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--:-- John Bickley: Good morning, I'm John Bickley, Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Wire, and this is a Saturday edition of Morning Wire.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And I'm Georgia Howe, co-host of Morning Wire. It's October 26th, and we're here to give you the facts first on the news you need to know.
--:-- John Bickley: Before we dive into today's topic, a quick word from our sponsor, Birch Gold. If you're looking to protect your savings, consider diversifying into gold with Birch Gold Group. They'll help you convert an IRA or 401k into a physical gold IRA, safeguarding your hard-earned wealth. Text WIRE to 989898 to get your free, comprehensive info kit on gold investing.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Now, let's get to our guest, Bhatia Ungar-Sargon, deputy opinion editor at Newsweek and author of Second Class. Bhatia, great to have you back on.
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: Thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure and an honor to be with you.
--:-- John Bickley: Well, we certainly love hearing that and having you on. So, first, we've seen an article this week from The Atlantic that the legacy media and the Democrats have really given a lot of weight to. It levels some ugly claims against Trump about supposedly praising Hitler's generals and disparaging a slain soldier. It's based on unnamed sources. Everyone on the record has said it's total nonsense. What are we to make of this story and how the legacy media is approaching it just days out from the election?
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: It's amazing, right? We're right back where we started. Trump is Hitler, right? It's just they just can't keep away from it.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And when they first trotted Kamala Harris out in what was nothing short of a coup against President Biden, replacing him with her on the ticket at the top of the ticket. I think they thought that she was going to emerge as some sort of, you know, Phoenix from the ashes of the Democratic Party, as if we had never met Kamala Harris before, as if we didn't know who she was.
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: They really acted like this was a person no one had ever met. And I think they believed that she was going to invigorate the base so powerfully that they could retire the Trump is Hitler, Trump is a fascist, Trump is a threat to democracy. She really did not make those arguments for the first two months of her candidacy.
--:-- John Bickley: And very much to her credit, she also retired the sort of Hillary Clinton, vote for me, I'm a woman, vote for me, I'm a woman of color. In Kamala Harris's case, I would be the first black woman president. You really did not hear her talk that way, although her surrogates made a really big deal about the quote unquote historic nature of her candidacy.
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: Now that they are seeing that actually she is just the Kamala Harris that we all know from her forays into politics over the last two decades, they've fallen back on what they think is their winning argument, which is Trump is Hitler, which they had sort of promised to do away with, I think, in the wake of the first assassination attempt on his life.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So, you know, it really does smack of desperation. The fact that, you know, these are all unnamed sources, the fact that the allegations are exactly the same. The Atlantic had an article a couple of weeks ago arguing you know Trump is Hitler Mussolini and Stalin Right You know they trying to up the ante
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: And of course it so depressing because what it does is it cheapens the impact that Hitler actually had in this world. It cheapens what these people were, Mussolini and Stalin, by comparing them to somebody who is at the end of the day a patriot and somebody who just wants the best for his country.
--:-- John Bickley: And I think that you're really seeing both on the left and on the right an inability to comprehend why Hitler was that bad. I mean, that's really what we've gotten to.
--:-- Georgia Howe: It's not just that it engenders attempts on Donald Trump's life, but it also really cheapens the history that, you know, a lot of people have really suffered through.
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: And meanwhile, we have Trump on the campaign trail serving fries to Americans and looking like a very relatable, not threatening at all man who's having a great time on the campaign trail. A lot of times you can see who's winning by who's having the most fun, right?
--:-- John Bickley: Look, we keep hearing about the gender gap. You mentioned the identity question, women for Harris, men for Trump, and a lot of polling does show this to be true. What do you see as the motivations behind that?
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: It's so interesting because what we're really seeing here is the class divide mapping onto the gender divide. Harris is appealing to college educated women and Donald Trump is appealing to working class men.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And of course, This has a lot to do with the aesthetics of the campaign. You mentioned Trump at McDonald's. And what I found so amazing about that moment was he showed up in his suit and did not take off his tie. He put the McDonald's apron over his the costume of Donald Trump.
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: And I think what that did was it really showed that he did not think that this was a degraded job. He did not think that you had to sort of dress down and be humiliated to take this job. He acted the part of a McDonald's worker with a lot of dignity.
--:-- John Bickley: And I think that that is why people really responded to that image of him. He looked proud to be doing it. He looked happy to be doing it.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And I really cannot think of another politician who could have pulled that off in that way. He stands with workers. And you see the way in which his policy, his economic policy, is designed for the working class.
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: No tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security. He promised that he would reduce the corporate taxes of any company that reshores manufacturing from 21 percent to 15 percent. This is going to encourage radical reshoring of manufacturing.
--:-- Georgia Howe: This is going to encourage radical reshoring of manufacturing. He said he's going to appoint a czar to entice American businesses back to the United States. These are all jobs that are, of course, women work in factories. Of course, women do service industry jobs. Of course, women work jobs that have overtime, but they are jobs that require physical brawn and physicality, the kinds of jobs that used to deliver the American dream before the Democrats became the party of the college educated.
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: And meanwhile, you look at the Harris campaign and she really is targeting that female college educated sector of the population, people who have less economic insecurity, less economic struggle and who are very, very invested in the question of abortion.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Honestly, to an extent that does not represent where the vast majority of Americans are at, the middle and the working class who have a much more moderate view on abortion.
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: This idea that abortion should be legal in all cases is very correlated with whether or not you have a college degree. And of course, women today in America are 15 points more likely to have that college degree.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So it really reflects the way that the Democrats have created an economy that really rewards women in a very big way Now we seen millions of dollars from the Harris campaign put into abortion focused advertising Do you think that having a positive effect for her campaign
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: I think that elites care more about cultural issues and the working class cares more about economic issues at this point. And the elites have more money and more time and more commitment as a result of that privilege to showing up and voting.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So it was a very smart thing for her to do. Even though Donald Trump has promised that he would veto a national abortion ban, the Democrats are a much more natural party for people who believe in late term abortions because Democratic politicians are unwilling to say what the upper limit on the right to an abortion should be.
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: They refuse to give that. So even though it is Republicans whose view at this point, namely Donald Trump, reflects more where the American people are at because of this question of the bans that she has been able to, I think, successfully tar Republicans with, she's really been able to mobilize that elite, over-credentialed, educated female vote.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Yeah. Now, you mentioned the economic policies of Trump. Harris has presented some of her own policy proposals. Can you walk us through the differences there?
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: Absolutely. She came out about a month in with an economic agenda that she's been calling an opportunity economy. And she had three main promises there. The first was a massive investment in small businesses by way of tax cuts.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And people have sort of poked holes in that and said, well, a tax cut for a new business is not really going to help those people because they're not going to have a lot of revenue those first few years, which means that a tax cut is not going to help them very much.
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: The second plank was she promised a twenty five thousand dollar tax cut for first time homeowners, as well as cutting a lot of regulation around housing.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And I think that that was actually a very smart plan from the cutting deregulation point of view, because, of course, we need much more housing. The reason that people are finding it so hard to buy a home is just a sheer lack of supply.
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: The problem with giving a twenty five thousand dollar tax cut to first time homeowners is that it will increase demand. So there's a real problem there. And the experts on housing have said this is actually only going to make the problem worse, because when you're doing that, you're actually making more people able to buy homes, which means that this dwindling stock is going to become even more expensive.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And the third idea that she had was just cribbed right from J.D. Vance. And it was a $6,000 tax cut for children for the first year of a child's life.
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: Of course, J.D. has said $5,000 for I believe it is unlimited for parents. So it was very interesting to me because from one point of view, this is not a great plan.
--:-- Georgia Howe: It does reflect the Democrats overall view of how to help people who are struggling, which is instead of creating an economy that pays better to working class people, you sort of raise taxes on the rich and then redistribute that, which, of course, working class people don't want that.
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: They don't want somebody else's tax cuts. They don't want welfare. They want much more of what Trump is offering, which is a protectionist economy, an economy that looks at the economy as a whole and says, how can we protect the labor of workers?
--:-- Georgia Howe: And Trump, of course, does that through tariffs, through getting rid of free trade, and then, of course, through limiting the supply of labor through immigration control.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Speaking of immigration, I wanted to ask you about that next. There's a stark difference between these two candidates when it comes to immigration. this issue converges with the economy instantly. And we've seen this playing out in all kinds of very specific ways with the Haitian migrants in some of these small towns How is Harris trying to counter the immigration message Is she doing an effective job at all
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: I think she sort of thrown up her hands honestly She was sort of caught between a rock and a hard place because she was second in command in the Biden administration, which has been an absolute disaster for immigration, opening the border and effectively allowing in 10 million undocumented immigrants to compete with Americans at the bottom end of the wage spectrum.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And what's actually worse is when they finally, finally, after three and a half years, decided to take executive action, what they did was they created legal pathways to parole a whole bunch of people. So you don't have the mess at the border anymore. They have actually paroled hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people into the country to compete legally with American workers.
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: And of course, that is why the gains that working class Americans had been seeing throughout the Trump presidency and then in the post pandemic labor crunch were halted immediately. And there's just been precipitous wage losses now, wage theft, to be honest, from working class people because of all of these paroled people.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So the Haitians in Springfield are part of that group. They were paroled into the country by the Biden administration, I believe, because he thought that halting working class wage growth was the only way to tamp inflation down and to get that stigma off of his administration.
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: And so when Trump shows up and says, you know, they're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs, they're eating the pets of the people in Springfield, they're probably not eating their cats and their dogs. They're not doing anything to the pets. What they're doing is they're taking the jobs. And to me personally, that's much more outrageous than eating the pets.
--:-- Georgia Howe: A lot of folks would agree.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, final question. Energy was a focus for Trump in 2016 when he won. It's a focus again now. Can you lay out the contrast between these two candidates when it comes to energy policies?
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: It's interesting. That's Trump's answer when people ask him, how are you going to get inflation down? And he says, I think accurately, energy is one of the biggest drivers of inflation because, of course, there's energy at stake in everything to do with groceries, everything to do with food, whether it's growing it and transporting it, feeding cattle, you know, transport everything. Everything energy, the cost of energy is going to be a huge driver in the cost of everything else.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Trump wants to drill baby drill. He wants to use every method available. He wants us to be energy independent, which, of course, is a huge, huge contributor to the sovereignty of our nation.
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: Kamala Harris was at one time a very big Green New Deal extremist. But like immigration, she sort of tried very hard not to talk about this topic because her party, even the voters in her party are no longer there. Everybody wants to get back to this sort of very moderate center.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So she has not been able to express where she stands on this issue like many other issues, because in order to win now, she has to pivot far, far away from commitments she's made in the past.
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: And I think, of course, again, at the end of the day, this is why they call Trump Hitler day in and day out, because it is Trump who has the moderate middle position on every issue. You look at where Trump is at, whether it's abortion, whether it's unions, whether it's courting black voters, whether it's energy, whether it's immigration, even mass deportations. Every one of these positions where Trump has eked himself out, that is where 50, 60, 70 percent of Americans are at.
--:-- John Bickley: Bhatia, great to have you on again. Thank you so much.
--:-- Bhatia Ungar-Sargon: Thank you so much. God bless you. And thank you for everything you do.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And that was Bhatia Ungar-Sargon, author of Second Class. This has been a Saturday edition of Morning Wire.
