Robbie the Fire Bernstein (10:04)
I, you know, I, I think it was about 30 seconds after Joe texted me and asked me to do the show that I was like, that's what I'm gonna do. It was like, you know, if. And I was really hoping that it was all said it was done, cuz I didn't know if I, you know, it was a very weird situation to be going into doing Rogan's show on such a big day, which like, again, I've done the show a lot of times, but this is kind of a unique thing. But to go, I've never done the show before where I was going in being almost like, oh shit. So in my mind I almost have to like think, okay, there's like three scenarios that it, this could be Donald Trump just got elected, this could be Kamala Harris just got elected, or this could be, we still don't know. And like, you had to be very. And there was no question, it was obvious that I was like, best case scenario, Donald Trump wins on election day. And then I can go and have all this kind of like leverage to be like, hey, you know, you promised this your mandate is this also. And this is one of the reasons why I ultimately ended up throwing my support behind Donald Trump is that there's this group around him of people who are very influential on him, who I'm fairly influential on. Like, you know, like, which is. Okay, it's not perfect, it's not. But it's like, you know, Vivek Ramaswamy and Tucker Carlson and Bobby Kennedy and a lot of these guys, they listen to what I have to say and they're also like, they agree with me on this. And so that's what I've been doing, both publicly and privately is trying to just get Everybody. Because now this is the move. Everybody. Pressure as much as you can to not make the same mistakes as the first time and keep the goddamn Warhawks out of his administration. And I don't know if we'll be successful at that. But at least with Trump, there's something to work with there, you know, there's something to. Maybe he'll listen to some of these people, you know. So, yeah, that was. That was kind of my game plan going into it. And I, like, I tried as many times as I could to call Mike Pompeo Liz Cheney's pick for Defense Secretary, but anyway, yeah. So, look, let's, um. Let's talk about the election. Let's talk about the response to it and how it all went down a bit. I mean, look, obviously we've been talking about this election for, you know, I mean, a couple years, I guess, now, but we've really focused on this for the last few months. And I guess it. So, like, my first thing that I would say. Right. Is it on our last episode and on several episodes before that, I had made the point that every indicator that you can actually observe with your senses was telling you that Trump's going to run away with this in a landslide. Like, that's what it. You know what I mean? Like, that's. It was just so obvious that, like, this is. The culture has moved, his support has moved, the amount of people publicly supporting him has moved. All of these things. While she's just terrible and. No, there's no enthusiasm there. I mean, she didn't have a fraction of the enthusiasm that Hillary Clinton had, and she had trouble getting enthusiasm. And yet the polls are telling you it's neck and neck. It's the closest election of our lifetime, all of this stuff. And so there was something kind of satisfying about being like, oh, okay. It was actually the scenario that it seemed to be. And once that happened, and look, I will say I. I was worried about deep state shenanigans, let's say, through this whole time. I had. I had said many different times, I'm not sure they will allow him back in. To be fair, that prediction has not failed yet. He's not back in, but looks pretty bad. I did say, though, on the last episode that you had essentially won me over and that your prediction seemed to be better. It just looked like Trump was going to win. I did not think he would win in the landslide that he won in. I really just thought it was impossible in today's polarized political environment to win a landslide like that. But he is, I mean, he dominated, you know, I mean, there's just no other way to put it. I mean, he just like, absolutely crushed her. Not, not just winning a few of the swing states that he needed to win, but like winning the popular vote and all of that. I mean, that was, that was pretty wild. And so when you see that, when you see, you know, this, okay, that is what it was. What we observed is reality. And clearly he, you know, was way, way out ahead of her. There's a lot of things that we could, that we could point to. So, by the way, as of right now, I'm checking the latest results. Donald Trump is up by, I think, four, four plus million in the popular vote. He has 295 electoral votes. But Arizona and. Excuse me, Sorry, hold on. Shoot now, Sorry, I got to get back to this. But so Arizona still has not been called yet, and Nevada has still not been called yet. And Trump is winning in both of those. So it looks like he's going to be well north of 300 electoral votes when this is all said and done and have won the popular vote by millions. This is a mandate unlike anything Trump ever had. This isn't 2016 where he lost the popular vote by millions of votes and just won, you know, the counties that he needed to win by the thinnest of margins. This was a dominant, dominant performance. And when you see that, look, there's a lot that can be said here. There's a lot that you can talk about about what really happened. And a lot of what happened here was something that is very interesting and new and kind of a revolution to some degree in the way presidential campaigns are run. But then there's also some just really conventional things that are like, oh, yeah, of course, like, of course this wasn't going to work. I mean, like, very, very basic things. Like, she was uniquely terrible. Uniquely terrible. Look, everybody, you almost go back to the fact that for four years now, shows like ours and other shows that were being honest in this space and just people who, you know, who were talking about this, we're talking about Joe Biden's cognitive state. You know, it was very obvious from at least 2019 that like, Joe Biden was in some type of severe cognitive decline. And the idea, and obviously it got much worse over those years, but the idea of, like, could he do a second term? Just seemed like there's not, like there was not enough mileage in that car. You know what I mean? Like, you're talking about a car with like 400,000 miles on it and you're planning a cross country trip, it'd be crazy if it never came into your head. You know, I'm not so sure this thing's gonna make it that, you know, like, I don't know, we might have some issues with this. And when people would think about that, all of us would go, maybe it's Gavin Newsom, maybe it's Gretchen Whitmore, maybe it's Michelle Obama. We started going to non politicians in our head while she is the sitting vice president, she is the obvious choice, you know what I mean? She's the obvious next in line and still all of us just skipped over her because, well, she's so terrible. There's no way you could run her and win. So they'd have to go with someone else. Now, the Democrats and Joe Biden, obviously not just in hindsight, but you could tell this in real time, made an enormous mistake. Or maybe, maybe a mistake isn't even exactly the way to put it, but all of the different incentives lined up to that. If you view the thing as a machine, as one entity, that it was like either Joe Biden had to announce that he wasn't running again or he had to run again. But what you couldn't do is have him go all the way late into the campaign, have, have the entire media and the entire political apparatus cover for him, not have a primary, shut RFK down, not have anybody else run against him, and then swear that there's absolutely no problem and he's sharp as attack, have the most disastrous debate performance in the history of presidential televised debates, and then throw this extraordinarily weak candidate in at the fourth quarter to not even have enough time to do it, and then just try to gaslight the country and tell you that she's hope and joy and wonderful. Obviously in hindsight that's a disaster of a strategy and it doesn't need to even be this bold new world, which it is, by the way. I'm not like that's an element of it too. But even in any conventional traditional year, if I just showed you that on paper, you go, oh, that's a disaster. That candidate's going to lose. So that is a huge part of this, you know, kind of can't get away from it.