donald trump is not willing to show up on the debate stage. chaos follows him and we can t have a country this disarray. taking their shot, ron desantis and nikki haley trying to take down the frontrunner donald trump on live tv. and plus phoning it in, trump warns iowa supporters not to sit back next week over speaker phone. and joe biden heads to battleground pennsylvania today to set the tone for his 2024 re-election bid. good morning, happy friday. we made it. it is 5:00 a.m. in washington and 4:00 a.m. in des moines where ron desantis and nikki haley each made their case that they are the better choice to face president biden in the fall. the democrats want trump to be the candidate. they are going to talk about all the legal tough, january 6, that will be what the election will be about. you don t want to be a infrastructure on trufrnl and the past. you want to be a referendum on booi biden s failures and our positive vision. and you need somebody that can ser
publisher nicholas johnston. always good to see you. i m missing your family menu behind you that i ve seen before you in the past. appreciate you coming in early. let s talk about the sdddemocra messaging from president biden. this is something that i mean, they are betting that democracy will be a voting issue especially for independents in the general election. do you see that happening? i mean, i have also talked to democrats who say that they have to connect it back to the kitchen table issues people put at the top of their concern list, inflation and other things. bidenomics was a big part of the early pre-election rollout that the administration was going through. but now we re 304 days away from election day. so now let s let the real general election begin. i think what the campaign is ar horse to what they think is a more powerful issue and that is democracy.
which quite frankly many supporters of him have already accepted and it doesn t concern them to the degree that it concerns critics of his. but what i found most fascinating to your point him leaning into the abortion argument despite how unpopular it has been for republicans across the country and his trying to convince these voters that he is the most anti-abortion candidate could be successful with some of them when it comes to the gop primary, but ultimately that is not likely to help him if he goes to the general. because we know that most voters especially independents who are going to decide the elections in so many states are not as severe on this issue as he is and as much as he assumes these republican voters are. it is a good point obviously in a general election, that is not the message, but ron desantis has to get out of iowa first before he will be able to start talking to those voters. so eugene, the other thing of course that was brought up last night with nikki haley
be the candidate. they are going to talk about all the legal tough, january 6, that will be what the election will be about. you don t want to be a infrastructure on trufrnl and the past. you want to be a referendum on booi biden s failures and our positive vision. and you need somebody that can serve two terms. i personally think that president biden was the right president at the right time. i agree with a lot of his policies. but the reality is rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him. and we all know that is true. chaos follows him. and we can t have a country in disarray. and a world on fire and go through four more years of chaos. we won t survive it. just ten days to go until 2024 voting begins with the iowa caucuses. i do think again a reminder, this haley/desantis fight is for second place. donald trump was not in iowa
what they want to do, although it is very clear that most republicans in iowa are backing the former president. but these two are really trying to essentially make the case that they are who can beat biden in a general election. and they used last night to get some of those points across to individuals who may have been tuned out quite a bit. we ll see whether or not it is effective. and so something notable from ron desantis here, he didn t immediately hit the social issues that he normally talks about. he usually talks about transgender health care bans, wokeism, but he did talk about abortion, which is something that distinguishes him in some ways especially from donald trump in a state, iowa, where evangelical voters really make up the core of the republican electorate. listen to how he talked about