Let's bring in our panel. Charles Hurt,
opinion editor for The Washington Times,
Guy Benson, political editor at
townhall.com, host of the Guy Benson Show on Fox News
Radio and USA TODAY White House correspondent Francesca Chambers Chesky.
You were there today. A lot of talk about that
meeting at the White House.
Any sense that there's movement here.
So when leaders say that it was productive coming out,
that mostly applied to a potential government shutdown.
I'm told that that generally speaking,
they feel that they're getting closer to a deal on
that partial shutdown.
But look, if there is not an agreement tonight,
given the 72 hour rule that Republicans in the House
have,
there could be a partial shutdown over the weekend.
And so they're hustling to try and get something done.
But when it comes to the border,
basically nothing was agreed to.
They're still pretty far apart on that.
And that Ukraine talks were basically in the same place
as.
Well. Yeah. And and guy,
when it comes to the border,
you've got the president and the former president heading down
Thursday for this split screen event,
if you will, 2 two different places along the border.
But we've seen a change in how the country looks
at at this issue.
Gallup now has immigration as the top most important issue
for
folks in the US across the board.
Depending on the party, you also look at a critical
threat.
It's now 55% of America thinks illegal immigration is a
critical threat and then you break it down by region.
And actually the East Coast has the biggest in in
this concern and that has shifted over years.
Gallup is saying this is a massive shift in how
people look at immigration.
Well, part of the border crisis has been
imported to the East Coast from the Texas governor.
So that's been, I think,
a political ploy that's worked rather well.
Isn't it fascinating, Brett, that here in this election year,
with the polls doing what they're doing,
the White House has decided that the president will design
to go down to the border,
something he had never done in his political career of
50 years until what was it two years ago?
My question about this visit is,
what's the point of it?
Last time he was down there,
he didn't even see a migrant.
They cleaned it up. So much like Chairman XI in
San Francisco,
the president did not see one of the millions of
migrants who've been crossing on his watch.
Will that change this time?
My suspicion is they're going to send him down there.
He's going to announce some executive action,
which he just told us he couldn't do.
Now he's going to do some of it.
He'll blame Republicans for the failure of the bill and
then jet home.
That's my guess. Cynical, but I think correct.
So how does the politics fall?
Because Democrats think they really have a cudgel here in
this Senate bill that is not getting passed in the
House and saying we're doing it.
We hit the strongest we could ever do.
But you're not doing anything.
Republicans. How does that play?
I don't think that it's going to work in the
long haul.
Obviously they've got to sort of grasp with straws and
do what they can.
But the problem that they face is 1 is that
the House offered a bill that would basically restore all
of the
executive actions that President Trump took that actually worked in
the in recent times
to to fix the problem.
That's the first problem. The second problem is,
and this is the greater problem,
you have an entire campaign season that is going to.
There are miles and miles of videotape and audio tape
of Democrats,
you know, proclaiming their position as being open borders,
as being in favor of giving free health care to
illegal aliens.
All of the Democrats running in 2020
advocated for free healthcare for illegal aliens.
That is like a giant welcome sign for illegals to
come into the country and then all of their embrace
of sanctuary cities.
Joe Biden talking about how he would would not
deport a single alien in his first year in office
and that and and even then he wouldn't do it
unless they committed a serious felony.
And I don't include drunk driving as a serious felony.
All of this tape is going to be played between
now and Election Day.
And I don't know how Democrats get that off of
them.
They can, they can try to blame Republicans.
I don't think it's going to work.
And it's especially not going to work trying to blame
Donald Trump for it.
The president on Seth Meyers
and in this interview, a couple of different topics.
One of the interviews he chose to do recently,
which we asked, by the way,
every week,
he was off for ice cream.
Yeah, that maybe ice cream.
Here you go.
You are currently 81 years old.
Who the hell told you that?
Yeah,
that's classified. That's classified. All jokes aside,
according to recent polling, this is a real concern for
American voters.
How do you address that concern going forward as you
come up to the
2024 election? Well, a couple of things.
Number one, you got to take a look at the
other guy.
He's about as old as I am,
but he can't remember his wife's name.
Yeah, and
it's about how old your ideas are.
Look, I mean, this is a guy who wants to
take us back,
all right? So just to clarify,
I think he's referring to the CPAC speech in which
the president
mentioned Melania Trump, the first lady.
Former President Trump mentioned Melania Trump,
and he got a standing ovation.
And take a listen. He turns and says,
Mercedes,
my wife, our great first lady,
she was a great. People love her.
People love her. Oh, look at that.
Wow, Mercedes, that's pretty good.
I wasn't saying Mercedes instead of Melania.
Mercedes Schlapp is the wife of Matt Schlapp,
who runs CPAC, and she was on the stage.
So there was all this coverage of this and then
the president.
To mention it on Seth Meyers is really something
the New York Post, Francesca,
former Obama aides sound alarm over,
Frail and mumbly, Biden warned.
His age is a very real issue.
I'm sure that going out there means more missteps,
more gaps that start circulating.
But if you don't view Biden being out there as
a net positive,
then the argument he shouldn't be running is right.
Meanwhile, former Obama senior advisor Dan Pfeiffer expressed his own
concerns in a separate interview.
It is a very real issue.
Clearly, the White House sees this or the campaign sees
this,
and the question is how they're going to deal with
it.
So he's been trying to use humor,
as you just saw there,
to address the issue. And they've gotten more aggressive about
pointing out
Trump's gaffs and missteps, especially on social media,
especially on social media, to say,
look, this is, you know,
he's got all these issues as well.
But what I keep hearing from voters on the campaign
trail consistently is that they are concerned about Joe Biden's
age,
but they're also concerned about Donald Trump's age as well.
And so many voters are saying they wish they had
another choice in this election.
You talked about this earlier in the show that they
are thinking about either staying home or potentially voting third
party as a result of that.
And so certainly it's an issue for both candidates in
the election.
Well, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California,
just told us that Joe Biden is putting on a
master class in the presidency and that he is a
gift to American voters.
Just have the opportunity to have four more years of
him.
That's I guess the best they can do over there.
Just sort of put on a brave face,
sprinkle in some humor by Biden did remember that line
for Seth Meyers,
so I guess that's a positive,
even though it was inaccurate.
To Brett's point, there's no getting around the problem,
right? You can spin policy failures.
You can spin communications failures.
You can't spin the glaring problem of Joe Biden that
came out in that special counsel report confirming what we
all see all the time.
The problem for the campaign obviously is it doesn't get
better.
Exactly. You know it doesn't improve exactly.
It's this is only going in One Direction.
It's not going to get any better.
And and a lot of ways,
I think, actually I think a lot of the Democrat
sort of apparatchiks would rather talk about like his age,
then defend his policies, quite frankly,
because the policies are sort of indefensible when you see
what's going on in the country.
I mean, we'll see. We'll see how the economy looks
by the time we get to the general election.
All right, panel. Thanks.