The two most vital members of the Ruthless Podcast, John Ashcroft, as well as Michael Duncan.
And guys, thanks so much for coming over. And often times I outdress everybody on radio, but not today. You've done it.
You've done the harder thing. Two-tone. Right? I mean, you want blazer, maroon tie, different type shirt. Not the expensive shirt, but it's different.
And then tan pants. Well, we're here at the Republican National Convention. So you got to dress up. And of course I was talking about John. Michael Clark Duncan, you look a little bit different than we promoted you on Friday. So for everyone should know, before the assassination attempt on President Trump's life, we had taped a segment with the Ruthless Podcast.
And on Fox & Friends, I'd like to promote on Friday what I have coming up on Saturday. And what happened? Well, I got like a million text messages from people that in that promo, Fox had used a picture of Michael Clark Duncan instead of me. Right. And everyone was just giving me a hard time.
My parents are laughing at me. Star of the Green Mile. Star of the Green Mile.
I'm tired, boss. You know, it's just, I didn't know I had such an illustrious career. But, you know, it's just, it's nice to be nominated for an Academy Award. And let me tell you, that's been a source of huge laughs on the side of the fellows. We were like, one of the guys had to pull his car over. He was laughing so hard. Like, and Fox & Friends was apologizing. They said they didn't know what happened.
I go, I loved it. No, it didn't bother me at all. Yeah, I thought it would hurt our relationship, but it's not. Right? Is that true? That's true. Right now, why do you think Josh Holmes is so overrated?
I mean, why is that? How long do you have? I know. So, the Ruthless Podcast, did you guys know how, did you guys have a sense of what you were capable of with this? The four of you, the chemistry you created, the buzz that's taking place in and out of Washington because of what you guys are doing? Well, we always knew we had the chemistry. We're actually our friends behind the scenes. We would hang out and do the exact same thing.
And talk politics. Yeah. I mean, that's just, what you get with the podcast is what you would get if you were sitting at the bar with us. And that's the whole idea behind the show. Did we know it was going to be as big as it is today?
I mean, I guess we hoped. I know Michael Duncan understands that in this business, this stage is everything. He really, really sells it. Now, let me ask some. There's four of you. How many are married? All four of us. Right. Do you wish that you weren't married now that you're so famous? Because this is the time when you guys become a real catch.
Don't you think so? I got to tell you a story. So early on when we were starting this show and, you know, people are downloading it. But it's all, you know, it's on your phones, on your computer.
And it doesn't feel that real. And then, you know, went to an event and these staffers from Capitol Hill came up and they're like, are you Michael Duncan? It's so great to meet you. My wife was there.
And we get back in the Uber on the way home and she goes, so you have groupies now. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, hey, look, it is get used to it. Right.
Have you changed? No, no, no. This is the same.
Well, I'll tell you in one in one way. I was press secretary for 20 years and now I'm walking around with the badge that says I'm a reporter. Right. And that's a lot of fun. Walking up to all these old reporters who I use these to ask questions.
And now I'm asking them questions. So J.D. Vance.
OK, gotcha. And that's let's be a reporter and an analyst at the same time. J.D. Vance, the pick for number two. A lot of Republicans thought that the president would do better by maybe being more inclusive.
Have somebody less like him, for example, and going for Rubio, going for Governor Burgum. Where do you guys stand? First off, was it a good pick?
I think it was a tremendous pick. And I do think he chose someone who was less like him. J.D. Vance grew up in poverty in Ohio, not far from where I grew up. And if you saw that, you saw the image of his mother.
She couldn't feed him when he was a child. And there he is on stage. So the personal background. But the beliefs are very similar. The beliefs are similar because I think a lot of Republicans, I'll tell you one thing, Brian, I think you've noticed this. A lot of Republicans are unified right now in their beliefs that we need to help the working people, that we need to build out this economy in a way that works for everybody, not just a few. And I think that that's sort of an ascendant point of view on our side. I want you to hear a little from J.D.
last night. Here he's talking about what the assassination attempt did to him. Cut to. I want all Americans to go and watch the video of a would-be assassin coming a quarter of an inch from taking his life. Consider the lies they told you about Donald Trump. And then look at that photo of him, defiant, fist in the air. When Donald Trump rose to his feet in that Pennsylvania field, all of America stood with him. And what did he call us to do for our country? To fight to fight for America. Even in his most perilous moment, we were on his mind.
His instinct was for us, for our country to call us to something higher, to something greater. Michael, that was pretty good moment. It was and there were cutaways to President Trump at the same time.
Yeah. Inspirational. I would say like I was sitting at the arena during the speech. And you could just feel it. People are proud to be an American. What Donald Trump did in standing up and lifting that fist and defiance made people feel good. And I feel like there's just so much negativity in politics right now. It's so divisive.
It really felt like a different sort of moment last night. The investigation is going to take on a life of its own because it is so maddening to think this happened and how preventable it was. How he was literally in the scope of a Secret Service agent 10 minutes before he actually pulled the trigger.
So you would think it's pretty obvious Republican or Democrat. That was an heroic, heroic, lucky moment for the former president of the United States. But if you want to talk about deranged, listen to this. Now, we should tell everybody yesterday our current president tested positive for COVID-19.
Cut 18. Donald Trump is an elderly man who, for whatever reason, was given nine seconds to take a iconic photo op during an active shooter situation. His survival of that and bouncing right back and going right to his convention is being conveyed in the media world as a sign of strength. This current president of the United States is 81 years old and has COVID.
Should he be fine in a couple of days? Doesn't that convey exactly the same thing? That he's strong enough, older than Trump, to have gotten something that used to really be fatal to people his age. Don Lemon just called up and said that was really stupid to say. And, you know, he was telling to talk about women in their prime.
Joy Reid might have surpassed and laughed Don Lemon in this. So what can you put into words how stupid that is? I don't think you can't put into words how stupid that is.
I mean, you just you have to hear it to believe that it was actually said. Yeah. Would you rather have the flu or get shot? I don't know.
Which would you pick? Right. You know, but I think it actually it indicates something larger. And that is the problem of the Democrats. They're really scraping the bottom of the of the poll right now. They got enough.
They got no juice. They're talking about a think tank, white paper, this project 2025, because they get nothing sticking to Trump. And like Republicans are united. We're all on the same page. We're having this great convention. So they're kind of grabbing at anything they can to get some sort of momentum back from into Biden.
Yeah. So the twenty twenty five thing that you reference is the Heritage Foundation did a very conservative think tank. They have a lot of money.
I think their director is fantastic. And it's fine. Nine hundred pages. Now they're trying to say Trump is twenty twenty five, that he is going to go for an abortion ban and go back to free trade and go back to what's in those nine hundred pages. Do you think they'll be successful in panicking people the way they've been successful in the past, maybe in twenty twenty two labeling the MAGA movement as something that's dangerous and out of control and radical? I don't think it's working.
And it hasn't worked so far because they're the ones who are dangerous and radical and out of control. I mean, look, President Trump was there was an assassination attempt on it on his life last Saturday. So if we want to talk about who's out of control, the left is showing people who they are rather than telling them, you know, showing is so much more powerful. Right. And the question is now yesterday, two days ago, the question was, why does the president need a bandage like that on his ear?
Is he is that something that even the doctor didn't want? He's trying to draw more attention to it. So I thought that was dumb.
This might surpass it. I got to give you I got to say CNN has been kind of deferential to what's going on here. You get so much more respect from people if you even if you were going to vote for one guy. But if you just acknowledge when the other guy has a good day, it makes me wonder in the big picture if they should have pulled Joy Reid off. And were you surprised at MSNBC pulled off Morning Joe the day after the assassination in the morning? That is their number one show.
Yeah, that was wild. And then, of course, Joe came on air the next day and he said, if they do it again, he made all kinds of threats against the executives. He actually took shots at Lester Holt, who did the interview with President Biden the other day. And so there must be something going on inside of that network that's that's just last night. I don't know if you guys saw this Gold Star family up there making a speech. MSNBC cut away from them last night. Did not see that. It was wild.
I don't know. I don't know who made that decision, but it was a very bad decision. It's just the thing is, it's just in line with everything else they've been doing lately. Right. And by the way, we did have that.
And I just know in life that you have a boss, even if you become very successful and valuable, whether you're an investment banker and you seem to be on a roll, you call out your boss. You have to be understood, understood that you could be fired and they are almost daring to be fired. But doesn't it go back, Michael, to when they said they didn't want Ronald McDaniel on their air and Chuck Todd and others started speaking out saying, how dare you do this? And NBC backed off. So now the anchors are running the asylum.
Yeah. And I mean, we saw this back in 2020. Remember when Tom Cotton wrote that op ed for The New York Times and the Slack Channel went crazy and they ended up firing the editor, all because he was saying, hey, maybe riots are a bad idea and the National Guard should help us. You know, and we've seen that in the progressive movement in the era of Donald Trump is like these younger employees at these organizations or just left wing activists who work in media. They just they don't see their job as being a professional job. Right. They're activists at the end of the day. And it is it's the inmates are running the asylum. Can't say it better than that. So, guys, stick around. I want to come back and talk about what's happening on the left, because I heard a disloyalty.
Joe Biden, after spending 100 years in the Senate, eight years as a vice president and now three years as a president, has a bad debate, a hideous debate. Got it. Everyone is turned on him, except maybe is his hunter. His dog never liked him. Clearly. And his wife.
Yeah. When we come back, more with the real brains behind the success of the Ruthless podcast, not the overrated Josh Holmes or the comfortably smug. Back in a moment, Brian Kilmeade in Milwaukee. It's time to take the quiz. Five questions, five minutes a day, five days a week. Take the quiz every weekday at the quiz dot Fox and then listen to the quiz podcast to find out how you did. Play, share.
And, of course, listen to the quiz at the quiz dot Fox. Live from the Republican National Convention, it's Brian Kilmeade and is my brilliant colleague, Zach Basu puts it at the top of Axios this morning. President Biden is now self isolating both medically and politically with Covid. Now, he had given the sequences. He had said what could get him out of the race? The president had said the Lord Almighty. Then he said data polling that showed I couldn't win. Then he said health. Then privately is reporting saying that he's being told that Vice President Harris can win.
And so so all his boxes now are checked. And that was Mike Allen of Axios. Do you agree, guys?
I'm sitting here with the most important elements of of the Ruthless podcast. John Ashcroft and Michael Duncan coming up after that would be Steph Kite of Axios. But guys, do you agree with that assessment? John? Well, I got to tell you, I think it's going to be really hard to knock the sitting president of the United States off of the nomination. If Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer themselves are releasing public statements running a public campaign.
And even if they do that, it's going to be hard to knock Joe Biden off the top of the ticket because he is the president. That's a powerful position, even though the guy's brain dead. He's surrounded by people who understand how to use the levers that they're given to hold on to the power they have. And no one can just take it away from him. You know, it feels like everyone's having an intervention by taking away the car keys from Grandpa.
But he's out there in the car driving around town and he's oblivious to it. Well, we've never had Senator Schumer, John and Hakeem Jeffries and Adam Schiff come out at the same time and say this. We heard rumors they're about to.
We have 22 in the 21, 22 in the in the House. I just don't know what they're doing is they're wounding him to such a extent that he can't survive. Or you're saying that the delegates are his life preserver?
Well, we might. Well, the delegates certainly are his life preserver. The question is, are they going to publicly pull that away from him? And can they publicly pull that away from him? Maybe what we're seeing with Schumer and Jeffries, like you said, coming out publicly just over a couple of days ago. Right.
Maybe that's the start of something much bigger, but they can't do it in the background. It's not something that you can just sort of slink and hope that you ghost write a column for George Clooney. And that's going to get Biden out.
It's just it's just not going to work that way. And then this Schumer meeting, which is a story. I know that you guys have been talking about this story. We actually went to Delaware. He went to Delaware himself.
We broke the story on the little program that could a ruthless podcast. And we talked about how he drove out there by himself to make an appeal to Biden to please get out. And it was not a very productive meeting because I think Biden got upset. And I think it's pretty clear.
He said, no, I'm not leaving right now. Well, I guess if someone has leverage, for example, if it gets to the point where James Comer might be able to get the documents he needs to really pursue what he was up to for those years, we know there's a lot there. We know that for sure. So, I mean, if that could be one thing. The other thing would be if if they do something for if they have Jill finally understand. Yeah.
Or if he falls again. Dr. Jill. Yeah. Dr. Jill.
Yeah. We don't know what she's a doctor of. But if you want to know how he's doing on his reclamation tour, here's a little of his interview at BET yesterday when asked about dealing with Republicans. Cut twenty two. Trump's going to sign a bill if he gets elected. We don't do well. It's going to say we won't put on no exceptions. Nothing done.
And so it's a mile. It's a little bit like George Floyd. What happened? You know, I had to take independent action that wasn't as strong as what I wanted to George Floyd legislation to be. And I couldn't get Republican votes. So you got to kill point out what's a state, what the mega Republicans are trying to do. Feel better now, Michael? I'm not quite sure what the heck he was talking about. Yeah. You know, and that really is his problem.
He's got three different ideas, these three different ideas, and he only gets halfway down the road with each one of them. And it's why Democrats are so nervous. They feel like he can't prosecute the case.
And in that debate, that was the thing that filled them with so much anxiety. It wasn't Donald Trump. And, you know, he oh, well, he didn't nail the line on abortion. It was fundamentally Donald Trump looked good. And Joe Biden had no defense to it. I also think that if he's out, he's got to leave because if he can't run again, he also is not running the White House.
Yeah. So, so, so I it's sort of counterintuitive, but it's almost like he did so bad. He can't leave because if he can't run for president, it's pretty clear he can't do the job as president.
So what do you conclude? Then you'd have to 25th Amendment him. He literally can't do the job. And who has to lead that? The vice president. Well, the vice president has to lead it.
But I mean, she doesn't have the she does not have the internal swat. This is this woman didn't even get to Iowa in the presidential race. Her only shot is her only shot is really this like hook or crook way to move Biden out and to put herself in. But it's going to take Obama. It's going to take the Clintons. It's going to take them coming together.
These powerful voices. Otherwise, they're not going to be able to do it. But as Republicans, let me tell you, we're scared to death of Joe Biden being our opponent. We don't want we don't want to run against Joe. You don't want to get up in the morning and find out he's out. You wouldn't be able to get out of bed. So I know it's just crazy.
I think we're going to I think we're going to find out that he's out this week, though. I hate to tell you. All right. Pull up a chair and join me. Rachel Campos Duffy and me, former U.S. Congressman Sean Duffy, as we share our perspective on the discussions happening at kitchen tables across America. Download from the kitchen table. The Duffy's at Fox News podcast dot com or wherever you download podcasts. Listen to this show at free on Fox News podcast, plus on Apple podcast, Amazon music with your prime membership or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
