Ep. 2109 - The Greatest SCANDAL In Modern Presidential History
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Folks, the reason that Donald Trump is president-elect is because the last several years saw the biggest scandal in presidential history. I'm going to explain that in a moment. Before we begin, my team and I would love to hear from you to make sure we're delivering the content and analysis you value the most. Please take a moment to complete our short survey. You can find the link in this episode's description. Alrighty, so...

The reason that Donald Trump is president-elect again is not just because Donald Trump is a unique figure, out of the box, historical figure. All that is true, obviously. The biggest reason that Donald Trump is president-elect again is because Joe Biden was dead the entire presidency and everyone knew it and the media lied about it and the White House lied about it. Now it can finally be said because Joe Biden is exiting office. This should be the biggest presidential scandal in history because unlike with

with Woodrow Wilson and Edith Wilson. Woodrow, back during his second term, basically had a stroke and was completely incapacitated, and Edith was running the country. At that time, the media was fairly small. There was not a lot of transparency to the public. It did not require the collusion of thousands of people in order to cover up what was happening to Woodrow Wilson. FDR was functional basically until he died.

Situations like what have happened with Joe Biden have never happened in the modern media age, but it happened and the coverup was extraordinary. And now it can be said, the Wall Street Journal had a long piece yesterday titled, how the White House functioned with a diminished Biden in charge.

Now, by the way, what this means normally is the 25th Amendment should have been applied to Joe Biden. His cabinet should have said he is no longer capable of holding this office and they should have made Kamala Harris president. But they didn't have the stones to do it. And so instead, they've allowed this diminished president, this person whose brain is not functional, continuing in the office of the presidency of the United States, the most important office on planet Earth.

simply because they didn't have the actual guts to oust him. So instead, they hid it. They hid it from the American public. And here's the thing. We all knew it. We all knew it. I think the amount of damage that did to the Democratic ticket this year is almost incalculable.

Because no matter how many times Democrats called Republicans liars or a threat to the Republic, no matter how much they said that Donald Trump was not normal, it turns out, you know what's the most not normal thing? Keeping a corpse in the White House like Weekend at Bernie's, wheeling him around press conference to press conference, wheeling him out and wheeling him in and pretending he's sentient while the rest of the public can see everything that's happening. It was one of the great emperor's new clothes moments in American history. According to the Wall Street Journal,

To adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, the White House told visitors to keep meetings focused, interactions with senior Democratic leaders and some cabinet members, including powerful secretaries like Defense Lloyd Austin and Treasury's Janet Yellen were infrequent or grew less frequent.

Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the presidency or key moments, including ahead of the U.S.'s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan. That's really early, guys. The disastrous pullout from Afghanistan was September 2021. That was the very beginning of his presidency. So pretty much from the moment he entered office, he was so diminished.

The cabinet members were not meeting with him and neither were members of the legislature. And it's not as though anything was important happening, you know, like the pullout from Afghanistan, like October 7th or like inflation at a 40 year high. He couldn't be bothered. And the Democratic Party couldn't be bothered because they were so high on their own supply. They believe that the American public hated Donald Trump so much that they could literally pretend that this mummy was president of the United States and functional, even though we could all see that he was not.

And the media went along with it. I'm not sure if there's a bigger political scandal or a bigger media scandal. Again, I sort of repeat myself here because, as I've said many times, there is a Democrat media human centipede in which the Democratic Party decides what are the issues that matter most and the media just repeat the mad nauseam. The legacy media are just stenographers for the Democratic Party.

For both of them, it's a massive scandal. According to the Wall Street Journal, senior advisors were often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy with people like National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Senior Counselor Steve Ruschetti, and National Economic Council Head Lael Brainard and her predecessor frequently in the position of being go-betweens for the president. So he wouldn't meet with people. Instead, there'd be a go-between. Now, the thing is, the go-between is probably making the policy because Joe Biden was not functional.

Press aides who compiled packages of news clips for Biden were told by senior staff to exclude negative stories about the president. The president wasn't even talking to his own pollsters as surveys showed him trailing in the 2024 race. No wonder Joe Biden thought he was winning. He wasn't even being shown the polls.

According to the Wall Street Journal, presidents always have gatekeepers. But in Biden's case, the walls around him were higher and the controls greater, according to Democratic lawmakers, donors and aides who worked for Biden and other administrations. There were limits over who Biden spoke with, limits on what they said to him, limits around the sources of information he consumed. They treated him like a toddler. They treated him the way I treat my four year old. They prescreened all the material. They gave him an anodyne world in which everything was hunky dory and no one could see that he was diminished.

The White House operated this way even as the president and his aides pressed forward with his reelection bid. This account of how the White House functioned with an aging leader at the top of its organizational chart is based on interviews with nearly 50 people, including those who participated in or had direct knowledge of the operations. And by the way, I'm here for all the tell-all books that are going to be coming out over the course of the next three years demonstrating the extent of this extraordinary scandal. And it really is an extraordinary, extraordinary scandal. According to the Wall Street Journal,

The system put Biden at an unusual remove from cabinet secretaries, the chairs of congressional committees and other high ranking officials. It also insulated him from the scrutiny of the American public. The strategies to protect Biden largely worked until June 27th when Biden stood on an Atlanta debate stage with Trump searching for words, unable to complete his thoughts on live television. Much of the Democratic establishment had accepted the White House line that Biden was able to take the fight to Trump, even in the face of direct evidence to the contrary. Well, that does raise the question. Why would they think that?

Why would they think that? You knew that he was gone. I knew that he was gone. We've been making this point since before he took office the first time. What exactly was new? The answer is nothing. As I said, after that debate, the reason the media turned on Joe Biden was not because a light bulb had gone off and suddenly they realized that Joe Biden died.

was not mentally capable. What happened is they were embarrassed. They were embarrassed because now it was clear to everyone just how incapable the president of the United States actually was. They were embarrassed. It's always been about their profile with the American public. And they thought they could get away with it. And then Joe Biden pants them and that embarrassed them and they didn't like it. And they turned on Joe Biden.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Biden's staff with advisers since he became a senator at age 30 came to the White House with a small team of fiercely loyal, long serving aides who knew him in Washington so well they could be particularly effective proxies. They did not tolerate criticism of Biden's performance or broader dissent within the Democratic Party, especially when it came to the president's decision to run for a second term.

Yet a sign that the bruising presidential schedule needed to be adjusted for Biden's advanced age had arisen early on in just the first few months of his term. Administration officials noticed the president became tired if meetings went long and would make mistakes. OK, again, he was not up to the rigors of the job from basically day one. Ideally, meetings would start later in the day since Biden has never been at his best first thing in the morning. Some of the people said when he was he wasn't a morning person. That's the excuse. He wasn't a morning person.

His brain didn't work and y'all lied about it for years until he exposed himself on national television like a predator outside a child's playground mentally. His staff made these adjustments to limit potential missteps by Biden, the people said. The president, known for long rambling sessions, at times pushed in the opposite direction, wanting or just taking more time. If the president was having an off day, meetings would be scrapped altogether. And this is what happens when people get older and their brain doesn't work as well as it used to. They have good days and they have bad days.

On one such occasion in the spring of 2021, spring 2021, listen to how early this is. Again, the media wanted you to believe that he only fell apart in 2024, spring 2021. He was elected in winter 2020. He took office in January 2021. Spring 2021 would have been like April. That's three months into his term. He has good days and bad days. And today was a bad day. So we're going to address this tomorrow. The former aide recalled the official saying.

Adam Smith of Washington found when he tried to share his concerns with the president ahead of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 that Biden was very hard to reach. He was the chair of the House Armed Services Committee, and he was alarmed by what he viewed as overly optimistic comments from Biden as the administration assembled plans for the operation. I was begging them to set expectations low, said Smith. He sought to talk with Biden directly to share his insights about the region, but couldn't get on the phone with him.

After the disastrous withdrawal, Smith made a critical comment to The Washington Post about the administration lacking a clear eyed view of the U.S. backed Ashraf Ghani government's durability. It was among comments that triggered an angry phone call from Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who ended up getting an earful from the frustrated chairman. Shortly after Smith got an apologetic call from Biden, it was the only call Biden ever made to Smith in four years.

Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said his interactions with the White House in the past two years were primarily focused on the reauthorization of FISA. Biden's senior advisors and other top administration officials worked with Himes on the issue. He praised the collaboration, but Biden was not part of the conversation. One lawmaker who did get one-on-one time with Biden noticed the president lacked stamina and relied heavily on staff. Senator Joe Manchin, he said that the job required a level of energy he wasn't sure Biden had been able to sustain, quote,

I just thought maybe the president just lost that fight. The ability to continue to stay on, just grind it, grind it, grind it. He said Biden's staff played a much bigger role in driving his agenda than he had experienced in other administrations. And they were all lying. They were all lying. Janet Yellen went out there and said he was totally fine. Kamala Harris went out there and said he was totally fine before stabbing him directly between the shoulder blades and throwing his body off the back of the boat.

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But Treasury Secretary Yellen, who was out there saying that he was totally fine, also, according to The Wall Street Journal, quote, had an arm's length relationship with the president for much of the administration. She was part of the economics team that regularly briefed the president. But one on one discussions were rare. She typically dealt with the National Economic Council or at the president's advisers rather than Biden directly, according to people familiar with the interactions. Some current and former administration officials said they would have expected a closer relationship between the two.

Over four years, Biden held nine full cabinet meetings, nine in four years. By contrast, in the first terms, Obama had 19 and Trump had 25. He had nine. He had one in all of 2024, one. And it is just amazing that they thought they could get away with this.

Biden's team also insulated him on the campaign trail, according to the Wall Street Journal. In the summer of 2023, one prominent Democratic donor put together a small event for Biden's reelect bid. The donor was shocked when a campaign official told him the attendees should not expect to have a free-ranging Q&A session with the president. Instead, the organizer was told to send in two or three questions ahead of time that Joe Biden would answer. At some events, the Biden campaign printed pre-approved questions on note cards and gave donors the cards to read the questions. Even with all the steps, Biden made flubs.

Some donors said they noticed how staff stepped in to mask other signs of decline. Throughout his presidency, Biden was assisted by a small group of aides who were laser focused on him in a far different way than when he was VP or how former presidents Bill Clinton or Obama were staffed during their presidencies. These aides were often with the president as he traveled. They stayed within earshot or eye distance. They would often repeat basic instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a station. I remember it was cheap fakes.

We showed video on this show repeatedly for years that Joe Biden was losing it. And these were cheap fakes, according to the White House and for a while, the legacy media. Every time you pointed out, for example, that Joe Biden had to be guided off stage, this was apparently you just being mean. Obviously, he didn't need to be guided off the stage. It was just people being nice to him. When Barack Obama had a giant fundraiser

guided him physically off the stage. Joe Biden froze up on the stage and Joe Biden had to physically be guided off the stage by Barack Obama. And we all pointed it out. We were told that was a cheap fake by the legacy media. The president's team of pollsters had limited access to Biden. By the 2024 campaign, pollsters were not talking to the president about their findings. Instead, they sent memos that went to top campaign staff.

This summer, Democratic insiders became alarmed by the way Biden described his own polling, publicly characterizing the race as a toss-up when polls released in the weeks after the disastrous June debate consistently showed Trump ahead. They worried he wasn't getting an unvarnished look at his standing in the race. And then apparently on July 11th, when Biden's top advisors met behind closed doors with Democratic senators and the advisors laid out a roadmap for Biden's victory, the message was so disconnected from public polling that it left Democratic senators incredulous. It spurred Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to speak to Biden directly.

Now, the thing about all of this is that we knew all of this. This is the part that makes it scandalous. We all knew it. It was all right there. They are so brazen in the media. They were so brazen in this White House. They thought they could get away with all of it. They urinated on the leg of the American public and they told us that it was raining. That's what this was. And now, now it can be said. Now the thing can be said. And this, by the way, is a pattern in the legacy media. And now it can be said thing. So for years, we were told transgender medicine was a life-saving protocol.

And then it turns out, as Britain is banning transgender medicine, one of the great misnomers in human history, for minors, now all of a sudden you're getting editorials from the Washington Post saying, hey, you know, there might be some problems with this. Now what can be said? If you're in the business of now what can be said, you are a liar by nature. Now what can be said is a lie because it could have been said at the time. You fundamentally betrayed your job and you don't get credit for coming out after Joe Biden's term is basically over

And saying the thing. You don't get credit for that. America was running on autopilot with Joe Biden's aides figuring out foreign policy and domestic policy. And Joe Biden in the other room sleeping. And we're supposed to believe that you get to do the, oh, well, at least now we're burying our, at least now we're burying our souls. The media are always late and they are always wrong. Okay, which is not a mistake. It means that they are wrong in the moment. They're wrong in the moment, in the time that it matters. Because it doesn't matter now whether Joe Biden was senile or not. He's leaving in less than a month.

That doesn't, it matters a little bit. They should 25th Amendment him today because you really shouldn't have a day where the president is non-functional. But it doesn't matter all that much. You know when it mattered? It mattered in 2021.

When the United States was losing soldiers in Afghanistan because Joe Biden was non-compostmentous. You know what it mattered? It mattered throughout the Gaza war when a diminished Joe Biden was threatening Israel with arms cutoffs. You know what it mattered? It mattered during this entire Ukraine war when Joe Biden was simultaneously suggesting that we were going to endlessly fund the Ukraine war and also that there was no off-ramp that he could name.

In fact, it matters an awful lot. It matters because the presidency matters an awful lot. You wonder why Donald Trump was reelected? This is a major factor. Joe Biden's mental status meant that it suddenly became palatable to Americans to look at Donald Trump as normal. That was always the left's

Their shtick was Donald Trump is not normal. You can't hand that guy power. He's not normal. But here's the thing. Donald Trump has now been the most normal person in politics for several years. Why? Because of Joe Biden, because of the Democrats. That is why, because of the media. I've never seen institutions on the left blow out their credibility the way they have over the past three years for literally nothing, for literally nothing. They got nothing in return. They got a terrible administration from a diminished elderly man

And to just add a cherry on top of that Sunday, they did it on behalf of Kamala Harris, an absolute trash heap of a candidate who with a billion and a half dollars and a glide path to the presidency couldn't land the plane. That is what they got. They got they got nothing in return and they should get nothing in return. Chris Chaliza.

Of the Washington Post, he has now come out and apologized. Oh, you know, you know, we probably should have said something. Apology not accepted, Captain Nita. No, you do not get to apologize now. Not even with your dumb blue glasses. You don't get to apologize. You should have done it in the moment. It is no longer relevant. It's no longer relevant. This is if Walter Durante shows up in 1952 and says, hey, by the way, I'm sorry I screwed up that whole coverage of the Ukrainian famine thing. It doesn't matter no more.

You apologizing for not having reported the thing we all knew. And by the way, called us liars for noting that. No apology not accepted. As a reporter, I have a confession to make. I should have pushed harder earlier for more information about Joe Biden's mental and physical well-being and any signs of decline.

Okay, I'm sorry, but no. No, the answer is no. You don't get to lie for years on end and then be like, oh yeah, by the way, by the way, sorry. No, all your credibility is down the toilet and gone. Okay, well, the good news is that this giant presidential lie, this enormous, enormous lie. Again, I'm not a conspiracy theorist guy, but the conspiracy was right out in the open. It was a conspiracy between members of the White House and members of the Democratic Congress and members of the media to cover up Joe Biden's mental condition.

That does not require any speculation. That is a fact. That is a reality. The consequences of the unraveling of that conspiracy, which you can all see right in front of our eyes. Again, the single worst decision, I think, in modern American political history was Joe Biden daring Donald Trump to debate him. Truly an awful decision. And the reason that Joe Biden did it is because Joe Biden had such an ironclad bubble that he actually believed he was fine. He was the only person in the room who didn't know that he wasn't well.

It's an amazing thing. Anyway, the consequence of that was, of course, Donald Trump becoming president. And I got to say, going into the new year, I am super optimistic about the Trump presidency. Last night, I had the opportunity to speak at the Turning Point Summit America Fest over in Phoenix, Arizona. And man, I have to say, Charlie Kirk, that dude knows how to put on a show. So Charlie, I've known Charlie since Charlie was 18 years old. Really? I mean, he's only 31 now, which is pretty incredible. Charlie was 18 years old when I met him.

Just a brash young kid, really smart, real go-getter. He was hanging around the David Horowitz Freedom Center Conference at the Breakers near here in Palm Beach. And I met Charlie and I immediately started hooking him up with donors because I said, this dude is going to be the head of the RNC one day. He was obviously aggressive. He knew what he was doing. He knew how to work a room.

Good principles. Well, Charlie has built an amazing organization in Turning Point. And this America Fest event that he puts on, which now has 20,000 people that are going to show up over the course of the next four days, amazing event. I'm telling everybody from students to just general members of the public, I had the opportunity to speak there last night and talk about what I was optimistic about for the future of the country. I also got to announce a project that we at Daily Wire Plus are doing with Turning Point. We'll announce that in just a few moments here on the show.

But it was a great event, really a terrific event. And what I talked about is the fact that I'm optimistic because President Trump is going to make the economy robust again. He's gonna make the economy dynamic again because Trump is a win first guy. He only wants the winning. That's what he wants. He's a total pragmatist. He's a utilitarian pragmatist. A lot of people, including me, have observed Donald Trump is not a conservative. That's true. He's not an ideological conservative, but his gut instincts are conservative because conservatism works in the real world.

And what Donald Trump cares about is what works. When it comes to the economy, what works are free markets. When it comes to the economy, what works is economic dynamism and innovation. And Donald Trump knows that because he's a business person. Well, all President Trump really cares about is what works. And when it comes to your kids, you should care about what works as well. I've been thinking a lot lately about kids' nutrition. You know how most kids' vitamins out there are basically candy with a vitamin label? They're loaded with two teaspoons of sugar, artificial ingredients. Kids really don't need vitamins.

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It's do no harm. At the very least, you know this administration is not going to come in and start upending every ridiculous table they can find. They're not going to come in and start talking about how business needs to be punished for its success. They're not going to talk about how unionization, for example, is the cure for what ails America's economic situation. They're not going to talk about how regulation is going to fix everything. And that's not what this administration is about.

So you can look forward to a more robust economy under President Trump. On foreign policy, you can look forward to solidification of foreign policy. Joe Biden is the worst foreign policy president in my lifetime, which is an amazing thing to say, considering there's a man named Barack Obama who exists. Joe Biden has been a horror show on foreign policy. And as I've talked about, there is a Trump doctrine, and the Trump doctrine is basically FAFO.

The Trump doctrine is American citizens come first, America comes first, which should be obvious. But American citizens do have interest in what happens abroad. So, for example, the freedom of the seas, the freedom of the Taiwan Strait or the Malacca Strait, so that, you know, the free flow of goods can actually allow us to receive goods, products and services in an affordable way. The United States has an interest in the free flow of energy and oil, which is why we're interested in, say, Saudi Arabia and also in drilling domestically.

The United States has an interest in curbing the regional ambitions of Iran, which is responsible for killing a vast bevy of American soldiers abroad, as well as targeting America's allies everywhere from the Middle East to Europe to South America. We have an interest in containing China, the American public, perhaps China most of all, because China is not only stealing our intellectual property, China's not only threatening Taiwan, which is the source of all the semiconductors that are useful in sophisticated technology, China's not only threatening Taiwan,

All of those various shipping channels that I mentioned earlier. China's also shipping the precursors for fentanyl into Mexico and Mexico's then shipping those over the border via drug cartels. There are all sorts of foreign interests that Americans have.

Which brings us to the second point about Donald Trump's foreign policy, which is we should calibrate our action to the level of interest the American public has in the thing. So if a bad thing is happening in some far off land that's really bad, and if we can do something minor to help that, great. But if it requires a serious commitment, it better be a serious matter to the American public.

and everybody ought to do their part. So when it comes to Ukraine, when President Trump comes in and says NATO members need to pay their fair share, he is correct about that, and he always was correct about that. And then finally, if the United States is going to actually use force, we should use force in the most effective possible way. The first sin in war is losing, and Donald Trump is not a loser.

He will use the credible threat of force to actually get things done. You can already see the world beginning to reshape around Donald Trump's foreign policy. And finally, Donald Trump is going to get us back to some sense of normalcy. The Democrats have decided that they're going to ride or die on the principle that the American family is somehow bad, that the American family is somehow a repressive institution. Churches are oppressive institutions.

Basically, we should all think of ourselves as freewheeling, atomistic individuals that are bundles of sexual desires. And if those sexual desires can be pleased on a momentary basis, well, then that's where true happiness comes from. That is not the vision of happiness that the American dream promises. You can see this, by the way, in the contrast between what Democrats think is weird and what Republicans think is weird. Republicans think drag queen story hour is weird. Why? Because it's freaking weird.

Democrats think J.D. Vance is weird because he has a wife and kids, grew up in bad circumstances, and made something of himself after serving in the military, and then is vice president-elect at the ripe old age of 39. They think that guy's weird. Normalcy is returning. These are all things I talked about at the Turning Point Conference yesterday. We did a really nice Q&A. We'll put that up online for you to see. It was great. Got to interact with the crowd. And I'm very optimistic. That optimism rests on efficacy.

Donald Trump is coming into office with some obstacles too. Going into the next year, this is really important. Donald Trump is not just coming in as the singular dictator who can determine exactly what he wants to do. Everything that we love about the American government is also the thing that makes it hard to get things done in the American government. When a Democrat like Joe Biden is in charge, you are very happy about the checks and balances. And when a Republican is in charge, Republicans get frustrated with the checks and balances. That's perfectly normal. It's perfectly natural. It's also why the checks and balances exist. Right now, Donald Trump is gonna enter office

with effectively speaking a one vote majority in the House. That is an absolutely slim majority. I mean, that is the slim as possible majority. He's also going to enter office with a three vote majority in the Senate for if you're counting vote number 50 and then J.D. Vance breaking a tie. These are not large majorities. They're particularly not large majorities because they're a bunch of people who are moderate Republicans in purple districts in the House and in the Senate. You have a few senators who are from purplish states.

And so what that means is that everything that Donald Trump wants that has to be gotten done legislatively is going to require a compromise. And that's going to require somebody to broker the compromise at the top level. In this case, John Thune in the Senate and Mike Johnson in the House. And so all of these sort of misplaced ire over the past 72 hours at Mike Johnson, as though Mike Johnson was just sort of freelancing and freewheeling when he came up with the Cromnibus package. That's not true. It's not true.

Now, we can argue over whether Speaker of the House Johnson made too many concessions in order to get the things that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance wanted in the original bill. I would say, sure, there are some things in there that definitely should not have been in there. And frankly, I'm glad that that version of the bill went down. It had too much pork. And as I said yesterday, I think the amount of disaster relief in the bill is excessive. I think the farm subsidies are excessive.

However, blaming Johnson for that is ignoring the fact that there must be coordination, heavy coordination between Donald Trump, who establishes what he would like to get done, Mike Johnson, who establishes what can get done in the House, and outside influencers who are pointing out the discrepancy between the two. It does have to be this interplay because otherwise what you're going to end up with is a circular firing squad.

And that circular firing squad dynamic is what we've seen over the course of the past several days. Now, I'm optimistic that it's going to stop. I'm optimistic that there will be action by the House of Representatives to avoid a government shutdown. Now, why does it matter whether there's a government shutdown? Now, the truth is it's not going to be the end of the world if there's a government shutdown. We had a 35-day government shutdown back in 2018. The world did not end. It was not particularly awful. Lost productivity was like $3 billion, supposedly. All the vital checks stolen out, like Social Security,

So if there were to be a government shutdown, the media would play it as though the world was ending. The world would not be ending. However, politically, it would not benefit President Trump to go into his new presidency, not only with a government shutdown, but also with having to presumably then deal with the fallout in the House.

Like that's not what you need if you're President Trump. You need a machine that's ready to go day one. That is the only focus. It should be the only focus from the Trump administration. I think now that reality is setting in, that will be the only focus from the Trump administration. Get past this thing, get to the administration, and then coordinate everything between the leadership and the Congress. Do that, and you can have an effective administration.

I'll give you an example of when the circular firing squad starts. So as we discussed yesterday, originally, the Kramnibus package, the continuing resolution could have been done with just a three page bill that says we're going to continue to fund the government at current levels up through January 20th or January 10th. That could have been the bill. Instead, Trump, Vance, Johnson, they all wanted disaster relief provisions in the bill because of the fallout from Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, among others.

And they also wanted farm subsidies in the bill because they believe that farmers have been shortchanged by the Democrats. In order to get those things, you are going to need to make concessions to Democrats because there are some Republicans who would drop off the bill based on the spending levels. In order to get those concessions, you'd have to give some concessions. And some of those concessions, I think were frankly wrong. Other concessions, I think were overblown. So for example, the idea that there was a pay raise for Congress that was 74, but that's not true. There's a cost of living adjustment

for Congress. Is that like a major issue in American politics? I think it's a cheap demagogic issue. Do I think it's like a huge issue? Not really. Is that going to break the bank? Not particularly. As far as the Global Engagement Center, a place that we literally sued, and that is a State Department offshoot that engages in soft censorship. My understanding is the reason that Republicans in the House, including Speaker Johnson, were willing to sort of make that concession is the assumption was as soon as Trump entered office,

Secretary of State Rubio would come in and just kill the Global Engagement Center anyway. So you can fund whatever you want. He was going to kill it anyway. With all of that said, the reality is it was not a good bill. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy pointed out all the flaws in the bill. And President Trump and J.D. Vance, who had coordinated with Johnson on the bill, they decided that they didn't want the bill after all. And so they decided to pull the bill and then suggest an alternative.

So yesterday played out as total chaos in the Congress of the United States. It played out as total chaos because, again, I think the reality is being sort of gradually accepted. And the reality, as I mentioned yesterday, is that politics is a coalitional game. The Republican caucus is very fractious and they have an incredibly narrow majority. And that means you're not going to get everything you want.

I'll explain in just one second. First, as President Trump declared on election night, 2025 marks the beginning of America's new golden age. We want you with us as we cover every minute of it. Right now, get 50% off new annual Daily Wire Plus memberships. That's an entire year of uncensored news, premium entertainment, investigative reporting, live breaking news, and much more for half the price.

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I think I'm gonna get some medicine so I can kind of like

Transform into a boy, get surgery. After the surgery, I didn't really feel any better. When it stopped being a thing for adults and it started to be a, let's teach this to kids. Total lie. Manipulation. It's gaslighting. Please stop. He's a boy, not a girl. How could she do this to my son? What they're talking about is hormonal therapy or sex reassignment surgery on children. I thought fixing me externally would fix me internally.

But of course I was wrong. The fact that the state thinks that they're more important and have a better say in what happens to your child over the actual parent's opinion is egregious. Puberty blockers, surgeries, big money makers for hospitals, for physicians. All I want to do is hold my son. Are you asking me to lie to parents? And he said yes. This is an weaponized...

Use of a parent's sympathy and caring and concern by the left to destroy your child. Let's tell kids that maybe they can be the opposite sex. Maybe they actually are the opposite sex. It is an evil thing to tell children that happiness lies on the other side of puberty blockers or double mastectomies. The left so badly wants to blur these lines. That's a five alarm fire. It's criminal.

This documentary and everything we do is made possible by your support. There's never been a better time to join. Get a full year of DailyWire Plus for half the price during our last chance sale. Head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe right now and join the fight. Let's make 2025 the year America's golden age truly begins. Alrighty, so after the death of the Cromnibus package at the hands of President Trump and Elon Musk, the new proposal that President Trump put forward was a continuing resolution

That would include funding for, for example, farmers as well as disaster relief and also would increase the debt ceiling for two full years. President Trump put out a statement in support of this proposal. Again, Speaker Johnson has been coordinating with Trump every step of the way. That is not a secret. That's obviously public.

President Trump put out a statement saying success in Washington. Speaker Mike Johnson and the House have come to a very good deal for the American people. The newly agreed to American Relief Act of 2024 will keep the government open, fund our great farmers and others and provide relief for those severely impacted by the devastating hurricanes. A very important piece vital to the America First agenda was added as well. The date of the very unnecessary debt ceiling we pushed out two years to January 30th, 2027. Now we can make America great again very quickly, which is what the people gave us a mandate to accomplish.

All Republicans, even Democrats, should do what is best for our country and vote yes for this bill tonight. So Trump, of course, was very, very excited about this new revised package. There was only one giant problem, which is that it went down to flaming defeat in the House. And the reason it went down to flaming defeat in the House is because a lot of Republicans aren't actually all that fond of abolishing the debt ceiling. Why? Because the debt ceiling has been a tool for ratcheting back government spending as long as I've been covering politics. I mean, going back decades at this point.

Many Democrats were not going to give Trump a win on this anyway. So we're going to get any Democratic votes on this. Among Republicans, there's a big problem. A lot of Republicans believe that raising the debt ceiling for like a full two year period is basically carte blanche to spend and spend and spend and spend into oblivion. For example, Senator Rand Paul said their proposals to raise it, their proposals to eliminate it. I won't vote for that. Representative Bob Good of Virginia.

is also openly opposed to the idea. Many Republicans were openly opposed to the idea. In fact, when this actual vote took place, 38 Republicans voted against it. Those 38 Republicans included many very strong Trump allies, including people like Representative Thomas Massey, including Representative Nancy Mace, including Representative Chip Roy. Now, Chip became the focus of the president's ire because Chip was a very staunch and very consistent conservative.

Make no mistake, Chip Roy is not some sort of left-wing rhino squish sellout. It's absurd. Here is Chip Roy explaining, listen, I'm not going to vote for a massive debt ceiling increase unless we get concomitant cuts. That's what I'm here for. I'm absolutely sickened by a party that campaigns on fiscal responsibility and has the temerity to go forward to the American people and say, you think this is fiscally responsible. It is absolutely ridiculous.

Okay.

Our country is far better off closing up for a period of time than it is agreeing to the things the Democrats want to force upon us. Biden is president. It's his obligation to properly lead. We're there to do the right thing, and we can't agree with what Biden and the Democrats are demanding. 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. Put America first and go for the victory, even if it means shutting down the government for a period of time. We had an overwhelming victory just four weeks ago, and we're not going to let Democrats forget it so quickly. Chip Roy is just another ambitious guy with no talent. By the

By the way, how is Bob Good doing? Bob Good, of course, is primaried by somebody who's backed by Trump. I hope some talented challengers are getting ready in the great state of Texas to go after Chip in the primary. He won't have a chance. And Roy responded saying, quote, my position is simple. I'm not going to raise or suspend the debt ceiling, racking up more debt without significant and real spending cuts attached to it. I've been negotiating to that end. No apologies.

Now, again, Chip Roy is not wrong in this particular thing. On an ideological level, the entire reason the Cromnibus was killed like two days ago is because it spent too much money. And Chip is making the point, you don't raise the debt ceiling for two years if your intent is to not spend a lot of money. So he's not going to do that unless he sees some cuts.

37 other Republicans agreed with him. It turns out that politics is not just a matter of saying the thing. You actually have to go negotiate the coalitional politics of the thing. And this is where I am concerned about the future. Listen, Democrats are not going to help Trump out no matter what. We know this. Even if Democrats agreed with the bill, they're not going to vote for it. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, he called the proposal laughable yesterday. The Musk-Johnson proposal is not serious. It's laughable.

Extreme MAGA Republicans are driving us to a government shutdown. And they're perfectly happy to have a government shutdown at this point because they believe that it will be blamed on President Trump. And listen, Trump believes it'll be blamed on Biden. No one cares about Biden. This is the problem. Biden's dead. Trump is at the center of American politics. He is the black hole around which all gravity is now shaped. And so, of course, he's going to be the center of the story. He's always been the center of the story.

This is the point that Wolf Blitzer on CNN was making to Republicans. How are you going to credibly blame this on Democrats? Again, this actually is Democrats' fault. Chuck Schumer prevented the normal appropriations process in the Senate from going forward. That's why you end up with these year-end crumb-to-bust packages. With that said, on just a PR level,

When you have a deal that's been negotiated with presumably a level of approval from Trump and Vance, and then it gets undercut and then undersold and then destroyed. And then the replacement deal gets shut down by 38 Republicans. Hard to say that that is about the Democrats rather than internal caucus warfare.

Let me just point out, Congressman, as of right now, if you take a look at the roll call, 31 of your fellow Republicans in the House of Representatives are voting against this current bill right now. So how can you say this is the Democrats' fault when you're in the majority? I love you, Wolf, but you've got to stop just trying to defend the Democrats here. The fact is that we

we have a number of Republicans that have never voted for a continuing resolution, have never voted to lift the debt ceiling. This bill requires two-thirds of the House, not an absolute majority. It requires two-thirds. So the fact that you have Democrats who

who normally would vote for this, refusing to do so, not because they disagree with a clean CR, not because they disagree with disaster relief, not because they disagree with aid to our farmers. No, they're doing so because they're upset that the debt ceiling increase is being taken off the table as leverage for them in future negotiations. That's what they're upset about. And you know what, Wolf? That's why Washington is broken.

And again, Representative Waller, he's not wrong here, but that's not the way they're going to play in the public view. Now, what actually happens if there's a government shutdown?

As I say before, these tend to be very, very overblown. But according to Axios, for thousands of non-essential federal employees, a shutdown means they stop working. Now, the reality is they'll stop working for a short period of time, then the government shutdown will end, and they will go back to work. During the last government shutdown from December 2018 to January 2019, about 420,000 federal employees were required to work without pay, while another 350,000 were furloughed from their jobs without pay.

accepted employees are those who keep working. Their responsibilities include services like emergency work involving the safety of human life or the protection of property. And then, of course, the federal employees are eligible for retroactive pay if they keep working while they're on the job. So what exactly gets impacted? Not Social Security, not SNAP, that's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs, food stamps, not veteran benefits, not passport issuance, not even education and student loans.

Pretty much national parks, Smithsonian Museum, all the things that the people in the media love to cover, but aren't sort of the day-to-day vital necessities of what people think of when they think of the government.

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Hurry, go now to GetTrumpWatches.com. So on a realistic level, is it a huge deal if the government shuts down? No. On a political level, is it good for President Trump to go into his administration with a government shutdown largely caused by a fractious Republican caucus? The answer there is no. Republican Steve Womack of Arkansas, he points out that this is not going to redound to Republicans' benefit if there's a giant government shutdown right now.

Here's the problem with shutting the government down, is eventually it has to be reopened. And under what conditions would it be reopened? If you are able to extract concessions from the other side, then that's one thing. But if they're dug in and they're not going to give...

then before long you're going to see the real impact on everyday Americans that a government shutdown actually proposes. And the results of that, I think, would be disastrous to both the new majorities in the House and the Senate and the incoming president.

Okay, so where exactly do Republicans go from here? Well, over at Punchbowl News, there's a lot of speculation by Jake Sherman, who does a good job over there covering the news, as to what exactly happens next. And there are a few possibilities. One is they go back to Plan A, the original deal that got shut down. Possibility two is a clean CR, right? That short bill that says we continue funding probably through January 10th. There is the possibility that they try the same thing again. They try to go back to the board with the same bill. I think that is unlikely. They could also try a new negotiated settlement, theoretically, with Democrats.

Or they could just pass the bill from yesterday without the debt ceiling increase. That includes the farm subsidies and includes the disaster relief and doesn't include some Democratic proposals. And it doesn't have the debt ceiling increase. And so you can get that by the Republicans. OK, but the reality of politics is such this is the thing that's important to remember going forward. President Trump needs to be on the same page with the speaker of the House. The speaker of the House needs to be on the same page with President Trump, which I think has been happening. Elon Musk needs to be on the same page with both.

Republicans need to be on the same page. This is not rocket science here. I mean, Elon Musk does rocket science. This is not rocket science. When you have a set of competing interests, all of which cancel one another out, what you end up with is gridlock. Gridlock within the Republican caucus is not good for President Trump. Now, there's been a bunch of hue and cry about how this is all Mike Johnson's fault. What if Mike Johnson had done things differently? And Mike Johnson was talking with the White House, with the Trump administration incoming every day, all the time. This is publicly reported publicly.

And this sort of bizarre notion that if you defenestrate Mike Johnson, suddenly things get better. I have a question. When they defenestrated Kevin McCarthy, did things magically get wildly better? I like Mike Johnson as a human. I think he's much more conservative than Kevin McCarthy in his voting record and in his principles. Also, he is the leader of a fractious caucus and the incentive structure did not change. And the incentive structure is not going to change post-election. It's not going to. Post-inauguration, you're still going to have an incredibly narrow House majority, an incredibly narrow Senate majority.

and President Trump and Elon outside, who is calling balls and strikes as to the spending. Those incentive structures are not changing. So if people are not on the same page, replacing one or other of the players is not going to change the actual outcome of the process. And this is the point. Politics is difficult. Coalitional politics is particularly difficult.

And so all these sort of calls that I'm hearing from some in the commentary, oh, Mike Johnson blew it. Oh, Mike Johnson is to blame. Or Elon is to blame. You've seen a lot of Elon. How could Elon do this? Listen, Elon did what he was supposed to do. He called balls and strikes on the bill. Mike Johnson was coordinating with Trump. And Trump...

Presumably heard the voice of the people and reversed himself. There's not a blame game and it shouldn't be a blame game because theoretically everyone should be on the same side. But in order for that to work, you have to have a better coordination and a better understanding by everyone involved as to how the sausage actually gets made. Because the sort of pie in the sky, if I throw out a proposal, everyone will vote for it. Or if I nix it, by the way, it's much easier to nix a proposal than get people to pass one. Way easier to kill a bill than to get a bill actually passed. Much, much, much easier.

You can kill bills all day long. But the reality is that until you actually have the president of the United States working in tandem with a team that he likes to work with, them working in tandem with him, everybody understanding one another, you're going to get gridlocked. I'm all for the messy game of politics ushering in a better policy. But when that mess becomes chaos, you don't even get the policy. This is presumably why Senator Trump

John Kennedy from Louisiana said, listen, I think the president Trump should just tell us what he wants and then we'll try to work on it. I think President Trump is going to have to consider coming to Washington. I mean, let's face it. He's the president now. It's not President Biden. President Trump needs to sit down with Mike Johnson and John Thune and come up with a new skinny CR. If the president wants to do something on the debt limit, we need to find out what it is and put it in the bill.

And then the president's going to have to help Mike sell it in the House. Democrats are not in the House. They're not going to go along with it. Mike's problem, Speaker Johnson's problem is that on the Republican side, he's got a bunch of free range chickens. I'm not criticizing them, but they wander off and Mike can't catch all of them by himself. This is right. This is right. The legislative process is a lot more complicated than putting out a statement on a social media platform by anyone.

This is why I say we all have different jobs. If you're a conservative, you have a different job depending on what the job is. If you're a commentator, it's to call out when conservatism is not being pursued and also to be honest about what is achievable. If you are a politician, your job is to get 70% of the loaf. All those interests are going to have to converge when Trump actually takes office. Again, I'm not super concerned about the CR. I'm not super concerned even about a short-term government shutdown.

But Donald Trump has big, important priorities and they need to get done. And the only way you get a big border bill is if the sausage gets made. The only way you're going to get tax cuts is if the sausage gets made. The only way you're going to get all of the priorities that President Trump campaigned on and deserves to have passed because the American people elected him. The only way that happens is if the process works. And so the process working is really, really important.

Well, meanwhile, Democrats are reveling in the sort of chaos in the Republican caucus. They're trying to force a wedge between Donald Trump and Elon Musk. What they're trying to do is suggest that Trump greenlit the bill, Elon Musk killed the bill, Trump followed Elon, therefore Elon is the real president. The reason they're doing this is not just because they're trying to force a wedge between Trump and Elon Musk.

It's not because they think that's true. Everyone knows Donald Trump is the actual president of the United States. Everyone knows this. The reason they're doing this is because they believe that if they keep saying that over and over, that Elon is the actual president running policy, then Trump will get frustrated with him and it'll create a personal gap between them. And that is the actual strategy that is being applied here. This is why you see the cackling hyenas over at The View who are reveling in all of this.

As DC barrels towards yet another government shutdown, a bipartisan bill to keep the lights on was scrapped. And it has a lot of folks asking, who is in charge? Because I've been saying it for a while. Yes, you have. I've been saying that I think Elon Musk believes he's president. I do. Well, you've been calling him vice president. I've called him vice president. I called him president because I don't know what J.D. is doing.

I hardly ever say I don't I don't remember last time we even talked about J.D. He's planning the presidency when he could get rid of Trump. So you think it's Musk, Musk Vance? Possible. What in the world are they talking about? What in the world? But again, the entire goal here is to create dissension in the ranks, which is why Republicans, why people who elected Trump should not engage in the internal firefight.

This is what Democrats want. Representative Barbara Lee, Democrat from California. Again, she is suggesting that Elon runs the government. They know Elon doesn't run the government. Elon isn't even a technical member of the government. He has not been appointed in any official government capacity. Doge is sort of an outside group. My understanding is it doesn't require congressional approval. Doesn't matter. They're going to try and play this up. It is really very clear to me that a non-elected billionaire, Elon Musk,

has weighed in now and has put forth a message on Twitter from his phone

that it's okay to shut the government down and to disregard the bipartisan deal. The public is not going to tolerate that. The Republicans are now breaking the deal that was negotiated. The public wants bipartisanship. Here we had a bipartisan agreement, and to allow a billionaire whose wealth, quite frankly, I believe has doubled since the election, to run our government...

really has grave consequences on the American people as it relates not only to the shutdown, but to the path forward in terms of governing. Again, this is a goal. The goal of theirs is to split apart the massive coalition that President Trump has built, which is led by figures like Elon Musk, who, again, was not a Republican until the last five minutes or so.

The Trump team has put out a statement about all of this. They said, quote, as soon as President Trump releases official stance on the CR, Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view. President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop. That that remains true. That remains true. Better coordination, however, would definitely be helpful. The grind of the legislative process is going to have back and forth. I think it's very good. We have people like Elon and Vick pointing out flaws in these bills.

With that said, there are going to be tough choices made in politics, including by President Trump, to pass stuff that ain't 100% of what everybody would like. That is the job of the presidency. And because that is Donald Trump's job and Mike Johnson's job, and because that's not the same job as many of the purists, we should just recognize that reality going forward or it's going to be very tough to get things done in a second Trump term. When it comes to immigration particularly, you need Mike Johnson there negotiating an immigration bill.

You can substitute whoever you want. You can change the incentive structure. And that immigration bill, I'm sure, is going to contain things that a lot of people like me don't like. The question with all of these bills is net net. Is it good or is it bad? You vote up or do you vote down? That's the real question. And that should be something that is known by all of the people who are in leadership positions before the thing even hits the public eye.

Joining us online is Bishop Robert Barron, the Bishop of the Diocese of Winona, Rochester, Minnesota. And of course, he is often cited as the Bishop of the Internet. You can check him out at wordonfire.org. It reaches millions of people every year. Bishop, thanks so much for joining the show. Hey, Ben, always good to be with you.

So let's talk about Christmas. Christmas obviously is coming up. We're very close upon it. And I wonder what you thought, because Christmas has become sort of a secular holiday in the United States for some odd reason, it's sort of become a cultural phenomenon rather than a religious phenomenon. What would you like to see Christmas become to Americans?

Well, yeah, I'd like to recover the real religious heart of Christmas. It was more of that when I was a kid. That's been a change in my lifetime, where it's become much more, as you say, kind of secularized, commercialized. You know, it's about the Word made flesh. It's about the baby Jesus. It's about the incarnation. And I think that whole idea...

suffused American culture for a long time. I'd love to see that revive. And here's a really practical thing. It's maybe more for the Catholics, but maybe the Protestants too, is everyone now goes to Mass, if they come, on Christmas Eve. And Christmas Day is kind of, the churches are sometimes relatively empty on Christmas Day.

And I hate that. I think the day itself should be the focus of attention. And if people come to church, they should come on the day and not just on the day before, which is permitted in the Catholic Church. But I think there's been a loss of the importance of that day, that something happened when the word became flesh and we should celebrate that.

So obviously in Catholicism, there's a whole period that leads up to Christmas that is religiously important. What does Advent, for people who are not aware of Advent and what that means, what exactly is it?

Adventus in Latin just means coming or arrival, right? So one way to look at it, Ben, is three dimensions. So the church looks back in time at the Adventus of Christ in time. The fact that we measure time according to him, you know, there's before him and after him, that he's for us the decisive climax of history. It wasn't the 18th century with the political and scientific revolutions. It wasn't the actual age. For us, it's the arrival of Jesus. So we look back

with great reverence at that time. We also look around at the present because we say the Lord wants to come now to inhabit our hearts. When Paul says it's no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me, he's talking about the adventus now. And then we would hold, of course, to a future coming, the second coming of Jesus, the culmination of all of history. So we would hold that history is going somewhere.

It's not one darn thing after another. It's not just cyclical. It's not meaningless. But history is gathered at one great eschatological point, and we would identify that as the second coming of Jesus. So I would say Advent is the time when we look back around and forward to the coming, the Adventus of Jesus.

So obviously this year, Hanukkah falls at the same time as Christmas. Now, one of the things, again, that's sort of funny about the way that these holidays have been celebrated in the United States is because Christmas is such an enormous season for Christians, Hanukkah has been, I think,

increased in attention, particularly to more secularized Jews, in a way that many of the sort of bigger holidays in the Jewish calendar are not. It's sort of interesting the way that that works. I mean, just as an Orthodox Jew, the big holidays are typically Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Shavuot, Pesach, those are the biblical holidays that predate Hanukkah. And Hanukkah is not what's called a Yom Tov. So you don't actually take off work. You don't actually, you know, you're not barred from using electricity, for example. It's not a...

a major holiday, but because Christmas is such a cultural phenomenon in the United States, Hanukkah has now been increased in sort of cultural importance. With that said, Hanukkah really is a thematically important holiday for a lot of reasons. And of course, in the Christian worldview, Hanukkah is the lead off to a period that ends in some ways in the birth of Christ.

Yeah, and what I love about Hanukkah, I mean, the rededication of the temple, after the desecration of the temple, it's the rededication of it, is a very important theme for Christians because the temple, as you well know, runs as a great theme throughout the entire Bible. The Garden of Eden is a kind of temple. Noah's Ark is a kind of floating temple. The Temple of Jerusalem of maximal importance for Israel. And then for Christians, Jesus is the new temple.

you know, I will tear down this place in three days, rebuild it, referring to the temple of his body. You have a greater than the temple here. When Jesus says that, that's a breathtaking claim for a first century Jew to make. If the temple was the great dwelling place of the Lord, for Christ to say, you have got a greater than temple here. And so we take very seriously the idea of

God coming to dwell now in us. So Paul will say, "Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit." So that's Christ dwelling within us. But you know, it came to my mind very much— I was doing some commentary for the rededication of Notre Dame in Paris, and this gorgeous Gothic cathedral.

And I think you and I talked about this a while ago. Notre Dame, who's Notre Dame? Our Lady. It's this Israelite girl, first century from Nazareth and Galilee. We believe an angel spoke to her and she becomes the mother of God. But at the center of one of the most important cities in the West, one of the most vital centers of Western civilization, is a monument to this Israelite girl, Nazareth.

She becomes the Ark of the Covenant. That's how the church fathers read Mary, is she bears within her the presence of the Lord. So all these wonderful temple themes and the rededication, the re-consecration of the temple. And then finally, it's to bring our people back to the worship of God.

Too many have been running away from the temple. They've been running away from our churches. I want them to come back. I mean, so all of that comes to my mind when I think of Hanukkah. So obviously going into Christmas, you know, we've spoken a number of times over the course of this year. It's been a very fraught year. The entire recent history of the West seems to have been pretty fraught, but it's a time of light for a lot of different religions, but particularly, obviously, most importantly for Christians. So what is your big Christmas message this year?

The Christmas message is the same one the Church has always said. It never really varies. It's that the Word has become flesh, and that means God's offer of salvation is there. That into the darkness has come the light. So go back to the prologue of John's Gospel, is that light shines in the darkness and the darkness will not overcome it. The Christian Gospels are massively honest about the darkness of the world. They know the fallenness of the world.

But the message is the light has come into the darkness and the darkness will not win. And there's the message for Christians of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is all the force of darkness overwhelmed him, it seemed. But the light conquers the darkness. That's the message. That's the ground for hope. It's the same Christmas message every year.

Well, Bishop Robert Barron, go check out all of his work over at wordonfire.org. And if you're a Christian, take his advice and go to church, not just on Christmas Eve, but also on Christmas Day. Bishop, it's been great to speak to you over the course of the year. I hope you have a wonderful Christmas and a happy new year as well. God bless you, Ben. Thanks. All righty, folks, we've reached the end of the show. We'll be back here after the new year with a lot more. I'm Ben Shapiro. This is The Ben Shapiro Show.