IT'S AN ASK ME ANYTHING: RNC EDITION OF THE SHOW TODAY We tried really hard to bring you to the convention with you, but if you have questions, fire up the text line and ask them today.
WE SHOULD START THE DAY WITH THE NATIONAL ANTHEM TODAY I had the chance to meet and have dinner with Mary Millben at the Steamboat Institutes' Freedom Conference last year (she goes every year) and she is one of the loveliest people I have ever met. Just super genuine and kind. And last night she PERFORMED the National Anthem. I love her so much and I teared up listening to her, as I always do. She gets what it is to be proud to be an American.
I had a chance to speak with her Wednesday and we're going to play that for you today at 2:15.
ABOUT PROJECT 2025 Stop panicking is the message here. I had a chance to sit down for a few minutes with Sarah Parshall Perry who is an attorney and senior legal fellow at Heritage. I asked her about Project 2025 and you need to hear what she has to say about it. The long and short is that it is the culmination of the work of over 100 conservative organizations and it is a wish list of public policy positions that they would love to see enacted. President Trump had NOTHING to do with it's creation and though Heritage has shared it with his campaign, they have offered it to the other two candidates, who declined to engage on it. This isn't some blueprint for the Trump Administration but I'll play the interview with Sarah at 12:30.
I GOT TO SPEAK WITH MADELINE BRAME She was the mother who spoke about her veteran son's murder in New York City on the first night of the convention. DA Alvin Bragg's office released the people who killed her son after knocking down his stabbing to "assault with a shoe". She was powerful and her story stuck with me hard as a Mom. I had a few minutes with her we will bring to you at 1:30.
TRUMP'S SPEECH WAS LONG LAST NIGHT And after talking about how disciplined the GOP has been this week, the President went off script and rambled for 93 minutes. If he had stopped at the 25 minute mark it would have been a brilliant speech, but he went on a rally style ramble that honestly put me to sleep. Literally. You can watch it here. He seemed humbled and grateful even as he rambled after the most impactful part of the speech, which is when he described his day last Saturday when a gunman tried to take his life. Watch it below.
OVERALL THE CONVENTION WAS REALLY, REALLY GOOD I came away a stronger Republican than I was before. I probably shouldn't admit that because I was supposed to there in a working capacity, but the people we got to talk to and the entire ambiance was one of joyfulness and love of country and it was hard to not be affected. Even media folks thought it was good, at least Michelle Tafoya did.
SOME OF THE BEST SPEECHES LAST NIGHT Which you should watch. First off, Eric Trump.
TUCKER CARLSON WAS FIRE
BUT NO ONE WAS BETTER THAN THE HULKSTER
This wasn't your parents convention and I think it worked. How about you?
SO IS BIDEN DROPPING OUT OR NOT? The rumor hit the media floor yesterday right before the show started when someone caught this story on NBC News. In it they quote sources close to the campaign who said, "the end is near" though some reporting later from yesterday says the President is still pushing back against that. That hasn't stopped NBC News from putting out a flowchart of what happens if Biden does drop out. Biden is apparently very angry and hurt that the leadership of the Democrat Party wants him out so apparently he's not heard of politics before. Interviews like this one don't help.
It's about treating people with dignity by getting their name wrong and forgetting the other one. We'll see what happens this weekend. From where I sit, this is a pretty accurate tweet about the state of the Democrat party.
THERE IS NO PRECEDENT FOR A CANDIDATE DROPPING OUT THIS LATE And CNN has a full breakdown trying to compare Biden to Truman and Johnson, but they bailed long before this point in the campaign. There is no precedent for where we are right now.
HE'S EVEN LOST HICK Who has come out and said that Biden dropping out would be "the best for the country" but fell short of calling for him to drop out.
REP. JASON CROW IS TRYING TO BRING THE TEMPERATURE DOWN On his own rhetoric and is asking others to do the same. I'm going to take him at his word until he proves differently.
PERHAPS OTHER COLORADO PROGRESSIVES SHOULD TAKE NOTE This is a good column by Rob Natelson on the nasty nature of some progressives in Colorado. When Colorado Rep. Steven Woodrow heard about the shooting of Donald Trump, he thought it was a super good idea to tweet out:
“The last thing America needed was sympathy for the devil but here we are.”
He's now deleted his X account after furious backlash, but he thought that was PERFECTLY fine to send out right after the man had been shot, which is telling. Read this part of the column:
Moreover, “progressives” themselves comprise the major American political group most closely approaching fascism. You need only examine the record of the Biden administration to see this: Within the last three and a half years, the administration has relentlessly pursued policies traditionally associated with fascism: efforts to disarm American citizens; perversion of the legal system to attack political enemies; gargantuan interventions into the economy; sweeping presidential mandates issued without regard to Congress or the Constitution; and what one federal judge called “arguably . . . the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” For more on this point, see here.
On the state level, Woodrow has been an enthusiastic participant in the Colorado legislature’s quasi-fascist thuggery: intrusive regulations, efforts to disarm citizens, and the campaign to convert Colorado from one of America’s freest and most prosperous states into a Third World hellhole. Woodrow himself was a sponsor of the “bag law”—a measure that appears to have no coherent purpose other than (1) attacking an interest group leftists don’t like and (2) making the rest of us suffer.
He's not wrong.
DID YOU GET CAUGHT IN TODAY'S TECH OUTAGE? It sure does bring a fine point to how much power lies in the hands of these tech firms, as the outage is affecting businesses from hospitals to airports to media companies. Read more here. Some guy says he's the one who caused the outage but take this with a grain of salt as even I know you don't push an update without significant testing first.
RIP BOB NEWHART This one stings. He was one of my favorites with his subtle, everyman delivery. Read more about his legendary career here.
LOU DOBBS IS DEAD The longtime newsman was 78 and had been absent from his television and radio shows for over a week before his death. Read more about his life and career here.
HOW OFTEN DO YOU POOP? It matters because a new study shows that people who poop more or less than the optimal (one or two times a day) are prone to kidney or liver issues. Read about it here.
HILLBILLY ELEGY IS BOOMING ON NETFLIX As people want to find out more about JD Vance without actually reading his really fantastic book of the same name. The movie is good, the book is better though. Read this comment about the movie doing well from this article:
As plenty applauded the movie others raged at Netflix for featuring Hillbilly Elegy so prominently, with some threatening to cancel their subscriptions.
Why not just not watch the movie instead of making threats designed to prevent anyone ELSE from watching the movie? Or even better, watch the movie so you can cogently tell people why it's so bad? You can't, because it's not.
sSIMPLE MOBILITY EXERCISES TO SEE HOW YOU'RE AGING And these are things you can do at your own home easily. Good luck, and if you don't score well it's not too late to get in better shape!