Ben Shapiro, one of the most impactful conservative voices in the world today. He's the Daily Wire co-founder, host of the Ben Shapiro Show, number one New York Times bestseller, deep thinker who talks quick and thinks quick.
In fact, let's get, let's bring him on right now. Hey, so Ben, are you pumped up for this? Does it feel to you almost like the World Series Game 7, Super Bowl? A lot of speculation. A lot of people think they know what's going to happen. Are you pumped up for this? I'm pretty pumped mainly because of the importance of the debate. I don't think this is going to be a sterling debate in terms of people just citing facts and dazzling your mind. I don't think what this is about, but obviously this is going to be the most impactful debate of my lifetime for sure, because right now the onus is on the incumbent president of the United States to actually show really, really well. I think the burden of proof right now is on Biden. A couple of polls that have come out in the last 24 hours, both of them, one from Quinnipiac, one from the New York Times showing Biden trailing Trump by four points nationally, which they blow out.
Number four, Donald Trump. Right now, Nate Silver is suggesting that there's about a 66 percent shot that Trump is winning this race. That means that Joe Biden has to do something to change a weird sort of situation because he has to all he basically has to do is just stand there and be normal. If Donald Trump stands there and is normal and then points out when Joe Biden slips up, points out when Joe Biden starts to mumble, when Joe Biden comes to the end of a phrase, he goes, well, anyway, if he points that out, that's a disaster area for Joe Biden. So this is actually setting up to be a fairly nice debate for Donald Trump in terms of the presets, despite the fact that it was Biden who issued the challenge, it was Biden who preset the rules with CNN, it was Biden who basically set the date, and Biden had basically all options on the table for him. And somehow he's still coming in the underdog in a debate where he's the incumbent president of the United States. So, you know, the president's known for his negotiating and he's very pleased by that. He wrote books about it.
Not many people say that he's bad at it because he's good at it. But when it came to this, he said, yes. The only thing I think he got out of it was you got to stand. And I think it was CNN that pushed that for 90 minutes. So I asked the Trump camp this. I said, well, why did you say yes? He said, well, because they never thought we would. And if you look at them being assaulted away for 10 days drilling Joe Biden, that's indication that our gut was right, that if we said any time, anywhere, and then did any type of request publicly, they'd say, see, I told you he didn't mean it.
Instead, they said yes. And next thing you know, Joe Biden scrambling in June to know the issues he's already been deciding on theoretically for the last three and a half years. It's illogical, Ben, that he would need this much time to prepare for a debate. It is wild, but it is a reflection of the fact that he cannot win this debate on policy. That is the biggest thing that Trump has going for him. On virtually every policy, Donald Trump has a more popular position than Joe Biden. That includes even positions that Joe Biden felt were going to be leading for him in this race. So, for example, Joe Biden clearly has been running this race on the basis of the idea that he is going to be the great defender of democracy and Donald Trump because of January 6th and because of election denialism and all this kind of stuff. That means that the American public are just going to look at Trump and say, no way. And now there is polling data out from The New York Times demonstrating, actually, that the majority, the plurality, at least, of voters in six swing states right now, six battleground states believe that Donald Trump is less of a threat to democracy and more of a defender of democracy than Joe Biden. When you're losing on that issue and you're Biden, what exactly do you have left in the cupboard?
You don't have your durability. You don't have personality because people think right now that he's either failing mentally or that he's just volatile and angry all the time. You certainly don't have a foreign policy where you set the entire world on fire. You don't have domestic policy where Americans hate the direction of the economy. They don't like the border and they don't like a social policy.
So what exactly are you going to stand on? It seems like this entire campaign from Joe Biden, he's trying to run a repeat of 2020 when the idea was Donald Trump is too volatile and crazy to be president of the United States. The problem is we've now seen three and a half years of Joe Biden being president and things got crazier.
They got more chaotic. He came into office pledging to be a moderate who's going to restore normalcy. And instead, what you got from Joe Biden was a wild, radical left-wing Bernie Sanders-esque administration plus senility.
That is a bad combo. And so the question for him over the last 10 days is how exactly do you somehow spin that into an attack on Trump? And there was a clip that was going around of one of Biden's campaign co-chairs talking about the real problem here is the American people have amnesia.
If you are a campaign co-chair and you're accusing the American people of having amnesia, you're losing. It's as simple as that. The world of business moves fast. Stay on top of it with the Fox Business Rundown.
Listen to the Fox Business Rundown every Monday and Friday at FoxBusinessPodcasts.com or wherever you download your favorite podcasts. It's funny. So my problem is the moderators because I do watch other channels. I know you do, too.
You're running a network. You do your own appearances. You got your live shows, but you have to find out what everyone's thinking and your shows better when we can hear other sides.
I think we both agree on that. And I watch Jake Tapper. I'm not saying they're not talented, but they are all anti-Trump. They treat Trump like he's some nut job. Alex Jones like figure.
They should not even be listened to. Here's an example of what the president's going to be. Former president's going to be up against tonight. Cut to we are waiting for former President Trump to make his first formal remarks.
We're not carrying his remarks live because, frankly, he says a lot of things that are not true and sometimes potentially dangerous. That was the worst debate I have ever seen. In fact, it wasn't even a debate. It was a disgrace, primarily because of President Trump lying, maliciously attacking the son of the vice president. The president does not think he's going to win this election and he wants to bring the rest of us down with him.
Okay. So what are his chances of actually approaching this with short questions, letting the candidates talk for their two minutes and one minute rebuttals? So I actually think that the beginning of the debate is going to be very rough for President Trump.
I think that you are going to see Tapper and Bash come out really firing at Trump, particularly on January 6th. But I do think that as the debate progresses, and here's the thing, unlike other debates, I don't think people are tuning out at the 30-minute mark. I think people are going to stick around for the entire thing because who knows when Joe Biden is going to physically collapse. This is like watching the Linda brothers walk across a volcano. You've got to watch them walk across the entire volcano.
It's not enough to watch them walk across the first third. So if that's the case, I do think that you're going to see the moderators actually ask some aggressive questions of Biden simply to maintain any sort of journalistic credibility whatsoever. If the whole thing is just an attack on Trump, I'm not sure that that hurts Trump. I think it actually probably in some ways helps him in the same way that the prosecution of Trump has helped Trump in the polls.
It makes his base rally around him and it makes it look as though the media have to step in and play great defender for Joe Biden. So I actually think that the beginning of the debate, here's what I would expect. I would expect the beginning of the debate is going to be all about January 6th and election 2020 and all the rest. And it's Trump's job to say, listen, I know you guys want to ask me about all that sort of stuff and we disagree on your interpretation of what happened in the election.
Here's the reality. I left office in January of 2021. Since then, every single day, Joe Biden has been president and he is currently losing to me because he is a bad president. This election is not about January 6th, 2021.
This election is about November 5th, 2024. If he does that, he just can't give them oxygen, right? This is going to be the thing that's hard for Trump because Trump's a battler. He's a fighter. He's a counter-puncher. He's going to want to go directly at the neck of the moderators if they say things that he thinks are wrong about January 6th and election 2020.
But the more time the American public think about 2020, the less time they're thinking about 2024. And so it's really Trump's job to sort of jujitsu all of that back into a discussion of Joe Biden. And I do think that as the debate progresses, I would be surprised if Biden gets zero difficult questions from the moderators. So, Ben, I want to talk about something in the last four minutes that we have about what's happening over in Israel. So Benjamin Netanyahu is the person that Democrats love to hate, even though Golan pretty much has the same policy and most of the Israelis agree with his prosecution of the war against Hamas.
And everybody wants to hostage us back, but at what cost? And now it looks as though war with Hezbollah is inevitable. How would you characterize the Biden administration's support for Israel? Originally somewhat tepid, and now the daylight they've created with Israel has radically increased the chances of serious war on Israel's northern border.
Ironically, Joe Biden's inability to see moral clarity here in an attempt to forestall war has made war significantly more likely. Imagine if Biden had said early on in the war to the Israelis, listen, go fast, go hard, win the war, defeat Hamas, build new infrastructure there, build new educational systems that get rid of the indoctrination against Jews. And this war had been over by February, which was certainly quite possible because Israel was on the borders of Rafah in February. Hezbollah would have backed off. Instead, what's happened is because this war has dragged on, thanks to the slow walking of aid by the Americans and Joe Biden every single day putting pressure on Israel to make concessions to terrorists, Hezbollah believes that they can continually up the ante in southern Lebanon and get some sort of sweet deal from the Biden administration or at least pressure on the Israelis.
And that's making the war significantly more likely in the north. Right now there are 100,000 Israeli citizens who are not living in the north of Israel. They're not living in their homes. A third of the housing stock in that area apparently has been damaged or destroyed by Hezbollah rockets.
No country worth its salt can ask its own citizens not to live in their homes, in their sovereign territory this way. And so, again, the targeting of Netanyahu by the media, by the Biden administration, by Chuck Schumer is totally ridiculous. There is well over 70% support in Israel for finishing the war against Hamas. There is well over 70% support in Israel for doing everything necessary to get back the hostages. And this idea that there's a wide gap in Israeli public opinion, it's just bizarre. I was just there for two weeks and it's just not true.
So the future of, I know, you were just there for two weeks? And you believe the people are supporting Netanyahu or the way he's prosecuting the war? The people don't support any of the politicians because they believe the entire political class is responsible for October 7th. But they are united themselves in the idea that the war has to be prosecuted to its finish, that there will be no sort of political agreement that allows Hamas to remain in place. And that the possibility of a, quote unquote, two-state solution with a group of people who like October 7th, the polling data suggests that 75% of Palestinians like October 7th, that is not the preconditions for some sort of Palestinian state.
That would be an immediate terror state in the midst of Israel's attempts to survive. AIPAC, which is a pro-Israeli group here in the U.S., put a lot of money into Jamal Bowman losing the next primary election, and he lost. And then AOC is blaming AIPAC for this. What do you think about the fact that he lost in the primary, number one, and that the squad seems to be reviled by their presence in elections?
What was their role in it, and how important was it for these doubters about the October 7th massacre to be ousted? So, I mean, there are a bunch of lessons from Jamal Bowman losing. The first is don't be a terribly stupid congressperson who stands for Hamas in a district that is 9% Jewish.
That's like the first rule here. Jamal Bowman was losing by 17 points to George Latimer in the polls before AIPAC spent a dollar in that district, and then he proceeded to lose by 17 points in that district. So AIPAC saw a vulnerability with Jamal Bowman, and they went for it. You'll notice that AOC is still sitting in Congress. She won her primary pretty handily, despite the fact that she's radically anti-Israel, summerly in Pennsylvania.
Same sort of thing. If you don't represent your constituents well, it turns out your constituents get very, very angry at you, and that's exactly what happened with Jewish constituents in New York's 16th district. Same thing could easily happen to Cori Bush over in Missouri's 2nd district. This has much less to do with AIPAC and much more to do with the constituents who don't like the person who is representing them as a congressperson. It's very reminiscent of when the left says things like, the NRA is responsible for constituents not liking gun control policies.
No, that is just an interest group that is representing constituent views. Lastly, who do you think the best pick for him, for Vice President's view, as a running mate to be Vice President? What helps him the most? What selection do you think, Ben? I think somebody who, again, projects calm.
Somebody who projects a sense of durability. I think Senator Tom Cotton from Arkansas would be an excellent pick. I think that Doug Burgum would be just fine from North Dakota. The entire question for Donald Trump is, can he project an aura of calm and decency and moderation at this point? All Americans want, and all we've wanted for 10 years since the Obama administration, is can we have some semblance of normal here?
That'd be amazing. And so anything that projects a sense of normalcy for the Trump campaign means something beneficial. He can really only hurt himself with a VP pick, I think, if he picks somebody who's sort of out of the box and has policies that don't mirror a more moderate version of the MAGA agenda, I think. Yeah, I think you're right. I think also, I think people just want common sense back. We're hearing less about conservatives and liberals. I think we're just hearing common sense.
And I hope we're at a point where we hear less about the Squad and more about that. And, you know, I don't think Donald Trump is 1-800 conservative. He's no cookie cutter conservative anyway, which drove a lot of people nuts.
But now I think a lot of other people are more than happy to bring it back. Ben, thanks so much. Congratulations on all your success. Thanks, Brian. Great talk to you.
