The Young Turks - President Elon Musk?

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

Donald Trump calls for eliminating the debt ceiling entirely, supporting a Democratic proposal that sparked backlash among Republicans. Marjorie Greene and Rand Paul call for Elon Musk to be Speaker of the House. Trump attacks Republican Rep. Chip Roy for opposing calls to raise the debt ceiling. An appeals court disqualifies Fani Willis from prosecuting the Georgia Trump case. " HOST: Ana Kasparian (@anakasparian), Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) SUBSCRIBE on YOUTUBE ☞  https://www.youtube.com/@TheYoungTurks FOLLOW US ON: FACEBOOK  ☞   https://www.facebook.com/theyoungturks TWITTER  ☞       https://twitter.com/TheYoungTurks INSTAGRAM  ☞  https://www.instagram.com/theyoungturks TIKTOK  ☞          https://www.tiktok.com/@theyoungturks 👕MERCH  ☞      https:/www.shoptyt.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to The Young Turks, the online news show. Make sure to follow and rate our show with not one, not two, not three, not four, but five stars. You're awesome. Thank you. Bessai. Baga! All right, welcome to the Young Turks, Jake Huguenot, I'm with you guys, live from the Polymarket Studio in L.A. So huge developments, of course, who's the president, Elon Musk, or Donald Trump? We're having that conversation.

Elizabeth Warren agrees with Donald Trump to get rid of the debt ceiling. Obviously, she's a Republican, right? Winger, et cetera, kidding, but we'll get to that in a minute. So, guys, one other thing before we get started with the news, a lot of you've been asking questions. I did a town hall yesterday on Operation Hope about, hey, they, you heard on other shows that we've turned right wing or something like that. And if you watch the show every day, I say, I hope you realize that's absurd.

But that's okay. We're going to address it today. We'll make the bonus episode today public. And you guys ask questions, any questions you like? And we'll answer them so that everybody. he's comfortable. Okay, well, I'll keep telling you about it as we keep going forward, but that'll be at 8 o'clock tonight. Yeah, so we're taking questions from members, so members, please write in. Yeah, we want to, because a lot of people have legitimate questions.

So, okay, God bless. Let's answer them. All right. Casper, let's do the news. Well, let's begin with what should have been more of a conversation about the government funding bill. We are going to cover that a little later, but that kind of morphed into a discussion and debate among Republicans about lifting the debt ceiling. So let's get to that. But the majority of our conversation was about the debt ceiling. We're about to find out that Donald Trump wants something super shocking. Take a look. Trump told me he's not just keen to see it lifted, as we've all seen and covered so many times in the past, but he'd like to see it got rid of entirely, something that's been discussed really by Democrats mostly in the past, but something

that he said he would welcome and would actively campaign for. He argued that the debt ceiling doesn't work for its purpose. It doesn't actually control debt at all. And that its effect is merely psychological. And it is used, again, most often by Republicans, as a sort of a choke point to get something they want out of the majority when they are in the minority. Based? Like, what? Okay, so as you just heard from Garrett Hake over at NBC News, Donald Trump wants to eliminate the debt ceiling, which is something that Democratic lawmakers have been calling for. Republican lawmakers do not want to eliminate the debt ceiling. But I believe what Donald Trump is saying here is absolutely correct. And so do other Democrats that we're going to hear from

in just a minute. Now, it's important to understand that the debt ceiling is different from the government funding bill. Okay. So it's basically a limit set by lawmakers that essentially determines how much the federal government can borrow in order to pay its bills for things that the government has already spent money on. Now, it doesn't authorize any new spending. So again, it is different from the government funding bill that's currently being debated and negotiated in Congress as we speak. But obviously, it's kind of somewhat tied because the amount of money the government spends in their spending packages is related to the debt. Now, with that in mind, in a phone interview with NBC News, Trump said getting rid of the debt ceiling entirely would

be the smartest thing Congress could do, I would support it entirely. Now Trump actually signed legislation three separate times during his first term in order to lift the debt ceiling and he probably remembers what that whole process was like and he didn't like it. And he called for the elimination of the debt ceiling before during his first term. And so this isn't something new, it's just something that wasn't really. emphasize that much in the press. And now he's really calling for this elimination. Now, in his conversation with NBC News, Trump even suggested that the debt ceiling is a meaningless

concept and that people either act like removing it is going to be catastrophic or that it's going to be meaningless. It's not going to have any impact at all. And so he says it doesn't mean anything except psychologically. Then he says the Democrats have said they want to get rid of it. If they want to get rid of it, I would lead the charge. But on social media, he also called the debt ceiling a trap by the Democrats, saying this is a nasty trap set in place by the radical left Democrats. That's not remotely true. It is not true.

In fact, after news came out that he wants to eliminate the debt ceiling, Elizabeth Warren came out and posted this on X, saying, I agree with President-elect Trump that Congress should terminate the debt limit and never again govern by hostage-taking. Representative Brendan Boyle, who's a Democrat from Pennsylvania and the ranking member of the Budget Committee, has been leading the charge with legislation called the Debt Sealing Reform Act that would diminish Congress's ability to use the threat of default as a tactic in legislative negotiations. He introduced it back in 2023 last year with Senator Dick Durbin, who unveiled a companion bill in the Senate. The House bill passed or has 55 co-sponsors, all Democrats, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Now, there's already some pushback against Donald Trump from Republicans, so we're going to get to that in just a minute.

But, Jank, what are your thoughts on this? Yeah, first, I want to go to one of our members at t.yt.com. Don't shoot on the goalkeeper said, maybe I'm an uneducated F, but I legitimately have no idea what the debt ceiling is. So first, let me just explain that again, and then I'll get into all the details here because they're so interesting. So the government arbitrarily says that there's a number where we can't borrow past this. So let's make up a number, all right, a trillion dollars.

So you can do, you can get debt up to a trillion dollars, but if you, you. get past that, you're going to have to ask for authorization from Congress to go past it, right? So, but they extend it every single time because if they don't extend it, what happens is that are the full faith and credit of the U.S. government and the U.S. dollar is called into question. Why? Because this is money we've already borrowed. So if you're angry about the deficit or the debt, you handle that in a budget process when you're originally borrowing the money, Okay, but after you've already borrowed the money, this is whether you're going to pay people back or not. That is why if you don't raise the debt ceiling, that means you're not going to pay some people back because by law, you cannot go past that number, right?

Once the U.S. government doesn't pay people back, that's it. Our credit rating is screwed. The full faith in credit is questioned. Your interest rates go sky high. The debt multiplies. The economy tanks, inflation reappears. Now, are all those things going to definitely? happen? Or is Donald Trump right? That maybe it's, you know, people say that it's not necessarily going to happen. Well, it depends a little bit on expectations and how people perceive things. So if they perceive it as a small, short-term thing, oh, but yeah, they're going to get past it and they're going to, you know, actually pay those bills, then maybe it's not a catastrophe. But does it risk a catastrophe? Definitely, right? So it's a very bad idea.

And the Republicans have been using it this entire time to whatever Democrats in office, So we're not raising it. You better give us something, otherwise we're going to hold the entire global economy hostage, right? So that's a trick that the Republicans have been using. That's why they're mad at Trump today for getting rid of that ace card that, the Trump card, if you will, that they had. The Democrats have wanted to get rid of the debt ceiling all along because there's no need for it. Look, are you going to borrow the money or are you not? Once you borrow the money, you got to pay back the money.

You got to pay back. This arbitrary ceiling is just nonsense, right? So that's why Elizabeth Warren, Durbin, Pelosi, et cetera, I agree with Trump in this case. Now, I've heard from some left-wingers that if you ever agree with a Republican, you're a racist and a right-winger, so I don't know if that makes Elizabeth Warren a racist right-winger. But Donald Trump agreed with us first. I know even for some on the left, that's just no way, no way. You have to yell at them. Okay.

So now, in terms of what we think, well, of course we like it. He's agreeing with us. He's agreeing to the thing that we have asked for a thousand times, right? So now why is he agreeing to it is another interesting question, which is there's three possibilities. One is he didn't do his homework and he doesn't know how the Republicans normally use it. He only knows it when he was in office and he's like, does it pain in the ass? Why do I have to get a vote on this every time? And it might be that he out of self-interest.

He's like, I don't want to bother with it three, four times in my term like I did last time. And besides which it makes no sense. Of course, it's never made any sense. It's just been a trick by your party all along. My guess is he didn't do the homework on that. And probably someone like Elon was like, why are we messing around with this? Why don't you just get rid of it? No.

Elon wants to keep the debt ceiling in place. In fact, he's making the argument that, well, maybe we can cut government spending so much that we don't even hit the debt ceiling. He made that argument, which by the way, the two things are not tied together. He's referring to the current debate that's taking place in regard to the government funding bill. And so he made a point about how, well, maybe we cut the government bundling, like the funding for the government so much that we don't even need to worry about lifting the debt ceiling. Again, you're right. Those two things are not related. Yes. But he gave the game away in terms of what he feels in regard to the dead ceiling. It seems like he wants to keep it in place.

I got to say, I also don't think Elon knows what he's talking about. Like there's this idea that like, oh, Trump doesn't know, but Elon, Elon. Well, if Elon knows so much, why did he get ahead of Trump on some of these on the budget, for example, and thereby set himself up for the criticism that he's leading Trump, which is a dangerous criticism. And why did he overpay for X by about $20 billion at least, right? There's a lot of things that Elon doesn't know either. So look, there's a lot out there right now about how Elon's the one steering the wheel and that Donald Trump is in the backseat taking orders. I don't know how true that is, but I think that this debate about the debt ceiling might give us the information that we need to know about who's really steering the wheel here. Because I think Donald Trump is absolutely right about the debt ceiling and how it should

be eliminated. We'll see how it plays out. But there are some influences trying to push Trump away from that idea, including Chip Roy. So let's talk a little bit about that. So congressmanship Roy, not in favor of eliminating the debt ceiling. And he is being vocal about that. And he's also kind of in a bit of a tiff with Donald Trump in regard to the government spending bill. Now, Trump accused Roy of obstructing budget negotiations, even though both Trump and Roy publicly opposed the original government spending package. But now Trump is pushing for this debt ceiling elimination, which Roy is absolutely opposed to. So Trump actually did what he does best.

He went to truth social, used the bully pulpit, and basically threatened Congressman Chip Roy unless he comply. He says the very unpopular congressman from Texas, Chip Roy, is getting in the way, as usual, of having yet another great Republican victory, all for the sake of some cheap publicity for himself. Republican obstructionists have to be done away with weak and ineffective people like Chip have to be dismissed as being utterly unknowledgeable as to the ways of politics and as to making America great again. He also added, and this is on X, Chip Roy is just another ambitious guy with no talent. By the way, how's Bob good doing? I hope some talented challengers are getting ready in the great state of Texas.

is to go after Chip in the primary, he won't have a chance. So he's essentially threatening Chip Roy with a primary challenger in the future election where he's certainly gonna seek reelection. Now Roy was confronted about Donald Trump's comments and looked a little like a deer in the headlights. Take a look. Trump is saying you're getting in the way of a Republican victory for cheap publicity. What's your reaction to that?

I've been able to read all we're doing is trying to talk about how to get a yield on so we can actually cut spending. Do you plan to talk to him to smooth things over? I don't even know what we're talking about. I got to look at whatever was put out there. He said, weak and effective people like Chip have been dismissed as utterly unknowledgeable as to the ways of politics and as to making America great again. Put America first and go for victory.

We're working right now on how to actually cut spending, which is what the voters sent me to Washington to do. So that's what we're working on. He looks scared. He looked scared. He looked scared. He knows. He read everything. He read everything. He knows. So I wonder when these guys are going to grow a spine. And I mean that. So I'll get to that in a second. But first on the Trump, look, guys, two things. One, on the Chip Roy of the stuff, he's going nuclear way too early.

Chipro is one of the most right wing guys in all of Congress. So here, he's trying to get the Republicans a bigger advantage so that they could cut more. actually between, if you're a right winger, honestly, and I'm a little reluctant to say this, but Chip Roy is more right than Trump is, if you're a right winger. If you're a right winger, yes. Because you guys use this debt ceiling to hold us hostage every time and to get more cuts from like programs we all care about. I know, but Trump doesn't want cuts. Like look, here's the reality, okay?

Trump actually wants to carry out portions of his agenda. And it's going to be costly. It's going to be very costly. And so Trump doesn't want to be stuck in this, like, annoying debt ceiling fight because while Republicans certainly do want to cut, like, you know, actual traditional conservative Republicans like Chip Roy, yeah, yeah, he does want to gut the government. Donald Trump knows that his policies are going to cost more money. So there's this, like, tension brewing that I don't think most people are even privy to right now. Yeah, so that's what's so interesting about this crazy time in politics, right? Because Chip Roy is more right wing than Trump.

Yes. But Trump is more MAGA than Chip Roy, because MAGA is not exactly right wing. Now you're going to say, wait, oh, parts of MAGA or maybe using all of MAGA's super right wing, no, you're misreading them. There's tons of massive right wingers in there. And that's where the base starts, of course, right? But now they've been joined by some populists and some bros and all these other folks. And Trump is a guy who only cares about being important.

popular. And if you only care about being popular, you know what you would do? You would spend a lot and you would cut taxes. And then you would load up the debt and then leave it for someone else to deal with and brag about how great it was during your term. I mean, that's what he wants to do. Which is another old Republican trick, by the way, that Richard Nixon actually came up with and wrote memos about. So that's what Trump is doing. So he doesn't actually want the right wingers to win here. Let me, let me, and I'm, you know what? I will allow it. So let's go to graphic nine. Okay, so this is from the New York Times. And it. it goes to the point that I'm trying to make here. So Trump's plans are expected to cost

trillions of dollars, much of which will most likely need to come from borrowed funds. A drawn out debt limit fight next year could force Trump and Republicans to bow to the demands of Democrats and could consume the congressional calendar. And then here's a quote from Trump, we're not going to fall into the debt ceiling quicksand. There won't be anything approved unless the debt ceiling is done with. Yeah. And so here what I would say to the Democrats is take the win as quickly as you can. Because sometimes Trump changes his mind once somebody goes in and goes, hey, you know, you could actually make more money the other way. Right. So for example, there are many of

these examples, but the NRA is a good one. After one of the mass shootings in his first term, came out and said, all these guys take money from the NRA and they won't do it. But I'll get this under control. And then the next day, the NRA came into his office and offered him a whole heap of money, right? Like a giant treasure chest of campaign contributions. And reminded him of the inaugural funds that they provided. And then so the next day, Trump came out and was like, never mind, I love the NRA. We're not going to do any gun control. Don't need it. We just need less doors or whatever Ted said. Right. So while he's in the mood to get rid of the debt ceiling, Elizabeth Warren's right.

Jump on it. Take it because this debt ceiling's been an albatross around our neck the entire time. And so whenever they say yes, take it. And then last thing, that for me is, look, is it enormously hypocritical of the Republicans? You can go back and find old clips of the young Turks. I didn't make our producers do it this time. Where we say, look, whenever a Democrats in office, the Republicans are like, that's silly. And whenever Republicans in office, they're like, I don't worry about the debt ceiling, right?

And they usually just pass it to raise the ceiling every time with no hassles at all, right? But this time, they've gone even further in their hypocrisy. And be like when the Democrats are in charge is the most important thing in the world, now that a Republican is in charge, forget it, it shouldn't even exist. But who cares, as Ben McQuist says, hypocrisy is overrated. It is. In this case, especially. Take the win.

Agreed. All right, let's take a brief break. When we come back, we'll give you whatever update we can in regard to the ongoing negotiations for the government funding bill. And then later in the show, we'll talk about how Fannie Willis is now disqualified from her role in prosecuting Donald Trump in the Fulton County Georgia election interference case and more. Don't miss it.

We'll be right back. t-y-t.com. And if you're a YouTube member, make sure you're getting everything on the website to go to t-y-t.com slash connect to connect your two accounts. Totally free. And you could also sign up for free just to participate in our polls, et cetera, on t-y-t.com as well. All right, Anna. All right. Well, let's give you all an update on the government funding bill because a lot has happened in the last 24 hours, but we still don't know what the end result is going to be or what is gonna get cut. So when it comes to the government funding bill, it looks like Republican lawmakers and maybe even Donald Trump have soured on House Speaker Mike Johnson. And now there are

even some calls to replace him. Now, of course, Donald Trump with the help of the new government efficiency group, advisory group known as Doge, of course, which is led by Vivek Ramaswami and Elon Musk, are looking to cut. spending on certain programs. And apparently there was an initial version of the government funding bill that didn't go far enough. And so Donald Trump scrapped it. And now they're kind of trying to figure out, all right, well, how are we going to do this? How do we move forward? What is the bill going to look like? But because of the fact that this was the initial bill that Mike Johnson had co-signed on, people have soured on him. Okay, so this all started when

members of the House Freedom Caucus. These are the very far right Republicans in the House of Representatives, started speaking out against Mike Johnson for failing to chop spending for the government funding bill. And then Senator Rand Paul jumped in. Now he identifies as a libertarian, but of course caucuses with the Republicans. And he says, the Speaker of the House need not be a member of Congress. nothing would disrupt the swamp more than electing Elon Musk. Think about it, nothing's impossible, not to mention the joy of seeing the collective establishment, a.k.a. Uniparty, lose their ever love and minds. Yes, exactly. Like, nothing would make us lose our minds or make the establishment lose its mind more than a billionaire at the reins.

Oh, don't hurt him too much, okay? Putting the world's richest man in charge of the entire government seems so populist. And I'm never going to stop cracking up at the word Doge. Like he named it after his own cryptocurrency. Yeah, it's like the meme coin. Yeah, it's like the biggest ad for Elon Musk and everybody's just saying it's like Bernie won and we named the government, the largest government commission, the yellow tigers. TYT, what, what, what, what, what, Okay, so look, there have been some proposals or alleged proposals from Doge coming out. So cutting funding to, I'm not even kidding, cutting funding to pediatric cancer research, stuff like that. That's not a good look.

And by the way, I mean, if Donald Trump is smart, and I think that when it comes to this issue, he's actually being pretty strategic in certain areas, especially when it comes to wanting to eliminate the debt ceiling. But think about how easy it would be for Democrats to campaign on that. Republicans cut pediatric cancer research from the government funding bill. Yeah, let alone when they try to cut Social Security, which I've heard a lot of right wing hosts start to talk about. Yeah, exactly. So there's a lot of disasters out there.

We'll see how savvy Trump is in avoiding those. And by the way, I mean, look, if you don't know, anybody can be Speaker of the House. You don't have to be a member of Congress. So it's not, that one, they're not crazy about you, they could pick Elon to be the Speaker of the House because he's not busy at all. I mean, he's running the entire government cutting project, which is the U.S. budget and Tesla and SpaceX and four other companies. But sure, yeah, have him run the whole country. Why not? Well, it looks like Representative Marjorie Taylor Green is in favor of this. She responded to Rand Paul and says that she'd be open to supporting Elon Musk for Speaker of the House.

Doge can only truly be accomplished by reigning in Congress to enact real government efficiency. The establishment needs to be shattered just like it was yesterday. This could be the way. Now there is a very real possibility that the government could shut down if they don't reach an agreement by Friday night. So as of Saturday morning, 12.01 a.m., if they don't have a bill, the government will shut down. And on the possibility of a government shutdown, here's what Donald Trump has to say. If there's going to be a shutdown, we're going to start it with a Democratic president, essentially

saying, well, people are going to blame Biden for it. I don't even know where Biden is, to be honest with you. I think most people know that at the moment, even though he hasn't even been inaugurated yet, Donald Trump is effectively serving as president. It's insane. What's hilarious about Trump is how he just admits things that he shouldn't admit. No, but I like that. I like that. I mean, it's accidentally helpful, right? Like, he's like, oh, we're going to try to blame it on Biden, even though I'm the one obviously shutting down the government. Okay, and yeah, to your point, Biden's an outer space, brother. Okay, so.

And everyone knows it. Yeah, you think Biden's making decisions. Even the Democrats now admit, as you'll see later in the show, they're like, yeah, out to lunch. Not can't make decisions. Nothing, nothing. So he doesn't even know what the hell is going on. Asked if he is still confident in House Speaker Mike Johnson, Trump responded by saying, we'll see. the funding deal they had yesterday was unacceptable, referring to the speaker's continuing resolution.

In many ways, it was unacceptable. It's a Democrat trap. It's a Democrat trip. That's hilarious. Okay, so, but look, that case, no, no, no, here, but I will explain that. I know what he's talking about, even though it's a hilarious way of putting it. So this is the biggest drama of the next four years. What's going to happen when MAGA and the Uniparty clash. Now, on some things, I agree more with the establishment. For example, if they go to cut Social Security and their establishment says, no, I might despise the establishment, but I agree with them on that policy, right?

And so, but if MAGA says, let's get the Pentagon, then I agree with MAGA on that policy, right? So it depends. But the UNIP party generally views this all as like a joke. Oh, Trump won. And so what we're going to do is we're going to do the same things we've always done. But we're just going to give even more tax cuts to the rich and corporations and cut spending even more.

And that's it. And we're going to call it a day. And everybody knows this, right? But still, things are going exactly as we want them to. And some people in MAGA, and MAGA is not a monolith. It's an interesting, you know, group of people that have different interests. Some of whom don't play traditional politics at all? A lot of whom voted for Bernie Sanders in 2016, right?

Some of them did, yeah. So there is a mix, and so I would not make the mistake of considering them a monoliths. A lot of them are against the Forever Wars or U.S. involvement in conflicts abroad. That's something I agree with them on. So things are weird and changing, and it's kind of hard to parse it out. But Jenk is right about that. Yeah, so if it's not business as usual, though, what has? happens. Because if Trump does the popular parts of MAGA, well, that's the ones that the populist

left and right agree on, cutting the Pentagon, being anti-war, anti-corruption, et cetera. Anti-corruption is way too much to ask for, right? But does some of the popular proposals that they have, even including ones we don't like, like on immigration, for example, right? Well, that'll work and he will become more and more popular. But if he goes, oh, no, I'm not going to do the Uniparty thing. Instead, I'm going to go way more extreme and I'm going to cut programs that people love and go, there you go, I got the dead under control. Some portions of MAGA will love that. Huge portions will love that. We finally cut. Education is gone. Social Security's hacked away and all this different things. But some portions of MAGA are going to go, wait, did you just

cut my Social Security? Did you just cut my Medicare? Get your government hands off my Social Security in Medicare, right? In fact, something that I was noticing. Now, obviously, Obviously, this is anecdotal, and so I'd like to see some, look, we've seen polling on how Americans, including Republicans, feel about Social Security, and it is the third rail of politics because Republicans do not want Social Security to be cut. And I'm talking about the voters, I'm not talking about the lawmakers. And so there were a few posts about how, oh, looks like Republicans are eyeing cuts to Social Security.

And it was like maga, maga, maga, maga comments about like, Trump said he wasn't going to cut Social security. He promised, he promised. So like, it will hurt him electorally. Well, I mean, with his approval rating. So it's so interesting because like within MAGA, there are some of the right wing hosts that are now, even including Dave Smith, who I really respect, who's a libertarian who usually, not usually, just a lot of times agrees with progressives like us, right? But he's for cutting social security. I'm like, go ahead, brother. See how that turns out for you, okay? Don't do it. It's going to be a disaster. But I don't think that even though some conservative host or libertarian host or MAGA hosts say Custle security, I think when

it gets to Trump, Trump's going to be like, oh, so you want me to be unpopular? No. That's right. Right. So, but I don't know, and that's why it's an interesting mess. And remember, among the people that voted for MAGA, probably the most important people are the non-Maga people that voted for Trump. The people who are worried about border crime, economy, inflation, et cetera, and they just want to change, right? So those people are the first out the door when you do something deeply unpopular, right? So if they go to do the cuts that they're all, they've always dreamed of, I think they're going to run into a buzzsaw with some big portions of their own voters, let alone the rest of the country that they don't expect. Because remember, everybody's in their

bubble. So we've got our own bubble on the left, but on the right, they think the whole country's MAGA. They just, they don't get that they're, that half the country is not at all MAGA, right? So they're like, what do you mean? Everybody wants to cut the Department of Education. let's find out. I'm afraid we're going to find out. But you should also be afraid that we're going to find out because I don't think people want that at all. Well, let's now move on to a pretty massive story that the Wall Street Journal did in regard to the cover up on Biden's mental decline. Lots of interesting new details about that. So let's get to it. The Wall Street Journal has now put out an expose regarding the obvious cover-up

carried out by those closest to President Joe Biden when it came to his mental decline. Now, there are a lot of details here. I'm going to try to get to all of the highlights, or at least as many of them as I can, starting with the fact that there were already massive red flags in regard to President Joe Biden's mental decline early on in the beginning months of his administration. But we didn't hear about that. did we until it was way too late. Now a lot of people like us suspected it, but now we have some confirmation that those closest to him

saw it and were concerned about it. Administration officials noticed that the president became tired if meetings went long and would make mistakes. They issued a directive to some powerful lawmakers and allies seeking one on one time. The exchanges should be short and focused. For example, they avoided doing any of these like meetings, meetings first thing in the morning because that was when Biden was struggling the most.

And if the president was having what they were referring to as an off day, meetings would just be canceled altogether. In the spring of 2021, again, very early on in his administration, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. Quote, he has good days and bad days and today was a bad day. So we're going to address this tomorrow, end quote. The former aide recalled the official saying. And so there's more. For instance, congressional Democrats complained that they couldn't even get a hold of Joe Biden to talk to him about policies, his agenda, what the best path forward was strategically in order to accomplish his agenda. So for instance, Representative Adam Smith claimed that he wanted

to get in touch with Joe Biden ahead of the Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021 because he was alarmed. at the overly optimistic comments he was hearing from Biden about what that withdrawal would look like. So Adam Smith was like, there are some issues at play here. So let's just meet so I can tell you what the concerns are. That way the withdrawal will be a little smoother. He says, I was begging them to set expectations low, said Smith, who had worked extensively on the issue and harbored concerns about how the withdrawal might go. He sought to talk to Biden directly to share his insights about the region, but couldn't get on the phone with him. In the end, as we know, that withdrawal, even though we were supportive of withdrawing from

Afghanistan, the way it was carried out was pretty disastrous. So 13 U.S. service members and more than 170 Afghans died as a result. And Smith made a critical comment to the Washington Post about how the administration was lacking a clear view of the U.S. U.S.-backed, you know, Osraf Ghani government. And this is like when the withdrawal was happening. So he gives that quote to the Washington Post and get a load of this. Anthony Blinken hits him up on the phone and just starts chiding him for having the audacity to say something even a little critical about Biden.

But later, Biden himself called Smith to apologize. And that was allegedly the only time he spoke to Biden throughout. his presidency, okay? And that was like an ongoing issue, that's what you hear over and over again, that people couldn't get any access to the president, Democrats in particular, and that when it came to things like cabinet meetings, they were very rare, and we're going to get to those details in just a minute. Sorry, but I got to do it, told you.

Right. So back in 2020 in the primary, I said, look, I've got very serious concerns about Biden having dementia. And I even did this tweet that people hated so much to people as a Democratic Party, reporters, et cetera. Hashtag dementia should be trending. And, oh, they're like, you're going below the belt. You're trying to help Bernie with this nonsense rumors. I'm like, guys, look, he can't remember words. He's struggling in public to get out thoughts, et cetera, right?

And we had evidence back then. And of course, every Democrat and every reporter in Washington said, outrageous, scandalous. Look at how dirty these progressives are trying to help Bernie Sanders by implying that there's something wrong with the beloved Joe Biden. Well, the minute he got into office, his staffers are like, there's something wrong with Joe Biden. He's in mental decline. We have to protect him. We have to shield him from these people.

We have to spend hours and hours prepping him for simple things because he can't remember anything. They knew from day one. How many times are you going to see the Democratic establishment lie to you before you realize, oh, right, the next time they tell you something,

it's also a lie. So they lied to you about his mental state in 2020. They massively lied about it in 2024. They lied about it while he was in office. time and time again. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the cabinet meetings, and we'll do a little comparative analysis between Biden's cabinet meetings or the frequency of them versus Obama and Trump. So he did not hold very many cabinet meetings, which is insane, especially at such a chaotic time.

Remember, he came in as the pandemic was still happening. Now, interactions between Biden and many of his cabinet members were relatively infrequent and often tightly scripted. At least one cabinet member stopped requesting calls with the president because it was clear that such requests wouldn't be welcome, a former senior cabinet aide said. So Biden had a total of nine cabinet meetings in his term, nine. Now, we don't know how many cabinet meetings presidents typically have. So let's take a look at Obama and Trump. Well, Obama had 19, Trump had 25. Yeah, and I remember people criticizing Trump for not having enough press conference, not having enough meetings.

He did 25, Biden only did nine. Let's say something here that's also super damning of our national media. No one broke this story for four years. So apparently Biden's entire staff knew that he was a mental decline for four years, and not one reporter or news organization in mainstream media. in mainstream media could break this story. I know. And I'll tell you why, because they're not trying to break that story.

It's uncomfortable. It's inconvenient. You know, you don't want to draw the ire of an entire political party. And we know what that's like. Oh, nobody knows better than us. It's the most uncomfortable, terrible, alienating thing because you're just trying to do your job as accurately and fairly as possible. But in today's political climate and news media climate, you're expected to be a mouthpiece for one side or the other. Anyway, a little more detail in regard to the, you know, cabinet

members. So one top Biden cabinet member met one on one with the president at most twice in the first year and rarely in small groups, another former senior cabinet aide said. So how do you run the country? How do you govern the country when you're not meeting with and coordinating with your cabinet members? Yeah, I mean, imagine only meeting twice. I don't know which cabinet member was, but you could fill in the blank on any of them, right? So what are you going to do with health and human services? I don't know, I only met the president twice. So I hope I got the good notes when I got to talk to him briefly, because I'm going to have to make massively important decisions about health, especially in the

beginning during COVID. You know, again, I don't know that it was that particular secretary, but on labor, on transportation, on, I hope it wasn't defense or state, right? This is crazy. And And remember, when they're meeting with him, these are very tightly scripted, very short meetings. That means Biden is not in charge. That means someone else wrote the script. And what I'd love to know, and I, as a follow-up to this story is, who was writing Biden's scripts? And then making him memorize them poorly when he had these brief meetings. Look, I know that there's a lot of focus on like, ooh, Jill Biden was really the president.

And look, she definitely had control over Biden in some ways. I really do suspect that Anthony Blinken was the one who had a lot more sway over the administration than anyone else. Yeah. So look, remember, sometimes it breaks out into do different areas. So for example, Dick Cheney was in charge of the government, I think, for the first six years of the Bush administration, but mainly on foreign policy, right? On domestic policy, it was a combination of people like Hank Paulson from Goldman Sachs ran the country economically for the first couple of years, et cetera. So the governments are huge and a little bit complicated. In terms of Biden's administration, on domestic policy, it's a little less clear. But on foreign policy, I think Anna's right that Blinken was the Dick Cheney of Joe Biden, that he seemed firmly in charge. And by the way, so where do all of these intensely pro-Israel decisions come from?

they come from the donors in the beginning, but Blinken is massively pro-Israel. And by the way, also his company funded by Israel, his lobbying company that he was at before, that he's going to go back to. It was, okay, so he had founded a think tank. And with think tanks, you can, you can hide, you can get dark money, basically. And hide your lobbying and your consulting. Exactly, and so a lot of that was happening. And it was interesting to see a lot of the lobbying they did seem to be,

on behalf of the Israeli government. So that's an issue, that's a huge conflict of interest. And by the way, I wrote about that before, like, as soon as Biden named him, nominated him for the role he's serving in Biden's cabinet, I was like, I looked into Blinken and I'm like, there's a huge conflict of interest here with the think tank. And look, I keep coming back to it for a reason, for a really important reason. Mainstream media is embarrassing. So were there any exposés about how Blinken is actually running foreign policy? Forget running foreign policy. Were there any exposés about how Blinken is getting, his company was getting money from Israel?

I remember. And there was one great article, right? Lee Fong, Lee Fong wrote it. You see, independent media, of course. For the intercept at the time. And after the intercept reports on it, did it not occur to the editors of the Washington Post in New York Times? Well, that sounds like a really interesting story. Maybe we should follow up on this.

No. Now when you've got conflict of interest with Elon, I think we should follow up on that as well. And mainstream media agrees. But whenever you have conflict of interest with Democrats or uniparty, like establishment of Republicans, oh, no, no, no, no, no. Hear no evil, see no evil.

So final thing that I have to mention about this, because this is the juiciest. So campaigning for the 2024 election begins. And Jill Biden is campaigning way more than Joe Biden. Biden is, right? And so specifically in Iowa, Jill Biden is like campaign stop after campaign stop, you know, doing her thing. And Biden, not so much. And so her press secretary at the time, Michael LaRosa, touted her efforts while speaking to a local reporter in Iowa. But LaRosa's superior in the Biden camp chided him for saying positive things about Joe Biden's.

wife to a local reporter. Get a load of this. Anthony Bernal, then a deputy campaign manager and chief of staff to Jill Biden, pressed LaRosa to contact the reporter again and played down any comparison in campaign appearances between Joe Biden, then 77, and his wife, who is eight years his junior. Her energetic schedule only highlighted her husband's more plodding pace. Larosa recalls being told. The message from Biden's team was clear. The more you talk her up, the more you make him look bad, Larosa said. So, dude.

I mean, look, there's a couple of problems there. One is they're so worried that Biden's falling apart at the seams that they're like, don't mention his wife who's also super old, but looks super energetic compared to him because he's falling apart at the seams. And she is super energetic compared to him. Yes, but secondly, they might have been saying that, Anna, because they're like, don't draw attention to the fact that Jill's running the place. Maybe, I don't know. So, and remember, the reason we're not just saying that out of nowhere, and I didn't realize it until there was this piece in a British paper that explained how Jill Biden was sitting in on cabinet interviews when somebody was being interviewed for a cabinet level position, and that she would sometimes interview staffers by herself without Joe Biden.

So I was like, I've never seen a first lady do anything like that. And so apparently she would had a ton of control inside the White House. And but if you ever mentioned it, not only would the Democrats take her head off, mainstream media would take her head off. How dare you say that? That is so disrespectful, et cetera. So the idea that these guys are challenging the powerful is hilarious. Mainstream media is doing no such thing.

So now that this term is over, Wall Street Journal breaks this story. And it's the same thing we told you guys all along. Biden is not really in control. He never should have run. And by the way, the reason that he was running, despite the fact that his entire staff knew he was in mental decline was because Jill Biden wanted to run. So that seems very clear at this point. So she deserves an tremendous amount of blame.

And I love, there's one thing that I've said this before and people misinterpret it. One thing I love about what happened in the selection is not that Donald Trump won. That's a bullet of China shop. but I don't want some of that stuff being broken in our government, right? But the establishment and their oppressive prison that they kept everyone in, you're not allowed to say that, you're not allowed to say the truth, we're going to try to destroy you, etc. Then now nobody cares. Okay, go ahead, go ahead. Tell us that, oh, you're not allowed to say anything about Jill Biden. Nobody cares about your stupid rules anymore.

You weren't the press. All you were were just giant marketing effort for the establishment. And now, especially with Biden, apparently not having run the country for four years, and not one person in mainstream media reporting that, we know for sure now they were not in the news business, they were in the marketing business. Well, when we come back from the break, we'll switch gears entirely and talk about why Fannie Willis, the Fulton County, Georgia district attorney, appears to be toast. All right back on TYT, Jank Anna and Boyka 420, who's an American hero who just hit the join button below on YouTube and women A.F who gifted five memberships, but she's been an American hero for a long, long time. You're awesome. Casper. We've got a big update on the Fulton County, Georgia election interference case against Donald Trump. So let's get to the details. Did you listen to any arguments?

I did hear that the argument this morning. It's ridiculous to me that the you lied on Monday and yet here we still are. I'm very much want to be here. So I'm not a hostile witness. I very much want to be here. Not so much that your hostileness will. So be an adverse witness. Your interests are opposed to mismurchance.

So after, after that you started dating shortly thereafter. Correct? A lie. That's one of your lives. Okay. I need to explain this and I think I get to explain my answers. That was an incredibly combative Fannie Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, testifying in court in regard to some legal challenges that Donald Trump's defense attorneys had brought forward in regard to her alleged conflicts of interest in naming Nathan Wade as the lead prosecutor in that case. She was having an intimate relationship with him, and so the legal team representing Donald Trump raised that as a big concern. Now we have a pretty big update on the story because it turns out that she's going to be removed from the case entirely.

Now that wasn't always the case because following the Trump defense team challenging her role in it in this case, the judge had made a completely different decision. So with that in mind, let's go to CNN senior legal analyst Ellie Honig explaining what had initially happened as a result of the hearings that you just saw some clips of. During the pretrial process, Donald Trump and some of his co-defendants alleged that the DA, Fannie Willis, had a conflict of interest. She had a relationship, which she later admitted with Nathan Wade, a person who had been brought in from the outside to be the lead prosecutor on this case. There were a series of televised hearings on this issue last year, during which Fonnie

Willis and Nathan Wade both testified, yes, we had this relationship, but it didn't start until after Nathan Wade became the lead prosecutor. And then with regard to the allegation that their finances had been intermingled because Nathan Wade was being paid a lot of money to work on this case, the testimony was essentially that they split the costs on everything and they did it all by cash. Well, the trial judge here found that there were significant questions about the truthfulness of Fawney Willis' testimony. The trial judge said, quote, the odor of mendacity remains around this case.

He said there's real questions about whether her testimony was untruthful. That's a quote, untruthful, from the trial judge. But nonetheless, the trial judge said, well, we can solve this if Nathan Wade leaves the case. And that's exactly what happened. So Fawney Willis wanted to remain on the case. And so she decided to remove Nathan Wade from the case entirely. However, that wasn't good enough for Trump's defense team because they decided to file yet another appeal challenging Fonnie Willis remaining on the case. and the appeals court has sided with the Trump team.

So in a two to one decision, a three judge panel reversed the decision of the trial judge, who in March allowed Fannie Willis to keep the case, despite revelations about a romantic relationship she had with the lawyer whom she hired to manage the prosecution. That was Nathan Wade. Now, the appeal panel's majority decision written by Judge Trenton Brown said that Judge McAfee's decision did not cure the already existing appearance of impropriety. Now, it was a two to one decision, meaning that there was one judge who did not agree with this. And so in a dissent, Judge Benjamin A. Land of the Court of Appeals wrote that he was

particularly troubled by the fact that the majority has taken what has long been a discretionary decision for the trial court to make and converted it to something else entirely. He says, if this court was the trier of fact and had the discretion to choose a remedy based on our own observations, assessment of the credibility of the witnesses and weighing of the evidence, Judge Land continued, then perhaps we would be justified in reaching the result declared by the majority. He added, but we are not trial judges. and we lack that authority. So Willis is not giving up.

She has now filed her own appeal. She did so swiftly. And so we'll see how this plays out. But if she loses upon appeal, it's very likely that this case will never come to fruition. Yeah. So let me explain why in a second. First, who's right? This ruling by the appellate court is wrong.

The dissenting judge is correct on the law. Normally, the trial judge gets to decide matters like this. This is a mainly Republican-appointed court going, yeah, that's true, except we like Trump and he's president now, and we know that if we overturn this, this thing's toast. And so they did. And so it doesn't mean that the case is gone, according to their ruling, it just means that Fannie Willis can't be in charge. But they know that once their ruling gets appealed, it's going to go to an even more

Republican-appointed court that is almost certainly going to back them. And then what happens after that? It goes to a Republican committee to decide what to do with the case next. And that committee will almost certainly kill the case. So this thing's pretty much over after this ruling. And so it would be shocking if they brought this case back now. It would have to be a bunch of Republican judges or lawmakers in Georgia who are like, no, no, we still want to prosecute the sitting president.

It's not going to happen. Never going to happen, right? It would be shocking. So now, what went wrong? here. The Democrats be clown themselves with all of these cases. There's only one exception, and that's the documents case, because that normally took a long time because they tried to get the documents back. Trump wouldn't, they had to do the raid, and Trump kept more documents, et cetera. That one went on a normal pace, okay? But Alvin Brag in New York, Fannie Willis in

Atlanta, or prosecutors in general in Atlanta, and Merrick Garland at the national level, They dragged their feet for two and a half years. And then we told you at the time, not after the election, okay? We told you when they were doing it. Why aren't you going now in the beginning of the term, Biden's term? If we thought that Trump did cheat. And if you thought Trump cheated, that's a massive, massive crime. You can't let him get away with that crime because the next guy might want to cheat.

Wait, let's be precise in our language. Not that he cheated that he attempted to overturn the election, right? like that with a fake electors scheme. Yeah, that's what I mean by cheating. That he tried a fake elector scheme, et cetera. And they did arrest those fake electors. Now, some of those are going to get tossed out. They're almost certainly going to get tossed out in Georgia, all of his co-defendants that

are with him. So they all skate. And some of those guys signed plea deals. Some of them might still go to prison, but a lot of them are going to skate on this, too. So they had a fraudulent scheme that it was super important to prosecute. But the Democrats waited and waited and waited. And there's a couple of possibilities. One is that they're grossly incompetent.

You can't ever rule that out with Democrats. But the more likely one is what we were worried about. They waited two and a half years so that the trials would happen right in the middle of the campaign. And in their idiotic heads, I think that some of them thought, well, that way Trump can't run against us. Well, then you made it political. And once you make it political, it's toxic. You should have done it from day one and you didn't think, oh, something might go wrong in the trial. I might take longer than I thought.

You've never run a trial? Or look, this is the last theory. And this one's less likely. But it's possible that they thought, oh, yeah, we'll never get it done in a year and a half. So we'll just use it against him in the campaign. And whether he wins or loses, we'll dismiss it. Because we never meant it. We're just trying to hurt him politically.

So that's so frustrating for those of us who thought he actually did those crimes. And it's certainly frustrating to Mago who thought he didn't do those crimes. But the timing, we said from day one for the whole four years and when they brought the cases, the timing was super suspect and potentially political. All right, let's take a break. But when we come back, Donald Trump is under the impression that, billionaires who have been meeting with him in recent days and recent weeks just really love him and want to be his friend. We'll be right back.