candidacy so early because he thought that would help him with the justice department investigation. but i never could quite figure out the reasoning there because it wasn t going to derail the probes, and now it has led to the special counsel which everybody i knew there had been leaks everybody knew there had been leaks. [laughter] i don t know why he announced so early. look, sometimes it benefits people to be first, but sometimes if you have a longer period of time, you have the come up with more cash, and we ve seen, you know, million millionaires and billionaires pull away from supporting him, pulling their money that hay threw at him back in 2016. and, you know, you also have more time for your opponents to get their game up to be above yours and to dig up more dirt on you, although i kind of think we know all the dirt on donald trump at at this point. howard: let me jump in here, ben, what do you think of elon musk reinstating trump, and will he come back?
howard: yeah, no question about that. let me get you both in on the story we keep coming back to which is elon musk taking a poll, reine shading reinstating donald trump the on twitter. trump says he doesn t see any reason, he s sticking with social, but i personally think it s only a matter of time. thoughts. i think if he can focus on facebook, if he gets back on there, that s a much better use for his voters. twitter is not real life. howard: i ve noticed. there s not a single time that a primary voter, general election voter that i talked to mentioned something about twitter. it is a, you know, it s just a cyclone of all of us speaking to each other. it s not what voters care about. in fact, some of the biggest twitter personalities went out to campaign, and they had no effect really on the general election. so twitter isn t real life. he s going to do anything, he should go to facebook that s where the voters are. howard: jim, on the other hand, trump has 88 million follower
it is news. there s only twice before in the history of president i says in our nation where presidents have done this. two, you could cut away and, three, howie, to your point if it s about ratings, well, that was obviously a poor choice. and for you to rip it, that s fine, but you have no point of reference for your viewers in that ripping. i do think though that there are some people out there, certainly on my side of the aisle, that feel that when donald trump is on television or wherever donald trump is, that those the are the types of things that led up to further division as we ve seen and we are at many our nation and led up to january 6th. so once bitten, twice shy. how re howe we re starting off on a rare moment of agreement here. let me just read from washington post as an example. headline: trump, who as president fomented an insurrection, says he is running again. lead paragraph. donald trump, the twice-impeached former president who refused to concede defeat
of straight news regardless of the ratings, he says howard: yeah, that s great. with the next statement, how he feels about the former president who is now a presidential candidate. will he apply the fair and balanced? i don t know. that affects what the anchors and reporters will feel. howard: there is myth, i think, that the media got trump elected in 2016 by covering all his rallies. he had to beat 16 candidates, so so if msnbc doesn t cover his announcement, does it not cover the convention vex? does it mute his slide during the de side during the debates? they didn t air his announcement, and then they spent 23 hours the denouncing him. it s already started. he s already doing what he did so well, and i don t think it s going to be something that any network can avoid. howard: right. but i think there is a
the 2020 election was rig. rigged. howard: back to the rigged election. look, the idea was to let a neutral person run this probe because trump is a candidate, and as garland said, joe biden is a likely candidate although the a.g. will make the final call. i understand that you have to do this. i think to have appearance of independence, but i don t think that republicans are going to buy it for a second. i think particularly the fact that jack smith also participated in the probe of bob mcdonald that was thrown out by the supreme court is something immediately people started talking about. and i think that, you know, the president, obviously, is going to treat as a hostile act against him. we re going to have to see where it goes, see how plays out, but i wouldn t expect my republicans to have confidence in this being an independent investigation. howard: leslie, the reaction in the left-leaning media has ranged from, well, this is great because it shows merrick garland must hi he h