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Well, last episode you got to hear my Festivus edition of all the grievances I had against all these people, and this week's rant actually continues on one of them. Yes, I'm ranting about you, Ron DeSantis. Now, why am I ganging up on Florida Man? I'm ganging up on him because I think he's missing the opportunity. He's not with the program.
What is his path to the nomination? His path to the nomination is to be the person who gets about a third of the people who would prefer Trump to the regular Republican pre-Trump party and also gets about a third of the people who prefer the pre-Trump Republican Party. That would get you to somewhere around 30% of the vote. It would knock out Nikki Haley. It would establish you as the contender for
to beat Donald Trump. And then, once Haley's out, all the people who would prefer a pre-Trump Republican Party will almost certainly flock to DeSantis because, out of choice between Trump Sr. and Trump Jr., they will prefer, reluctantly, Trump Jr. And that's Ron DeSantis. So, the question is, what do you need to do to get there? What you need to do to get there is convince people who like Trump, who would prefer Trump to a pre-Trump Republican, that you are preferable to Trump. Now,
Call me skeptical that you can do that without actually talking about Trump. Because remember, these are people who know Trump. They like Trump and they think that he did a good job in office. What they're willing to do is look at somebody who can be a better Trump, a more modern Trump. But what they're not willing to do is simply say, hey, you know, I like Florida man. I think he's great without thinking about him in relationship to Trump.
Now, early on in the campaign, DeSantis needed to establish himself. He needed to establish his bona fides, his credibility as the person who is that blend between old guard, new guard. Trumpy, but not overly Trumpy. And I think he did a really good job of that. If Donald Trump weren't in the race, I think Ron DeSantis would probably be leading the pack. The problem is, wait for it, Donald Trump is in the race. And now we're about a week and a half out from the Iowa caucus.
And he is still not making the contrast. He is looking at a historic 30 point defeat in the state that he has staked everything on. And he's beginning to talk about Trump in interviews, but his television ads do not do this at all. The super PACs ad that is up features Casey DeSantis saying what a wonderful person her husband is. It's a wonderful bio ad.
And if this were the beginning of the campaign, I would have featured it in ad of the week. The problem is it's a week and a half out. If you're running bio ads a week and a half out, you've got a problem. Either somebody doesn't know you or you're missing the point.
All the surveys show he's very well known. The surveys actually show he's very well liked. So the bio ad has already served its purpose. What you need now is a contrast, and that's something Ron DeSantis isn't doing. To the extent he's contrasting, he's trying to contrast himself with Nikki Haley. But then again, what's the point? He's contrasting himself with Nikki Haley, trying to show that she's not Trumpy enough. Hello?
The people who are inclined to want that already know Nikki Haley's not Trumpina. They're either with Trump or they're with DeSantis. You're not picking up any votes by attacking her by being weak on China. The people who want Nikki Haley are the people who actually kind of would like a balanced relationship with China between confrontation and trade that actually not like the sort of outsider businessman fighter that Bernie Marino is trying to cast himself as in Russia.
Ohio, as we'll see when we get to the ad of the week later in the program. The fact is, you're going after the wrong target. The sort of person who is interested in Nikki Haley is not the sort of person who
who is interested in Donald Trump. The sort of person who's interested in Nikki Haley, the sort of person who has always accepted Donald Trump as maybe being somebody who was okay as president because he acted as a conservative, but don't like any distinctive Trumpy themes. They like the fact that Nikki Haley isn't quite as much of a culture warrior
They like the fact that Nikki Haley wants to support Ukraine. They want a balanced relationship with China. The fact is that if you're punching at Nikki Haley, you're punching in the wrong direction. It means what you're trying to do is preserve second place rather than go for first place.
Ron DeSantis has 10 days left to completely change. He has 10 days left to get a clue. He has 10 days left to decide that he actually wants to be president this time and not simply try and avoid an embarrassing loss to set himself up for maybe four years from now. The problem is you never know what's going to happen.
His time was now. In four years, there'll be another person who emerges on the scene unexpectedly because there always is an American politics. If Nikki Haley beats him for second place,
going to be the person a lot of people look for, regardless of what happens to Donald Trump, regardless of what happens to her in future elections. So what you've got here is a man who started in a marvelous position, who has failed to build on it, who has moved backwards. And the fact is, Ron DeSantis may be the most promising candidate to
flame out in a presidential election since, oh, I don't know, maybe John Glenn in 1984, maybe Jeb Bush in 2016. People who started with big advantages, lots of money, lots of hype, and just couldn't deliver. Ten days to go. We'll see what happens. I may be eating my words, but it sure looks like this is a candidate who's fighting for second and is likely to finish third.
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Well, I'm really honored this week as my first guest in the new year to have Ben Domenech, editor-at-large of The Spectator magazine and a Fox News contributor. Ben is here to give us his thoughts on the Republican race, as well as some interesting tidbits at the end. Ben, welcome to Beyond the Polls. It's great to be with you, Henry, and it's always a pleasure to talk to you. It's a very interesting time in politics, so there's much to discuss.
Boy, is it an interesting time in politics. But some of us on the Republican side wish it was more interesting, that we're talking about a race that looked like it was going to heat up. And yet all the polls in the national polls, the early state polls, basically say we're only a few weeks away from a coronation of Donald Trump, a.k.a. Orange Man. What say you?
Well, I think that that's likeliest to be true. I do think that there might be a little bit of flutter here at the end where you have a bit of pushback against that overwhelming tide. But I don't think it's likely to be overcome. And I think that's been pretty clear for a while now.
Really, ever since the raid on Mar-a-Lago that we saw, I think that this whole race has been dominated and all the oxygen really sucked away by the different lawfare-based attacks on the former president, which has really disabled any of the other candidates from having any possibility of rising up. And there's a certain irony here because Mar-a-Lago
If you read the kind of questions that Nate Cohn at the New York Times gets from his readers, all of them sort of turn into some form of why are Republicans doing this? Why won't they consider someone else?
And yet those are also the same people who tend to be clamoring for the former president to experience the most serious law, a law fair based ramifications for January 6th or for any of the other objectionable behavior that he's engaged in, you know, whether it comes to documents or anything else.
And so to a certain extent, I think this is a situation where Democrats are running the same playbook that they did in 2022 to great success, which is to say that they engaged in primaries, backed candidates or opposed more moderate candidates in a hope of having the nominee be someone who was, you know, frankly unacceptable to a general electorate.
We saw that happen across the board in a lot of different cases. And, you know, I mean, my favorite example is the situation that happened in the Grand Rapids congressional seat where you saw John Gibbs being pushed blatantly by Democrats
as the nominee over incumbent Peter Meyer, who had been one of the votes against Donald Trump when it came to impeachment. If Democrats were serious about Trump as a threat to democracy, Meyer's the kind of candidate, the kind of Republican that they ought to be backing. Instead, they backed Gibbs because they believed that the general electorate would reject him, and they did. And so that's the kind of situation that we are stuck with on a national level right now,
And I think that that's going to lead to a lot of different ramifications as these different law-based oppositional approaches to the former president play out over the coming year.
This is the thing that has always gotten me about the Democratic efforts to attack and delegitimize Trump, is that you would think that if you really believe that the former president is a existential threat,
to the rule of law, to free speech, to democracy, then you would want to make common cause with people who might not be normal Democrats, but agree with you that this is paramount. And yet, that's exactly what they don't do.
What they do is instead insist on playing to their base more, insist on driving the fears that Republicans have that drove many of them to support Trump in the first time, and then adding people to that by making more people afraid, and then expressing incredulity when they say, well, how can you do this?
I was talking to one Democratic strategist who was asking me about this, and I said, you're thinking like a Democrat. So the question I've got is, why are they doing this? They're doing this because I think that the partisan priorities, frankly, outrank the different priorities that they actually claim to have regarding democracy and the republic. And I also think that there is a, you know, for a lot of smarter Democrats, there's something at play here where they actually believe
their heart of hearts that the first Trump term really proved that even with a wild man from their perspective in office in the presidency He was actually limited in a lot of ways. He ran up against the courts He ran up against the guardrails of politics and rules. He ran up against the different barriers that were thrown up in front of him from bureaucrats in the administrative state and I think that because of that they have a lot of faith in
that, you know, he really can't do that much damage. We've actually tested this before. And so they're happy to just go out there, lie about the level of threat that he represents in order to try to move voters into their column, you know, particularly among the suburban set that, you know, really is fearful, I think, of a lot of the different things that he could do and really play this type of game. But it's a very cynical game. And I think it's one that
really doesn't understand, you know, the degree to which the there are a lot of people out there, I think, on the right who have gone along with the ideas that were attached to norms of policymaking, norms of the bureaucratic process.
and rules that they believe that they ought to abide by in order to process things in a very normal manner, who are going to, frankly, flout those and throw them out in every opportunity that they have if they are able to get back into power again. Now, what that looks like in terms of their process, I'm not entirely sure. But I do think that one of the things that we can take note of is
is that in recent years, the left engaged in behavior that I think really tested the bounds of what you could do in an authorized bureaucratic manner under the assumption that by the time this works its way through the courts, we will have established our new policy as being the norm.
We saw this within fights over, for instance, Medicaid expansion and a lot of things coming out of Obamacare, where basically they would force the policy into place, understanding that there would be immediate lawsuits filed by attorneys general, Republican attorneys general, obviously, across the country, various challenges that would be raised. But their hope was that by the time that the courts actually ruled on this subject, three or four years down the road, that this...
This would be such an established thing that the courts would be loathe to remove them. And I think that now they've basically expanded that approach to almost every area of policy, most notably immigration. And I think that that's something that, you know, when it comes to the way that the law is going to be tested going forward, either under a second Biden or a second Trump administration, is going to be a very key question.
So to paraphrase the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, what you're saying is that they kind of defined democracy down. Mm-hmm.
Yes, they've basically taken the idea of a representative government and turned it on its head. They've said that basically if we are elected, we have the authorization to do whatever we want in whatever way we want, regardless of the rules in question, and then we can fight it out in the courts going forward. Now, that's one of the biggest reasons that the issues of the Supreme Court
of court packing, of the attempts to delegitimize the court from Sheldon Whitehouse, Dick Durbin, and others on Capitol Hill, have taken on such a key aspect of the Democratic messaging in the last couple of years. Because they really had hoped, I believe, that they were able to count on a court that would
be fairly evenly divided or one that would even tilt in their favor. Unfortunately, that was not what they ended up with because they didn't elect Hillary Clinton. And they ended up with a court that is now tilted to the right and that they're very frustrated with. It's also, I think, a key question about what would come in a second Biden term if
if that was something that was an option that I really believe ought to be asked a lot more as a question. If he's willing to go and pack the court in a second term, one where he obviously would not be standing for re-election under any scenario, that's something that I think voters deserve to know. And I think it's a question that is going to take on more resonance in the coming year, assuming that things continue the way that they are.
Let's move back to the actual race for a moment and ask, how can you see, you said that there might be some pushback, there might be something that would throw maybe a monkey wrench in this seemingly inevitable coronation. What might that be? Well, I think that the only potential monkey wrenches are brought probably by two states that
frankly, may not occupy the same position going forward. And I don't know what your own opinion about this is, Henry, but, you know, Iowa and New Hampshire, you know, were obviously two states that the Democrats basically decided to take off the map.
after last go-round. They wanted to really start with South Carolina. In Iowa and New Hampshire this time around, obviously DeSantis has put all his eggs in the basket of the Iowa caucuses. Caucuses can be very weird. You can have inaccurate polling when it comes to the outcomes there. New Hampshire, obviously, is a state where
candidates have overperformed over and over again. And Nikki Haley obviously has the backing of Chris Sununu and, you know, has done well there in terms of her polling. And then South Carolina is a weird state this time around because Haley is obviously from there and has a lot of local support that a typical candidate does not have. That being said, it's hard to see anything other than a flutter there, you know,
people who are coming in at, you know, 30 or 40%, you know, and still facing a, a, you know, Trump dominant, uh, support, uh, level at 50% or plus or more, it still doesn't really make that much of a difference. And so I just don't think that there's going to be anything more than a little bit of resistance. And the one thing that I would point out about that is that it speaks to the lie that I think a
As soon as things coalesce, as soon as the field shrinks, that there's going to be a clearer anti-Trump vote within the Republican coalition. That just does not exist. From my perspective, it's a situation where
Trump and his or Trump number one or Trump number two supporters are basically 75 to 80 percent of the party. And you have, you know, an anti-Trump portion of the party, which is not really anti-Trump. It's more just from the perspective of Trump.
They very much want to win and they believe that he's someone who has too much baggage, has too much going on in his own legal challenges to necessarily win. That portion really is, at most, one out of five Republicans. And so I think that this is a situation where as much as there is going to be, I think, a little bit of resistance right here at the end,
And there's nothing that really shows a path towards beating Trump, given the fact that he has the vast overwhelming support of the conservative faction, which was the resistance to him last time around, and now has totally bought in on the idea that he's someone who they can believe in and trust when it comes to the presidency.
That's really the great irony is that when you look at his support from 2016, he ran from the outside in. He ran as the moderate candidate.
Not that he was explicitly doing that, but that's where his support base was. And this time it's completely inverted. The more conservative you are, the more likely you are to be backing Donald Trump. How do you explain this sort of political reinvention? I mean, this is the sort of thing that would make Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton slobber with envy as they were able to see how he pulled it off.
Well, you know, I think that last time around, you know, you had kind of the, I say last time, 2016, you had the Ted Cruz coalition of the kind of Tea Party set, the tri-corner hat, you know, pocket constitution set that really believed that, you know, he was the kind of person to be their champion. Those people are now overwhelmingly in favor of Donald Trump.
And the handful that aren't are in favor of Ron DeSantis, but they think of Trump as their next best option. And I think that that really demonstrates the degree to which he delivered on the promises that he made to the populist conservatives when he was in office. And also, frankly, the fact that they
trust him over the people who still have misgivings about him namely the mitch mcconnell you know quote-unquote establishment of the republican party that exists in washington dc and you know whatever you think of the accuracy of that judgment i do think that it represents a very real belief
that Trump was someone who made them promises that he largely delivered on, or that he attempted to deliver on, or that they believe he attempted to deliver on. And that's something that I think they wouldn't say about most of the other politicians
in the Republican Party who they have sent to Washington over the past several decades. Instead, they view him as someone who at least tried to do what he promised to do for them. And now, you know, they view him also, I think, as a martyr or a victim of a witch hunt.
that targeted him repeatedly because of the various views that he holds that they view themselves as having common cause with. It is a bizarre and very much a flip of the way that things were before. The moderates who had some kind of view of him as being perhaps more centrist, they're the ones who he has to win over potentially this time around because I think a lot of them are people who
you know, potentially saw him as being not a culture warrior, not someone who was going to, you know, engage in some of these hot button issues as much as he did. And instead, those are people who are now, you know, a little more reluctant to put a sign in their yard or a bumper sticker on their car.
Or the polls are to believe to even vote for him, that this is the sort of people who in Republican primaries are most interested in Nikki Haley or Chris Christie. Now, many of them will almost certainly come home in the general election. The greatest single predictor of whether you're going to vote for Trump in 2024 is whether you voted for Trump in 2020, no matter what you think about him with respect to the primary. But it's still...
Mind-boggling how Donald Trump has adopted, kept the same fighting persona and completely switched the sort of people who are most attracted to him.
Yes, it is. And it's also, I think, a demonstration of how little policy matters in terms of candidates. It's all about positioning. I mean, so much of this is about, you know, the nature of the communications that people have, the way that they present themselves, as opposed to the actual policies in question. I mean, if you asked me to tell you the difference between the policies of these respected candidates on the Republican side,
I would be hard-pressed to give you anything on tax policy, on healthcare, maybe a little bit on foreign policy, but that's pretty much it. And I think that that says so much about the fact that we have now these politicians as avatars of where we are positioned within the political firmament as opposed to actual representations of people's policy priorities
And that's something that I think, you know, in particular hurt Ron DeSantis. DeSantis kind of came out of the 2022 election cycle as being this very powerful juggernaut of a Republican governor, a conservative who, you know, had broad based appeal and touched on a number of different issue segments. But instead, when he ran for president, he ended up kind of becoming a
the candidate hot button culture war issues to the exclusion of everything else. And that was something that I think really did limit his ability to appeal to a wider audience. And we've seen his campaign go through all sorts of ups and downs, but mostly downs over the past couple of months.
It's hard to see any way that we can look back on this and view it as anything other than a massive missed opportunity for a fairly young politician who was viewed as being someone who had a long career ahead of him.
Well, you mentioned Avatar, and those of us who had children of a certain age remember Avatar, the cartoon of the heroic kids who are saving the world from the evil fire empire, which of course brings us to the realm of fantasy. And that means it's time, Ben.
that it's time to hear your assessment of the Republican and Democratic and Independent candidates with respect to where they would fit in the Dungeons and Dragons typology. So I am happy to take up this mission from you, Henry. And I did think about this quite a bit. Just to frame it for your listeners,
They may have seen these various memes that go around on social media where you've got a nine square box, a three by three of alignments. And they are you have a choice between chaotic, neutral and lawful and then good, neutral and evil alignments.
And I should say, when you're understanding these alignments, you shouldn't necessarily understand them as moral judgments. It's more about the inclinations of the character involved. And I think that when you look at these candidates, you can pretty clearly see where they settle down.
You can even, I think, make an assessment on which kind of class or player they would be if they sat down at a table where they were going to be rolling dice. And so from my perspective, you know, I think, you know, starting with the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, I think you have to say that this is a guy who's a neutral good.
What that means is he's trying to aspire to the best in life, but he isn't necessarily feeling constrained by the normal rules and norms expected of one. This is something that obviously got him in trouble with the Chamber of Commerce types, a lot of the pro-business Republicans. He would be kind of a human paladin type, I think, if he was playing at the table. For Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, I think of her as a lawful neutral candidate.
She's someone who is very much about the rules and the norms. She's very old-fashioned in a lot of ways when it comes to her interaction with the press and with organizations. But I think of her as kind of a high elf warlock type. The neutrality of her views is something that is affected a little bit by those who are trying to influence her, whether you believe that's the Chamber or Raytheon or Boeing or something like that.
with Vivek Ramaswamy, I think you have to describe him as a chaotic evil. He's just trying to cause trouble and he's doing it in all sorts of different ways, according to his own priorities, often inverting onto his own, you know, previously declared rules and priorities. I think of him as a, as a arcane trickster, gnome rogue or something like that. Chris Christie,
from my perspective is a true neutral he's neutral when it comes to alignment neutral when it comes to the morality question he's he's in it kind of for himself and for his own priorities he's outside both parties really and and you know maybe the goal is just an ABC contract or something like that at the end of the day but he's kind of like a dwarf Bard he's very charming uh but
but really only in it for himself, from my perspective. With Donald Trump, I think of him as a chaotic neutral. He has no real kind of quotient in terms of his directional perspective other than chaos. And so you would actually assign him something like a fire Goliath or something like that. Someone who's just trying to set things on fire, doesn't really know why he's doing it,
But the priority is more chaos more than anything else. With Robert F. Kennedy Jr., I think he's very interesting. I think he's a chaotic good.
He reminds me a little bit of kind of a wood elf druid or something like that, a little bit of the environmentalism kind of flowing through there. And someone who definitely just sort of has priorities that are a little outside of the normal perspective. He did, by the way, I don't know if you saw this, today declare that he had made the requisite steps to get on the Utah ballot.
which would be, which will be quite interesting. Biden himself, I think you could go a couple different ways, but I personally think of him as a neutral evil. I don't think that, uh,
You know, again, you know, it's not necessarily a pejorative. It's just that I think that Biden has kind of sunk away from his former self where he tried to find common ground with Republicans to really demonizing everybody who disagrees with him. And he doesn't particularly believe that he needs to abide by any of the rules or norms as much as he holds them up.
as being something that everyone really needs to abide by. I think of him as a feign spirit, which is a type of spirit that repeats what you did when you were alive without any real recognition that you're actually passed on already. There's a little bit of that going on with him.
And then obviously Kamala Harris, I think of as a lawful evil, someone who has her own kind of devices, but it's definitely a rules focused person. You know, we saw that kind of attack made by Tulsi Gabbard on the debate stage back in 2020 against her.
And I think that she's definitely in that category. I would describe her as a Kenku barbarian. A Kenku is a bird-like creature that likes to repeat things that are already being said to it, which I think of as being very much Kamala's mode of conversation. And then finally, to round out the full nine, I would include Mike Pence, obviously lawful good. He's a rules-focused person.
guy who believes that everything that he's doing is good. He's not going to be going around murdering NPCs or anything like that. I think of him as a halfling cleric type. Somebody who's very much of the mindset that they're put on Earth to fulfill good functions in terms of what they're trying to offer. And they will pray even for their enemies.
Well, that was even deeper than I thought it was going to be.
I told you I thought about it, Henry. Yes, you asked me to. There's a good, there's a, you know, if you ask, if you ask me to think about the things that are otherworldly in nature, I'll spend way more time on it than I will having to prepare for a TV hit. So this, yeah, I'm just imagining you in the green room turning around to somebody. Would you say that? Yes, yes.
But this came about because of something you did in the last presidential campaign, which was online. You rated the candidates at that time, you know, Amy Klobuchar. I forget what you did for her. But what got me was that I forget what you rated Tulsi, but she responded and knew what you were referring to. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure. Similarly to RFK, I think I rated her a chaotic good.
Because these kind of outsidery candidates, they're essentially, they're clearly at odds with the superstructure, the institutional kind of presence. And so they are, in effect, agents of chaos, but they are convinced of their own nobility in that effort. And that's something that I think is really key to understand about them. I have no idea...
you know, uh, you know, myself where Joe Manchin would end up on this list. But I think that as long as he's not actually a candidate, I shouldn't have to assess it, but he's probably, I mean, neutral, neutral, neutral all the way down. No, I was thinking about Dean Phillips and I was thinking, you know, the blandest of the bland, there's a phrase in, uh, English slang, much of muchness, uh,
which basically means the ordinary of the ordinary. And I was thinking, yeah, he's about as neutral, neutral, neutral, neutral. But you have to remember your New Testament and your St. Paul, you know, because you are neither hot nor cold.
I have spit you out of my mouth. So, so that's the danger. That's the danger of neutrality in these, uh, uh, in these days in the old Futurama cartoon, uh, there's a, there's a planet of neutrals that gets targeted at one, at one point. And, uh, uh, and the neutral leader turns to his assistant as doom becomes apparent. And he says, tell my wife, I said, hello. So,
Well, let's not get into the merits of Zap Brannigan and Lila. So just to tie this all up, we ended on notes of fantasy. We started on the question of the state of the race. Was it always fantasy to think Donald Trump could lose?
I don't believe so. I think it was not fantasy to think he could lose prior to the level of lawfare that we saw play out over this past year, which sucked up all the oxygen and made it really impossible to have any kind of competitive case made over key policy questions and effectiveness. And look, I do believe that the one error that I think that, well, there are a lot of errors that were made going around,
But the one error that these candidates really did make on the Republican side, I think, was that from the beginning, they really ought to have stressed, I want to win. I can win. He is the riskier attempt to win.
And in a very practical way, I think that they never really managed to make the case that Donald Trump is a riskier proposition. And he clearly is. I mean, if you if you look at all of this, you know, as soon as there's, you know, any kind of legal verdict that comes down.
that slams down on him, independent voters of whom the vast majority of my friends are, I would say, independent voters, they will turn against him. They have clearly in the polls said that they would turn against him. And I think the problem for the Republican candidates is that they were too reluctant to make that case
from day one saying he is the riskier proposition and we can't afford to have uh you know four more years of joe biden and kamala harris and here's you know the other aspect of this which i just think is it's very stunning and there's really no historical precedent for it we have two incredibly elderly candidates who are about to fight this out and i don't know about you henry i mean i i
I do not, you know, in any way like to place bets on various sports books, either here in America or around the world, that are based on, you know, someone expiring. But if you had to bet about either of these candidates finishing out their term, you know, I would be shocked if you're going to put big money down on the over on that.
It's just something that I think is very unfortunate for a country that needs to be reinvigorated with youth and optimism, with a forward-looking view of the way that we engage with the world, with a belief in our people, and frankly, a status in the White House where you've got
kids who are still going to bed in their jammies, you know, and that kind of thing, as opposed to, you know, the likes of Hunter hanging around the place. And that to me is something that is a real shame. And I wish that we had a group of candidates on either side that would have that type of youth and an optimism about the future, as opposed to a couple of people who are really just, you know, scrabbling over who's going to hang on white knuckling it to the end.
Well, on that note, Ben, I'd like to ask, how can my listeners follow your work?
Oh, you can find me on X at B Dominech. That's B D O M E N E C H. You can also subscribe to my sub stack, the transom, which is at the transom.com. I'm editor at large at the spectator, which is excellent magazine. I encourage you all to subscribe to it. The print version of it is, it is very impressive. It's a real, it is a real throwback to the kind of the golden age of,
magazines and I'll show up and pop up on your TV screens on Fox and on the podcast side of things with Fox News Radio when you have the amount of attention span that you have for politics you can judge how many of those different things you want to pay attention to be on I hope that I don't irritate you too much laughter
Ben, I can't imagine you would irritate somebody who would rather be how much that they would get themselves in trouble by staying away from it. It's all the things that I do, Henry, to avoid writing a book, which is a far more worthwhile use of my time. But I just keep holding it off because I can't decide. Eventually, I'll do it, and it'll probably be about...
Dungeons and Dragons or video games or something completely irrelevant and the publisher will probably reject it out of hand. Well, there's a friend of mine named John Hood who is writing a series merging fantasy and American history. So you have George Washington meeting the Wood Elf at Valley Forge and that sort of thing. So I encourage you to think about that as a possible mix of your interests. They were key to the assault, as I recall.
Did they help him cross the Delaware? That's fantastic. The pixies at Trenton are the unknown people of American history. Excellent. So thank you very much, and I look forward to having you back on Beyond the Polls. Great to be with you. Long-time listeners may have noticed that I haven't had an Ad of the Week segment on this program in a while, and that's because I haven't seen many ads that really impress me.
This one, though, does, and I think you'll understand why when you hear it. Let's listen. Bernie Marino. President Trump has given Bernie Marino his complete and total endorsement because Marino is a successful businessman and political outsider who puts America first. Trump endorsed conservative Bernie Marino for Senate. I'm Bernie Marino, and I approve this message.
Yep, it's short and too sweet and to the point. It's only 15 seconds long, but that's all the time Bernie Marino needs in order to communicate his message. Donald Trump likes him. Did you get that? You see two pictures of Trump on the screen. At the end, when he's endorsing the message, it says endorsed by Donald Trump. And you also see a picture of Trump's
post on Truth Social that gives Bernie his complete and total endorsement. Why is Bernie Marino doing this? Well, Marino is running for the United States Senate in Ohio, and we all know that Trump's endorsement is the most coveted
thing in a Republican primary. There's no runoff. All he needs to do is get a plurality of the vote. So he's reintroducing himself. I say re because he's run statewide before, but it was a couple of years ago to Ohio Republicans by telling them about the most important thing many of them care about. Who is the big man behind? So you get the message over and over again. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.
You also hear that he's an outsider and he's fighting and he's a businessman. That reinforces the things that Trump-oriented conservatives want. They don't want somebody who's been in public office before. They don't want somebody who just wants to pass legislation. They want a fighter. They want an outsider. They want someone that, oh, by the way, sounds and looks and has the support of Donald Trump.
This is a wonderful introduction ad, and the fact that it's 15 seconds means that it's half the cost of a normal ad. It means you can play it over and over and over again, getting greater exposure and greater impact from the only message Bernie Marino cares about right now. Marino equals Trump. Trump equals Marino. Get it? If you get that message, you're the person that he's targeting, and that's why it's this week's ad of the week.
That's it for this week's edition of Beyond the Polls. Next week, we'll be jumping over to Iowa, where we'll get a bird's eye view of what's going on and what's likely to happen in the First Nation Caucuses. Until then, let's continue to reach for the stars as we journey beyond the polls.
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