Ben Domenech -“It’s Going To Be All About Revenge” If Democrats Get Power

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Full Transcript:
Guy Benson: Ben Domenech, Fox News contributor. Ben, great to have you back.

Ben Domenech: Good to be with you, Guy, and I appreciate your acknowledgment that there is some fluff.

Guy Benson: Yeah, sometimes.

Ben Domenech: I’m sorry. You’re not one of these people who’s out there inventing AI that’s correct. You actually add some fluff within your conversation over three hours.

Guy Benson: Yeah, over three hours, a little bit of fluff is allowed. I want to start with this. We just opened the show on Abdul El-Sayed and his interview with Martha MacCallum. I had a few things that I wanted to point out and did with the audience. Something I didn’t get to is the revelation announced, I believe yesterday, that former President Barack Obama will be traveling to Michigan to campaign for Abdul El-Sayed for Senate.

And as I joked on Special Report last night, although it happens to be true, Obama would have to appear four or five times with El-Sayed to catch up with us on Piker in terms of the number of events that they’ve done. Just as a point of fact here.

But I think there are, in my mind, two reasons why Obama’s doing this. Number one, Obama loves politics. He’s a highly political ex-president, very partisan, still very involved, and he likes to be seen as cutting edge, as far to the bleeding left as you can get while still being electable in this country, which is what he did in ’08. And I think he sees this new vanguard of leftists as the new version of that. He wants to be in with that crowd. And I think he’s ideologically aligned in most ways, even if he didn’t fully admit it openly when he was president and running for president.

That’s A.

And B, I think the Democrats worry that El-Sayed might still have a problem with Black voters in Detroit. We saw that really come to the fore in the primary, where he was expected to win by 10 points and barely won by a point because he got hammered with Black voters. They’re going to try to bring in Obama to get that coalition all patched up because it’s going to take them all, I think, to win this race.

What’s your read on this and that particular dynamic?

Ben Domenech: So, a couple of things. First off, I think you’re dead-on about your analysis of the former president. One of the points that I would make, which is separate from this decision to campaign with El-Sayed, is that Barack Obama, as he always did when he was president and as he has only continued to do in his ex-presidency, loves to have it both ways.

He goes out there and says, “I don’t get why people are so divided. When did this start? Why can’t we talk to each other?” You know, right? Kind of above-the-fray kind of thing. These nods toward, “Why can’t we just sit down and talk blue states and red states?” It’s the United States.

Guy Benson: Exactly.

Ben Domenech: Exactly. And then he does this BS. I mean, it’s just an indication of how deeply unserious he is when he says all of this kumbaya crap about wanting to get along with each other and cross partisan divides, etc. His view is that everyone should get along and then the left should win. That’s always been his view.

And I think that’s something that he found convenient with John McCain’s campaign. He found it convenient at certain points with Mitt Romney, namely as soon as he lost and not in the run-up to it, when he was more than happy to depict him as someone who was going to, along with Paul Ryan’s assistance, push your grandma over a cliff.

He has this attitude toward partisanship, which is completely disingenuous. When it comes to the gap between his attitude toward this and his endorsement that we can see on the campaign trail coming up of El-Sayed, I think one of the big problems that he has here is that Black voters in Michigan really have not heard from El-Sayed consistently since he won that primary. He has done very little outreach to them, and we saw that, in fact, most recently, even today, in a feature on MSNBC and in other data points that we have seen in terms of the details there.

This is something that I’ve been harping on for quite some time, and particularly, I wrote a piece about this at the time of the primary win. El-Sayed and the rest of his socialist cohort like to have this false image of themselves as being this rainbow coalition. In reality, you and I know the truth: They are the most elite, white portion of the Democratic coalition that exists. That is who they appeal to. That is who they consistently appeal to.

And the problem that they always run into is that the actual base of the Democratic coalition is not as far left as they are and actually wants to be heard on issues like neighborhood policing and some of the other issues that are going on within their communities.

I don’t think El-Sayed has made up that difference yet, but he’s trying to. And that’s what Barack Obama is there to help him do. And when he gets into the Senate–if he gets to the Senate–he will be exactly the kind of partisan force that Obama secretly wants to happen. And he just will say, “Well, why can’t people get along with El-Sayed? Why are they talking about the fact that he’s a dual citizen? How abhorrent.”

Guy Benson: Yeah, well, and also the type of senator that Barack Obama was and then pretended not to have been. That’s part of it.

Ben Domenech: Yes. He pretends he wasn’t filibustering people who had no business being filibustered. I mean, he was an actual partisan. He would try to revise his history constantly. And this is true of both his personal life and his political life.

Guy Benson: I do wonder if part of the reason why the polls were so wrong in the primary and Haley Stevens almost shocked everyone and beat Abdul El-Sayed in that primary is because a lot of those Black voters just weren’t showing up in the polls, right? They weren’t responding. Whatever it was, they were not detecting what was happening in the Black community in Detroit.

And if there is a sort of depressed or muted turnout with that constituency for the Democrats in that race, that could be a way that there could be a slight polling misfire–or a big one–in Mike Rogers’ favor, right?

Ben Domenech: Go ahead. I think you’re completely correct about that, and I think that this is part of the issue when it comes to polling in the midterms. As you know, polling in the midterms is such a harder task than it is within the presidential , which is already a hard task.

And I do think that we give pollsters a bad name. A lot of them really do try to get this stuff right, and they are embarrassed and should be embarrassed when they have big misses. There was a big miss there within that primary. There’s a potential for another big miss when it comes to the Hispanic vote in Texas.

And I think that’s the thing that has a lot of Democrats nervous about this current situation. They really want to win in Texas. They really want to win in Michigan. But it requires them to pull cohorts that are less reliable when it comes to their votes coming in and coming in for Democrats than we typically see in a lot of these midterms.

And that’s, I think, the demos that they’re most concerned about.

Guy Benson: Then I want to play you a clip that I saw on Instagram yesterday. I hadn’t really seen it anywhere else, so I then pulled it and tweeted it myself. It was shared by the Young Democrats of Florida, so an official appendage of the Democratic Party in Florida.

And they feel like they’re at least in the ballgame, in the hunt, in Florida this year. And in a year that could be this blue, they feel like they’ve got a chance in the governor’s race. And even this hardcore socialist is only a handful of points behind in the Senate race.

So here’s the Young Democrats of Florida highlighting a video that was taken at an Angie Nixon rally at the University of South Florida. Angie Nixon being the DSA-aligned, defund-the-police, you know, crackpot Senate nominee that the left wing has nominated down there, even in a state like Florida.

And this was the energetic chant in the room at the Angie Nixon rally in South Florida. Let’s listen to Cut 27.

All right, so they’re chanting “Lock him up.” We all know who they’re chanting about. And here’s the thing: Big Trump supporters don’t really have a leg to stand on in clutching pearls about that chant because, famously, the “Lock her up” chants in 2016–we all remember it very well. What interest can complain about it?

But I do think it’s interesting that in a year where the Democrats feel like they’re ascendant, the partisans, even in a state where you think they might want to moderate in order to have a chance to win, this is what they want.

They want a socialist on the ballot in Florida, and they can talk about affordability and gas prices or whatever they want to talk about in order to try to bring people in–data centers, right? They’ve got their issues that they feel like are polling well. But the actual motivating id of this base is what we just heard.

And if the Democrats win and get enough power, what their base is is what that chant is.

Ben Domenech: You’re totally right, Guy. And the other thing that I think people should understand about that is that that’s not just something that they’re going to do during the campaign; it’s what they’re going to try to do once they get power, if they get power.

And I’ve been rattling this to the irritation of some people because they don’t like to hear it, but the truth is that we can see from every indication that Democrats are going to go full-bore after not just the president, but they’re going to go after the president’s family. They’re going to go after everyone who’s worked with them, meaning the CEOs who’ve gotten closer to him and supported his efforts this time around when they didn’t in his first term.

They’re going to go after all of the different businesses that are associated with people who are related to him, whether they have government jobs or not. The truth is, they’re going to go after Don Jr. They’re going to go after the different people against whom they have anything to bring, and much of that is going to be designed to feed into lawsuits at the state level–lawfare that we’re going to see across the country that targets people who are viewed as being softer targets than the president himself.

So instead of just the Letitia Jameses of the world going after Donald Trump, they’re going to be going after a lot of other people where it can hurt them more and they have fewer resources to defend themselves, just because they worked with the president, or for the president, or have a related or tangential connection to the president.

They are going to be coming after them to the nth degree because it’s all that they can really do to keep that portion of their base in line, keep them loyal. It’s not going to be a Democratic majority, if it ends up being a majority, particularly within the House, that is at all about affordability. It’s going to be all about revenge.

Guy Benson: Yeah. And by the way, I would say that Trump and company have given them a lot to work with in terms of some of these investigations, right? Some of it, I think, would be legitimate with the subpoenas flying. Some of that will be the same old nonsense that we’ve seen in this political bloodlust, “Lock him up,” that sort of chant.

I want to turn to this, Ben. We’ve talked about it a few different times with a few different guests. What is your sort of 50,000-foot take on this horrible story at Cornell?

Ben Domenech: Well, you know, the Cornell story is one that I’m uncomfortable with, in part because I think that a lot of people go to their priors on this. They look at situations like Duke lacrosse, which we’re obviously familiar with–you and I and our friend Mary Katharine. That was a formative experience, I think, for a lot of us.

You know, we go to Clarence Thomas, we go to Brett Kavanaugh, we go to the different people who’ve been falsely accused over the years.

The difference here is that clearly something horrible happened, and it’s not something that I think can be debated. It’s something really truly horrible that no one would want their sons to participate in, in any kind of fraternity or otherwise. Culture happened here.

At the same time, does it rise to the level of actual legal ramifications, or is this kind of an election-year story that they are playing up in New York because they view it as being to their advantage to do so? I think it’s far more the latter.

And particularly given the thoroughness that Cornell demonstrated after the initial stories, that was a big part of my questions. It’s very clear that they conducted a very thorough investigation into this at the time. And I think that that’s appropriate, given the accusations that were being leveled.

But this is a situation where I think this has become very quickly a political football. Letitia James posting about this on Facebook and then taking up this case, refusing to answer questions about her own post, the games that Governor Hochul is playing with it–I just think that the legal side of this is going to be very messy.

But it doesn’t really matter to the people who are participating in it now because it is, for them, I truly believe this, Guy–feel free to feel otherwise–but I think this is their October surprise. I think that this is their “We want to motivate this conversation in a way that goes after and targets this frat culture of men.”

Which, by the way, you already heard this in public being said by various commentators–that this is something that the president helps own, or something that this is his treatment of women, or something like that.

Forget the fact that this happened under the Biden administration, but it’s the kind of thing that I think is going to be played for the politics of the moment. And unfortunately, I don’t think that you’re going to come out at the end here with anything that approaches the likelihood of justice.

Guy Benson: Lastly, Ben Domenech, some fluff. Hollywood is reportedly considering making movies about the Last Ditch Bar in Western Massachusetts. I did a dramatic reading of that Boston Globe story a couple Fridays ago, one of my favorite segments in a very long time.

Ben Domenech: I have to ask your producer to send that to me. Please have her send it to me.

Guy Benson: Oh, it is worth the listen. Get on that, Cookie. Send it to Ben. Quick final take on the Last Ditch Hollywood treatment.

Ben Domenech: I think this is the story of the year, and I’m glad that Hollywood is finally admitting that they’re so desperate for things. You know, they’re turning to 4chan memes in the back rooms. They’re turning to YouTube Shorts and obsession, and now they’re finally turning to podcasts like my friend Katie Herzog’s Blocked and Reported and all that, and the Boston Globe when it comes to a story that’s crazy.

I can’t get enough of it. It’s so lunatic, and I can’t wait to see who they cast as the poor participant, the co-founder of this, who got so fed up with it that she left running the bar in order to actually follow her dream to join clown college.

Guy Benson: Clarence School.

Yeah, no, the details of that story are so spectacular. And if you did miss it, as Ben did, we do have the entire hour very available at GuyBensonShow.com. It’s several Fridays ago, in our Happy Hour, our third hour. Just crack open a cold one, maybe a Long Drink, and enjoy.

Ben Domenech, Fox News contributor, on The Guy Benson Show. Ben, thank you.

Ben Domenech: Great to be with you.