.

That would have deprived us of the greatest justice in the history of the United States, which Chief Justice John Marshall universally claimed as the greatest Supreme Court justice ever. The person who really founded the power of the Supreme Court and the federal government in its early history, he was, get this, Thomas Jefferson won the election of 1800. But back then, inauguration wasn't until March. After Jefferson had won in January, after Adams had repeatedly asked other people to be chief justice and got turned down, Marshall was actually the secretary of state. It's like the Cheney rule of vice presidents. Adams basically said, well, I can't find anybody. Marshall, why don't you do it? So Marshall, this young guy, was both nominated and confirmed in January of 1801, well after Jefferson had already won. So the Thurmond rule was simply really what it came down to was don't waste

anybody's time holding hearings if the Senate is not going to confirm the if there's no chance of confirmation. Right. Isn't that really what it came down to? Yes. Why humiliate a nominee and beat the hell out of them in a hearing when you know they're never going to get through? All right. So speaking of the word nominee, who's it going to be? If I was betting my own money or worse yet, if I was betting Rob's money, which I try to do whenever we're on those casino trips, I think it's going to be Amy Coney Barrett. And the reason why is exactly because she is so prominent, because she actually, if you look at her record, I've followed her for a long time. We clerked for the same lower court judge. She is very clear on where she stands on a lot of issues.

She has written, as a law professor, a lot more than Justice Scalia ever wrote before he was nominated to the Supreme Court. She's been very clear about a lot of things. So I think that prominence means Trump picks her. He's kept his promise from four years ago that he appoints originalist judges. At the same time, it's going to drive the left absolutely bonkers because she really does have a clear record. Okay, so last question, Rob, sorry. Level of heat, noise, fury, with the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings at 10, and the, what, the Scalia confirmation hearings, or the Ruth Bader Ginsburg, both of them were approved by more than 90 votes, as I recall, with those as a one. Where do you expect these confirmation hearings to come down? Isn't there that faux rock band movie where the guy says, I always turn the volume up to 11?

What we do is if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do? Put it up to 11. 11, exactly. One louder. Why don't you just make 10 louder and make 10 be the top number and make that a little louder? These go to 11. Yeah, right? These go to 11. But in the meantime, Chief Justice Roberts has moved to the middle and kind of assumed the vacuum, blessed by Justice Kennedy. So if you put on a sixth conservative nominee on the court, that prevents Chief Justice

Roberts from playing footsie with moderates or the left on the court. Then I think you really do start the constitutional, I'm sorry, the conservative direction of the court, finally in the direction conservatives have wanted since 1968, but they've never been able to achieve it. I really do think a Barrett or some of the other nominees on the short list would really succeed in solidifying that conservative majority, which we've never really had. And that happens at the same time that the culture and the politics lurches ever more leftwards, which is interesting. System seems to be able to check itself. But looking at a conservative court, wouldn't a newly ascended Democratic majority then just pack the hell out of it so they can get their majority back and make sure that whatever they

decide to do for great justice is, of course, constitutional? Do you see them packing the course or they wouldn't? Yeah, I wish conservatives did a better job of explaining what they're doing because, you know, James, if the culture is getting more liberal and politics get more liberal, all conservatives on the court really want to do, and they should say so, is return all these questions back to politics. It's like the Supreme Court doesn't want to decide abortion anymore. You guys fight it out in the political process. If the country really is going left, if it's going towards Rob's direction, then you'll be able to vote on it and put those effects to law. You know, if he wants to ban the McRib in every McDonald's, you guys decide that.

No, just for you. A bill of attainder for John, you. And the second thing is, you know, this is an interesting thing about the court packing, which I talk about in the book because it really struck me. Everybody but Biden actually is the only nominee in the Democratic primary contest who didn't vote for court packing. They had one of those raise your hand kind of moments and everybody else said, yeah, I would pack the court.

But it's really not an issue, I think, of senatorial practice anymore if you do that. You could have arguments, the McConnell rule, the Thurman rule, Schumer or McConnell being hypocrites. But that's still all within the universe. I worked there, the universe of the Senate, which is guided by history and tradition. The normal response would be, OK, if you do that to us, then the next time we control the present Senate, we're going to confirm all the justices we can whenever. But to say you're going to pack the court to change the number, which has been fixed

since 1869 and has resisted efforts to change its number since to meddle with its outcomes, that's like dropping a thermonuclear bomb down as a retaliation for someone taking a pot shot at you with a handgun. That's so beyond the normal universe of political retaliation. I got to think of someone like a Joe Manchin or somebody might well stand up and say, not on my watch. Well, that's why we have a Senate, right? Representatives from all states. So it's not a popular vote. It's a state representative system,

which I think kind of is naturally the balance there. But here's what irritates me and tell me if I'm crazy. You're crazy. You're crazy. Wait, let me finish. Why is there any rule at all? The idea that there's a rule seems to me to smack of this kind of Senate go along, get along ism, this kind of crud. No, if you're, if you ever been elected, if I've hired you and you're in the federal government and your job is to represent your state or something else, or be the president United States, you're there until you tell you, I say you're till the constitution says you're not there. And if you're Donald Trump, you're there until January 22nd or noon on the 23rd or whatever day it is. And that's that. And you and if if if foreign power invades us on January 21st, you're the commander in chief. And it just seems to me

like I don't I don't see why there's a rule at all. If I know it's politics, but what if you know, what if Obama, instead of being the arrogant unilateralist he was, what if he'd called up Mitch McConnell and said, listen, I'm thinking about these three people for the court. You tell me which one is the most acceptable to your caucus. What's wrong with that? What's wrong with actually trying, if it's gonna be politics being political, but the idea that you can't play politics with this seems crazy to me.

Like, of course you can. And if he's president of the United States and the Senate is a friendly Senate, he should get whatever he wants, right? I mean, or my- Rob, as is your want, you have just driven us down to the lowest, calmest denominator. We are just living with the animals without any rules at all. Good. First, you make a really important point. Constitutionally, there are no rules beyond the president gets to nominate until his term is over and the Senate gets to confirm until its term is over. But if you look at the Constitution, it sets no other rules for the running of the Senate. And if it were the way you suggest, then other things could easily happen. Like, why have a filibuster? It's not in the Senate. And if it were the way you suggest, then other things could easily have,

like, why have a filibuster? Why is there, it's not in the constitution. You could just get rid of it all the time. So what was to stop the Republicans in 2016 from saying that, telling the truth, which is, Hey, we control the, the, the, the Senate. We get to decide, we don't need to come up with a rule. The person you're suggesting is too liberal for us. And so we're just simply not going to have hearings because that's our prerogative. We don't need to come up with a rule. The person you're suggesting is too liberal for us. And so we're just simply not going to have hearings because that's our prerogative. We don't have to come up with some fancy high-minded rule that is going to end up making us look like hypocrites. Why do it?

We all know what they were doing. They're well within their rights to do it. There's no, there's nothing immoral about doing it that way. That's the way the system has been designed. Why do we feel so good? Why do they feel so compelled to come up with some kind of idiotic moral argument? Or rationale, yes. What is in fact constitutional.

Yeah, there's no doubt it's constitutional. There's no doubt if President Trump nominates Barrett and she's confirmed by the Senate by January 3rd, that would be constitutional too. It's because the senators tried to figure out rules that apply regardless of partisan politics. But I agree with you, Rob. This rule, the Thurman rule, it was really because of raw political power. You've got a Senate where the majority is just opposed to the president. And in fact, you could say it's different now because now the Senate is the same party as the president. But this Senate in particular, because we talked on the Senate is of the same party as the president, but this Senate in particular, right? Because we talked on the show about all the Kavanaugh hearings and all

the stuff that happened there. Three senators, apparently, three Senate seats flipped from Democrat to Republican because of the way the Democrats treated Kavanaugh. And the Supreme Court future potential vacancies were an issue in that election two years ago. You can almost say that the Democrats are reaping the whirlwind here for what they did to Kavanaugh two years ago, which was three more Republican Senate seats, which are the is something else. But the political question is really quick. Really quick. I have a friend of mine who's working in the Republican Senate campaign in the Republican Senate campaigns. And his statement to me last week was or this early this week was the Supreme Court hearings will help Republican Senate candidates will probably hurt the president. Do you believe that's possible? The confirmation process. Look, Trump is actually the introduction to the story. He's going to nominate someone. The real fight is the Senate and how they're going to get enough votes or not. And it's going to remind people why it's important to have a Senate.

A lot of Republican voters, I think, are motivated by the Supreme Court and the hearings. And they're going to, as I look at the schedule, having run these kind of hearings before, you could have the hearings two weeks before the election, and you can have the floor vote on whether to confirm the Supreme Court nominee three or four days before the election and still be within a somewhat normal time for considering a judicial nominee. So that's going to remind people right before the election what's at stake with control of the Senate. Okay, my second question, just this more of a, because I don't know nothing about no law.

Stare decis. I recommend you say that every time you're pulled over by a police officer. Yeah, I don't know that no law. Rob just named his favorite lap dancer. Who was that again? Stare decis. So Amy, they're going to ask Amy.

I always want to call her Amy Comey. I don't know. It's like she's James Comey's daughter. Amy Berry. Judge, they're going to ask ACB what her thoughts about Roe v. Wade are. And in an early questionnaire, she said it's settled law. What does that mean? What does that really mean? To me, it's settled until you have five justices on the Supreme Court who unsettle it. Is she implying that her principle will be, well, this is a Supreme Court precedent, which I will not overturn?

That's what she wants people to think. She's written a long Law Review article, actually, about how much respect you have to pay to precedent. And there are precedents, past decisions of the court everyone agrees are wrong, and Supreme Court justices shall return them, like Dred Scott, like Plessy v. Ferguson. Brown v. Board of Education was right to say Plessy was wrong and to introduce a civil rights movement on the Supreme Court. So there are cases where, settled or not, you think the justices should do what they think is right, reach the right answer, regardless of what past justices have said. The other thing she has written, which I think is very important, is she's written a whole article on what Catholics should do when they're judges. Because I think the main attack on her, it may not just be Roe versus Wade,

it's using Catholicism as a proxy for what she thinks about abortion, which I think is completely unfair and I really don't think is proper for confirmation. It's what's going to happen. It happened last time when she was confirmed for the circuit court. And she said, you know, as a Catholic, I may be opposed to abortion or the death penalty, but my duty as a judge is to carry out the Constitution. Scalia even put it better. She actually, I think, quotes Scalia. He said, Scalia said, there's no Catholic way to cook a hamburger. Now, I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure about that either.

Philadelphia. But he said, there's no Catholic way to read the constitutional text. There's no Catholic way to treat precedent. You just do what the right answer. And Judge Comey, she went far, Barrett, she went farther. She said, if you can't do that, then you should either recuse yourself from those kind of cases, or you should actually just resign from the bench because you can't do your, you're in the wrong business. Yes. Last question for you. I think this is, well, we'll, James is running the show. This is my last question anyway. So is that the main, look, the Democrats on the judiciary committee know perfectly well that the Kavanaugh hearings backfired on them. All the evidence is that there are three seats that the Republicans might have lost, would have

lost. Let's put it this way. There were three Republican senators who owe at least some portion of their margin of victory to the Kavanaugh hearings. They know it backfired last time. Will they be, how will they handle, what lines of attack will they pursue if indeed the nominee is Amy Coney Barrett? She's a woman. She's brilliant. She's deeply experienced. She's a mother of seven, two of whom are adopted children from Haiti. How do you get, how do you make this person seem like an ogre? You know, I think if I were the Democrats, I would say they're going to lose. So what they should do is pull a suitor and rush to embrace her with open arms, look like the epitome of moderation, hope that she becomes more moderate over the years.

I think they should have done that with Kavanaugh, too. But instead, I think because of their outside groups, they're going to do a scorched earth on her. And I think Democrats, you know, they see the polls. They see a majority of the country supports a limited right to abortion. And so they want to turn're trying to remind people why it's important to have a Democratic president who will nominate different kinds of nominees. In terms of specific lines of attack, they will do the traditional thing. I think they're going to try to bring out all kinds of things about her being Catholic. I guess she's a member of a certain kind of group within Catholicism. I'm sure they're going to ask her if she's a member of Opus Dei and whether she thought the Da Vinci Code was actually just a documentary and not fiction. But I think they're going to try, because I think, as you said, it's very hard to attack her. And that's why I think last time they tried to use religion as a proxy for all those issues, which

I thought was offensive, but they may well think that was effective and they might repeat it. There's not a lot of cases that they can go on, but she has written a lot of law review articles, law scholarly writing. But I think the articles are pretty good. to stop her would have to be something more personal, something more about background or going after using Catholicism as a proxy for her views on abortion and gay marriage. Yeah. By the time they're done, they'll have her in a black robe and a red wimple dancing around a wicker man, Mike Pence, 50 feet high, as the flames blacken the sky of D.C. Hey, I guess we're going to have to- That sounds like a great show.

Rob and I will be pitching it next week. Hey, I guess we need to have you on again soon because this is important and you know your stuff. So we'll probably talk to you next week, John. Thanks for joining us in the podcast. Thanks, John. Sorry about the racism. We're stuck with you, John. And thanks.

And thank you for. And thanks to Scott so I could listen in on his pizza orders this time. Oh, indeed. And it is always fun when John brings up the casinos at the, on the cruise ships, because if you've ever watched John play, you know that it's not so much, he's not really gambling. It's, it's, it's more like charitable giving from John. Who needs money? I mean, come on. These are not high stakes. When you play punk with Rob, I mean, I get sick of these nickel and dime stakes.

I mean, let's play with real money. By the way, speaking of charitable giving, we are sponsored today by Donors Trust, the principled and tax-friendly way to simplify your charitable giving. Now, consider, John and Jane have college-age children. It wasn't long before the couple discovered the world looked different when viewed through this new college lens. Since then, they've been supporting classroom and other foundational programs that teach the principles of economic liberty, rule of law, and free expression. Now, they could have written personal checks to accomplish their goals, but instead, they opened a donor-advised fund at Donors Trust. At Donors Trust, they knew that they would spend less time on administration and more time having an impact.

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And our thanks to Donors Trust for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast H.R. McMaster, Saud and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was the 26th assistant to the president for national security affairs under President Trump. Upon graduation from the United States Military Academy in 1984, McMaster served as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army for 34 years before retiring as a lieutenant general in June of 2018. McMaster holds a Ph.D. in military history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his new book is Battlegrounds, the Fight to Defend the Free World. Welcome to the podcast,

sir. Let me quote from your book. You said, at the turn of the 21st century, the United States was set up for a rude awakening of tragic proportions, end quote. Why was that and did it happen? Well, thanks so much. It's a pleasure to be with you. Well, it was a setup because we were overconfident. We were overconfident and that overconfidence led to complacency in the 1990s and maybe even a bit of hubris in connection with the belief that the end of the Cold War and the lopsided victory in Desert Storm in the 1991 Gulf War had meant that really there was an arc of history that guaranteed the primacy of our free and open societies, overclosed authoritarian systems. A corollary to that is that great power competition was a relic of the past.

And then, and also there was great confidence in American technological military prowess, as demonstrated in the 1991 Gulf War. If any, if any adversary had the temerity to challenge the United States, future war would be fast, cheap, efficient wage from standoff range. And of course, the first shock of the of the early 2000s was the mass murder attacks against our country on September 11th, 2001. That was followed by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that were of unanticipated length, difficulty, and cost. And then the 2008 financial crisis. And then it's then that that pendulum shifted from overconfidence, I think, and over-optimism to pessimism and even resignation about American foreign policy. Hey, HR, it's Peter Robinson here. The book, again, is Battlegrounds, The Fight to Defend the Free World. You and I have talked about this already. We recorded an episode of Uncommon

Knowledge on it. If I may, you're very careful about talking about the current commander in chief, partly because you're a military guy and you owe respect to the commander in chief. And partly because of course you were his national security advisor. But if I may ask, we're in the middle of an election season. If I may ask the following question, the argument would be that Donald Trump, this improbable strategic thinker, Donald Trump has now achieved a bipartisan suspicion of China. Before he was elected, it was not quite there. He's achieved that. So whatever one thinks of this or that aspect of his policy in the Middle East, if you look at it in broad strokes, you've got the UAE and Bahrain formally recognizing the state of Israel and entering into normal relations with Israel, the first such breakthrough since the Camp David Accords of 1978. You've got Russia in at least some ways on the defensive.

We've got troops of our own nato participating with nato we've got troops in poland right on the border of russia is it it to somebody who's trying to make up his mind about how to cast a vote it does let's put it i'm trying to make it i'm trying to make this a non-partisan question for you hr so you can answer it in good conscience. But does Donald Trump clear the bar as at least a competent foreign policy president? Well, this is what I cover in Battlegrounds, Peter, as you know, is that we have to be able to assess these policies based on what's in our interest. And certainly it's in our interest to confront the aggressive policies of

the Chinese Communist Party. I think it's clear now that if China succeeds in exporting its authoritarian mercantilist model, that the world will be less free, less prosperous and less safe. And the shift that President Trump and the Trump administration put into place from a policy of cooperation and engagement on China to one of competition, I think was long overdue, was immensely important, and I think will reshape our approach to China for maybe generations to come if the Chinese Communist Party doesn't alter its aggressive approach to the world. So that represents a major, even if Donald Trump leaves office in January, even if he loses this election, that is a major achievement, correct? And I think historians will acknowledge

that. And I think, I think historians will also acknowledge this achievement of the normalization of relations under the Abraham Accords of United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. This is significant in that it recognizes that the interests of the Arab monarchies is aligned with Israel, at least on the issue of Iran. And it also, I think, could be a very important force in isolating jihadist terrorist organizations from sources of ideological support. And again, another very significant achievement, Israel, of course, vowing not to annex the West Bank, which those countries can say was an achievement for them. But I think this is the beginning of what hopefully will be a trend in the Middle East of a recognition that we're all people of the book and that as these jihadist terrorists try to

cast their use of mass murder as their principal tactic in a war against all civilized peoples as having any degree of religious legitimacy, that they'll fail to do that in the future because we're going to come together across various religions and recognize that we need to work together to build a better future. Hey, General, it's Rob Long in New York. Thank you for joining us. After the Cold War, the argument was that we're kind of lost without an enemy, a controlling metaphor, controlling an umbrella enemy that we could see in Central America, we could struggle against in South America and in Africa and all across the world. And the good news is that we won the Cold War, but the bad news was we kind of lost our way.

Have the recent movements you've just mentioned in the Middle East, the movement from Bahrain and UAE towards recognizing Israel, the willingness, obviously, of Israel to negotiate things that it had been previously a little intransigent about. Is that, are we now seeing kind of a reemergence of an umbrella enemy or at least an umbrella challenger in Iran that we can kind of focus through that lens our next moves in the Middle East, whatever they be? Well, Rob, I think we should, obviously. What I try to explain in the book is we ignore really two fundamental realities about Iran.

One is the nature of the regime and the Iranian regime's determination to export its radical ideology. And the second is just the fact that Iran has been waging a four-decade-long proxy war against not only the great Satan and the little Satan, you know, the United States and Israel, but also the Arab monarchies. So I think there could be a very significant alignment in that connection. And I think that's all positive because it should signal to the Iranian regime that they have to make a choice, right? They have to make a choice between are you going to be a responsible nation or are you going to be a terrorist state essentially? And I really hope that one day our European allies will join us in helping to convince the regime.

Does that seem likely? It doesn't seem likely from now. Does that seem likely for you in the future? It does seem like the Europeans have always tried to triangulate between us and the Iranian regime. Is there going to be a sunset on that? Or do you think that's something we got to contend with? I think there's going to be a sunset because you know who we can count on? We can count on the supreme leader of Iran and the IRGC. Because every time the Europeans are kind of weak on Iran, you know, we uncovered the next, you know, the next Iranian terrorist plot to commit murder on European soil. Or we see the next egregious act by the

Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force. So do you think it's going to happen at sort of a slow diplomatic pace, slow change in Iran as it slowly turns itself around? Or is the Iranian regime as weak as some people have been hoping for the past 20, 25 years? Is that really ever going to happen, the protests we see in the streets or have seen in the streets in the past? Is that something we should be hoping for, something we should be helping? Or is that something we should probably chalk up to a daydream? I think we ought to encourage the Iranian people because they

really actually, imagine that, want to have a say in how they're governed. And so I think there is, as we've seen in the protests over the past really couple of years, that they're extremely dissatisfied with this corrupt regime, this corrupt authoritarian regime. But of course, you know, in these situations, you know, it's difficult for the people because the state has all the levers of power. And in this case, for the Iranians, it's the Bashis, you know, these thugs who will literally beat into submission any Iranian who has a temerity to suggest that they should have a say in how they're governed. And then it also, of course, is the regime's ability to establish these criminalized patronage networks where these bunyads and mainly the children of the clerical order and IRGC commanders

are at the top of these commercial conglomerates and they dispense patronage so that people are dependent, dependent on the regime remaining in power. But of course, with the sanctions and the drag on the Iranian economy, mainly from the corrupt regime itself, along with the collapse of oil prices, has put Iran under tremendous pressure. And that could be a happy ending for us. But if we could turn just briefly, I know you got to run, but briefly to our competitor to the East, China, we're entangled in them a lot of ways, probably a lot of ways we can't disentangle from. We sort of recognize them as a strategic competitor. Is it worrying to you that the newest

generation of Chinese leaders do not remember how bad it was for them in the 50s and 60s and even the 70s, that they they have maybe a more rosy idea of the past that they turned their back on 20 years ago, 30 years ago. Is that something that we should be concerned with or something that we think will will sort of correct itself over time? It's something to be very concerned about. And what Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party have done is try to erase the memory of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. And to create this narrative that this is really a linear path of progress after the century of humiliation.

And now that China is inevitably taking center stage in the world, the, the, the propaganda is increasingly jingoistic, hyper-nationalist and anti-American and anti-US allies. And what I'm concerned about is what if the Chinese people, maybe in particular, the people's liberation army, they believe this propaganda and begin to act on it on their own. I think related to this is the probability that Xi Jinping, the dictator that he is, is a bit of an echo chamber. And I think what he's hearing now is, hey, you're winning. You're on top. Look at America. Look at all the problems that they're having. Look at the dissension around their election. Look at the racial divide laid bare

after the murder of George Floyd. Look at the effect of the pandemic and the recession. And hey, we're coming out of the recession and we're going to be stronger than ever. So I think this is a very dangerous period at this post-COVID period, a pandemic that the Chinese Communist Party foisted on the world. And I think that we have to be especially vigilant and watch really as China has already ramped up its aggressive actions, really from Europe with wolf warrior diplomacy to the Himalayan frontier to the South China Sea to Taiwan. Well, we don't have that many levers to pull. As you said, in China, we're sort of enmeshed in a lot of different ways. What levers do we have?

Where are they weak that we can poke? Where is the, to use the art of war, where are they not expecting us to show up and where should we show up? Well, I think we have to show up together across the free world, right? That's why the subtitle of my book is The Fight to Defend the Free World, because our interests align on this. And I think if the United States, Japan, and the EU are together in confronting Chinese various forms of aggression, including economic aggression and industrial espionage and and non tariff barriers to entry into their market and and anything but fair and reciprocal trade, then I think we can really make some progress. But of course, China is very good at the strategy of co-option and coercion and concealing their nefarious aims and portraying them as just normal business practices. So I think the real opportunity here, and this is already ongoing to a certain extent, but is to ramp up international cooperation. I think India's with the program now that they've

had to conform. They're at war. Yes, right. So I think that's the greatest opportunity. If you're the president of the United States, you're advising the president of the United States, whoever that president is, how big a deal would you make the Uyghurs, the separatist movements to the West? And there are even some up in the Manchurian North and in the Southeast Asian South. How shaky would you try to make or how much mischief would you make for the idea of Chinese unity? Well, I think what we have to do is certainly call out what is a campaign of cultural genocide. It's our, it's our humanitarian duty in the world to, to draw the attention to the, to the fact that there are millions of people, um, at least a

million, uh, maybe as many as two and a half million in concentration camps. And that this campaign of cultural genocide has resulted in the reduction of Uyghur birth rates by 60 percent in some areas. I mean, this is terrible and we have to draw the world's attention to it. I was very glad to see the United States take the lead in sanctioning companies who had a hand in helping to establish the Orwellian surveillance technologically enabled police state in Xinjiang. James Lallex here in Minneapolis. And you know this is the geopolitical hotspot of the world right now.

And I know you have so many questions about Minneapolis, but we know you have to go. So we'll just have to have you back another time. So much to talk about in your book, Battlegrounds, the fight to defend the free world. I look forward to reading it. Everyone else should. And next time we talk, there's probably going to be a few more hot spots, old and new, that we could discuss.

Thanks for joining us in the podcast today. No, thanks to all of you, and thanks for just a great, great podcast. I listen to you guys every episode. Oh, that's cool. Thank you. Thank you, General. That's great.

Bye-bye. All right, well, now I have to say to everybody, buy the book twice. I just saluted the mic. Honest to God, I just saluted my microphone. It's always great to have somebody of McMaster's caliber in the show. It really raises our VIP quotient, don't you think? Right.

But again, all of our guests are VIPs. All of our sponsors are VIPs, but only one of them is a VPN, and that's Express. Look, there are tons of VPN providers out there. You've probably heard of a couple of them. Some of you may have even used one before. Maybe work makes you use one. But I like to do my research on the sponsors, and I only recommend the brands to listeners that I believe in.

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the Ricochet podcast. Rob, are you still there? I'm not going anywhere. Peter had a previous commitment, so he had to scoot. He won't tell us what it is, international man of mystery that he is. So, I think there was an Emmys

this week, Was there? It's hard to know. Yeah. Have you ever won an Emmy? I have been nominated several times. I think I have. Yeah. But I tend –

A local Emmy, which is – Oh, this is a local Emmy? It's like a county-level Grammy, but go on. My rule is that I don't watch or I don't go to award shows where i'm not nominated it's like i mean i really don't i mean i keep thinking like why do i care uh and i know i'm supposed to care um but i just don't i just uh i i want to win uh myself and so i'm and i'm happy other people can win but I just am not interested if they win. The ratings were horrendous. And apparently, I guess when you don't actually have the ceremony of somebody standing in an auditorium with a bunch of beautiful people clapping like seals, there's no appeal to it.

Just seeing these guys standing up in front of a green screen somewhere handing it out has limited entertainment value. The only thing I saw was Jimmy Fallon getting dressed down and sort of nodding whenever he was supposed to nod. And it struck me again, how disconnected I am from the culture, I guess, the television culture. You're plugged into it. So you tell me, the new slate of stuff that's going to be coming out of the studios for the next season, I don't even think in terms of seasons anymore. I't know if you do but there's stuff that's coming out how much of this is influenced by this desperate attempt to feel incredibly relevant with the social moments and get on the right side all of this and let everybody know that they're on the right side of all of this well i'm i'm uh i'm i'm bad at math um so i'd have to say what's bigger than 100%?

Is there like a, I don't know. Google percent. Google percent, yeah. I think it's going to be, it's a lot. And I think also it's one of those things where it's part of the, you know, it's just built into the system, right? Because you have this larger thing at the top and everybody's concerned with, you know, nobody wants any trouble, right? And there are probably one or two people who are really sort of legitimately committed to, you know, a more inclusive set of programs, which I, whatever that means, it's fine.

But they're still governed by the marketplace and all the people going to them and trying to pitch shows to them are governed by the marketplace. And you try to make it easy for your the buyer to buy. Right. You don't make it hard. You want to make it easy. So I think there are a lot of people rethinking pitches and saying, well, what if the lead was not a doctor guy, uh, uh, older white male doctor, but a young Latina doctor. What if, and there's a lot of that happening. So part of it is just, you know, from the, from the, the, the fat end of the funnel, things are changing. So at the narrow end of the funnel, when you're something appears on your TV, it'll be from

that. I mean, I think that's going to happen. I think. Right. But, but that doesn't seem particularly new at least from my christian glance of watching the process walking past the medical shows my wife watches i hope to live long enough that i can see a show about sherlock holmes where sherlock is a white male because now the new version is his sister who i'm sure of course it's brighter and more intelligent than anybody else. And we're going to have to cycle through endless permutations of Sherlock Holmes before it's novel and shocking again for it to return to its original roots.

And that's fine. If people like it, they like it. But how much of this do you think – I mean, you mentioned the market. What if the market completely rejects every single bowl of spinach that they put down and just simply insists on, you know, good stories, good characters, good writing and the rest of it. Yeah, I think they will. I don't think those shows will be bad because of it. But I do think that, I mean, what you're pointing to is kind of correct, which is what if if those shows are good, then nobody care. I don't really think anybody cares.

And if they're not good, then I don't think it really helps. I mean, I don't. Nobody, nobody cared that Star Wars had a black stormtrooper. It was a completely manufactured controversy online. Two or three geeks or something in some obscure website says nobody cared because it was an interesting character and it wasn't a bad movie. And so we liked it. You know, the reason that people hated the Rose Tico character is because she was boring and whining and had no personality and seemed to be a Mary Sue. So you're right. I mean, American television watchers seem to be open to watching anything if it's good. It's just when we feel we're having spinach tamped on our throat like, you know, gunpowdered on a cannon, Ma, that's when people balk. I have my theory is that I tell people when I'm putting the show together or when I'm helping people out or when I'm doing it myself is I say the same thing over and over again, which is that nobody pays for homework.

If you give people homework, they're not going to watch. They don't pay for homework. So don't give them homework. Make sure you may have a mission. You may have a message. You may have something you desperately need to communicate with your work and your show. That's fine, but you better hide it and it better become in a very, very attractive, pretty package. That's got lots of laughs and romance and

excitement and thrills and chills in it, or, uh, it's not going to work. It reminds me of something that AOC said this week, when this is all over, you're not going to be able to go back to brunch. Yeah. Uh, of a mind with Michelle Obama saying, you know, Barack Obama is not going to let you, I can't remember what he wasn't going to let us do. And it is the same mentality that people who walk up to diners sitting outside enjoying an alfresco dinner and play drums and tambourines and yell at them through bullhorns. You will be engaged. And that's the thing that I'm wondering about the post-election period. Should Biden win? Whether or not there's going to be a mandatory engagement for all of us or whether people will just said, look, I voted for Biden. I got rid of the other guy. I did my part. The drama's over. Leave me alone. I don't know if a lot of the people, my neighbor has a Biden flag. He's got a tall two-story flagpole, and he put out a Biden flag today.

And I can't imagine ginning up having that much enthusiasm for the fellow. But okay, I think a lot of people just think that it's going to be returned to normalcy, and that's what they want. Politics'll be politics will be boring again. And it's not going to affect them in any way, shape or form. And I think they're wrong, depending on whether or not by the charge. I agree. Our our friend of our podcast and a friend of mine, Mickey Kaus, who's just a lovable nut, hated George W. Bush, hated him, hated him, hated him. And but didn't wasn't great.'t think john john kerry when in this 2004 election was just a complete loser but he had he made up a few bumper stickers that had uh or john kerry bumper stickers and the tagline was he'll do right and i feel like that's kind of where you should be with biden if you don't like trump is that he'll do so the idea of waving

a flag i mean luckily i'm not you I'm not, I can't even fake my non-enthusiasm. I can't fake any enthusiasm for any of the candidates, but especially not for Biden. It seems hard for me to understand how anybody could. But the idea that we're trying to, that that side is trying to sell people on this continuing passion, this continuing struggle is doomed, because that sounds like homework. Right. So let's make the bumper sticker for this year. He will suffice until removed for mental impairment to achieve the desired effect of ushering in a post-Trump culture.

Which works for both candidates. Yeah. But if you got one of those cute little Fiat cars, it probably is too long for the big bumper. Hey folks, thanks for listening to us today. Oh, I'm kidding. I wasn't ending the show. It's time for the Lightlakes member post of the week. No music? It's a bit. It's a

bit. I'm doing a bit. Oh, he's doing a bit. He's doing a bit. You can keep this part in. I was doing a bit where you wouldn't have the music because that's part of the joke. And then in a huff, I was going to leave the show. That was the whole thing. So just imagine that I did all that, everybody. And I hope you enjoyed it and laughed heartily.

Rob, thanks for being with us, of course. Peter, wherever you are out there, we'll see you next week. And we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, boys. Next week, fellas. I forgot I had a choice. I let you push me past the breaking point. I stood for nothing. So I fell for everything. You held me down, but I got up. Already brushing off the dust. You hear my voice. You hear that sound. Like thunder gonna shake the ground. You held me down, but I got up. Get ready, cause I've had enough. I see it all, I see it now. I got the eye of the tiger, the fighter, dancing through the fire. Cause I am a champion, and you're gonna hear me roar.

Louder,der than a lion Cause I am a champion And you're gonna hear me roar You're gonna hear me roar Now I'm floating like a butterfly Stinging like a bee, I heard my stripes I went from zero to my own hero You held me down, but I got up

Already brushing off the dust You hear my voice, you hear that sound Like thunder gonna shake the ground you held me down but i got up get ready cause i've had enough i see it all i see it now i got the eye of the tiger Dancing through the fire Cause I am a champion And you're gonna hear me roar Louder, louder than a lion Cause I am a champion And you're gonna hear me roar

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