(upbeat music) - President Joe Biden is taking aim at doubters within his own party after sending a defiant letter to lawmakers saying he will not step aside. - I wouldn't be running if I didn't absolutely believe that I am the best candidate to beat down someone 2024. - What are the polls saying and why has former President Trump been so quiet? - I'm Georgia Howe and yes, I am back from maternity leave. It's Tuesday, July 9th and this is Morning Wire. After years of record-breaking immigration, Republicans are trying to crack down on voting by non-citizens. - It is an effort by our Democratic colleagues to essentially destroy sovereignty, destroy what it means to be an American because they don't believe in it. - Why are Democrats fighting that effort? - And the legacy media shifts its attacks away from Trump to Project 2025. What are the project's missions and how is the former president reacting? - Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned, we have the news you need to know. - College is expensive, but being a man shouldn't be. Score 60% off Jeremy's Razor's one-year bundle and dominate campus life. While others conform, you'll stand out, clean-shaven and unapologetic. Major in masculinity@jeremeserazors.com today. - President Biden on Monday launched his most aggressive defense since the debate, taking direct aim at those seeking to push him off the Democratic ticket. - Daily Wire senior editor, Cabot Phillips, is here to break down the momentous power struggle. So, Cabot, a number of new developments from this story that continues to dominate the national conversation. - Yeah, and for good reason. For the last week and a half, supporters of the president have been urging him to make a more forceful approach against those calling for his removal. And on Monday, he came out swinging. Early in the morning, as Congress reconvened after a long recess, Biden sent an extraordinary and defiant public letter to Democratic lawmakers, essentially telling them to suck it up and fall in line. Quote, "The question of how to move forward "has been well-aired for over a week now," he said. And it is time for it to end. He went on to argue that the time to replace him has passed, saying quote, "We had a Democratic nomination process "and the voters have spoken clearly. "This was a process open to anyone "who wanted to run only three people chose to challenge me. "Do we now just say this process did not matter, "that the voters don't have a say? "It was their decision to make not the press, "not the pundits, not the big donors." - Not the sort of public statement you typically see from a president speaking to lawmakers in his own party. - Yeah, it's almost unheard of and just gives an idea of how desperate the White House is to stop the bleeding and discourage more lawmakers from going public with calls for him to step down. Minutes after that letter was sent, President Biden called into MSNBC, striking a defiant and, at times, angry tone as he attacked those questioning his fitness to serve. - Come on, give me a break. Come with me, watch, watch. I'm getting so frustrated by the leaks. Now I'm not talking about you guys, but about the elites in the party who they know so much more. But any of these guys don't think I should run against me. Go ahead, announce the president. Challenge me into convention. Biden went on to say that he is confident Democrat voters still want him to run and that any effort to replace him would be a form of subverting democracy. And then in another interesting moment, he claims the polls do not reflect any meaningful shift towards Trump. - The idea that Donald Trump has gained in any substantial way has his argument to why he should be president is anywhere convincing than it was two weeks or three weeks ago. It's just not there. What do the numbers say? - Well, put simply, that claim is not true. Since the debate, Donald Trump has more than doubled his national lead from 1.5 points to just under three and a half. Now, for their part, folks in the Biden camp say those numbers show that even after a disastrous debate night, he's still within striking distance. They argue that replacing him is just too risky. But for context, at this point in the 2020 race, Biden led Trump by nine points nationally. And the numbers now get even worse when you look at those swing states where Trump has expanded his lead further and is now up by four points on average. Again, there is not a single battleground state where Biden is in the lead. - So let's get to Trump. He has been uncharacteristically quiet since the debate. What are we hearing or not hearing from him? - There's an old quote never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake. And Donald Trump appears to be embracing that mantra. The former president has not held a campaign rally since June 28th and has seemingly been content to lay low and let the conversation remain on Biden, much to the chagrin of Democrats who have been taunting him saying he's disappeared, clearly trying to draw him back into the fray. The Trump campaign has also held off on spending campaign funds, saving their money for the home stretch. So this is interesting. If you look at battleground spending, Democrats in the Biden campaign have burned through $64 million in the last 30 days alone. Republicans in the Trump camp have spent just $12 million. That means Trump is leading in every battleground despite being outspent by a five to one margin last month. In Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin, Republicans spent less than half a million dollars combined. So for obvious reasons, the Trump campaign says they're confident their lead will grow even more once they actually start hitting the airwaves in those key swing states. - Well, a trend to watch in the coming weeks. Cabot, thanks for reporting. - Anytime. (upbeat music) - Democrats are whipping votes against a Republican effort to tighten voter registration rules. - Here to talk about the Republican effort is Daily Wire reporter Tim Pierce. Hey Tim, so there's a bill that's supposed to be voted on this week on election security. First, what does it do? - The basic idea is to cut down on the potential for non-citizens to cast ballots in federal elections. This was a bill introduced in the House by Congressman Chip Roy of Texas and in the Senate by Mike Lee of Utah. Morning Wire talked to Roy about what his bill does. It just requires documentary proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections. Current law does technically require you to be a citizen to vote, but it has no enforcement mechanisms. So we fix that glitch, take it a step further, go ahead and require it across the country. - The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act as it's known, has 104 Republican co-sponsors and is expected to go to the House floor on Wednesday. With such a slim margin in the House, Roy will need essentially universal Republican support to get it passed. - Now this has generated some stiff opposition from Democrats, what do they say? - Yeah, House Democrats are whipping votes against this and even the White House took aim at the act yesterday. Democrats raise a few objections. They say that non-citizen voting is already illegal. There isn't any evidence that this is a widespread problem and that the GOP's bill could disenfranchise voters. Roy pushed back, of course. He said that even though we don't have comprehensive data, he's seen many examples that non-citizen voting is a problem. - There are numerous examples. Virginia just cleaned its rolls last year, 2023 and found 1,500 who are registered, I think 800 and something ballots cast. In Virginia, we've had numbers in Texas, there are places all across the country. You have jurisdictions now who are overtly registering non-citizens, they try to do it in the nation's capital, Oakland, San Francisco, New York, other jurisdictions that are doing it. - He also said that one of the biggest impediments to good data on this issue is the Biden administration. - Well, first of all, we don't know the extent because frankly, we get very little support from the administration. We ask them for information and data all the time and they're not really frankly willing to cooperate with us on it. - Roy also said that the legislation provides different alternatives to proving citizenship and contrary to what Democrats have said, voters don't need to get a passport to prove their citizenship. - All right, so if this bill does pass the House, it still has to face a Democrat-controlled Senate and a Democratic president. What are the odds this bill actually does pass it along? - Well, long, but the Republicans pushing it know that. Here's what Roy said about that. - If Senate Democrats and the president are going to oppose common-sense legislation like this, let them go explain to voters why, if we do fall short. Who knows, maybe you pressure them, maybe you break some of the Democrats, maybe enough Democrats go, wait a minute, I don't want to walk into an election, where I'm opposed to an 85% issue across the country. But even if we fail this fall, then we will have elevated the issue, we will help increase people's awareness. - So even if it doesn't pass, Republicans think that this is very much worth the conversation at least. - Yeah, well, we'll see how many Democrats they're able to convince on Wednesday. Tim, thanks for coming on. - Thanks for having me. (upbeat music) - The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, a policy blueprint for the next Republican administration, has come under increasing fire from Democrats. Now, President Trump has distanced himself from the agenda, saying he knows nothing about it. Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham spoke with Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, and she's here now with more details. Hey, Megan. So it seems like Project 2025 is being framed by Democrats and some in the media as sort of something nefarious. First, what exactly is it? So it's an unprecedented effort, the product of 110 conservative organizations, and it's led by Heritage. And its purpose is to recommend policies and personnel to the next Republican administration. Essentially, it would have thousands of political appointees ready to go on day one of what they hope will be the second Trump term. And it's become a major focus of the Biden campaign and progressive political pundits. So this was Rachel Maddow, for example, talking about it on The View. He's trying to get rid of the American system of government, and that means getting rid of a government that does anything other than serve him. And that's what Project 2025 is all about. But Roberts told me that this type of policy planning is something that the Heritage Foundation has done since the Reagan era and that the only reason it's getting so much attention right now is because this year, it is larger in scale and it's more organized, involving more conservative organizations. And because he says Biden has nothing else he can run on, so he's trying to create controversy out of the perfectly normal process of setting a policy agenda. - The radical left has nothing else to run on. If they focus on the policy contrast between President Trump's first term and President Biden's term, then President Biden, just on policy terms, would lose every single one of those analyses. And then secondly, the radical left, I think is particularly concerned because the conservative movement has never been this organized. By building Project 2025, we have simply taken a tactical page from the left's playbook by getting thousands of competent, reasonable, calm, well-prepared Americans, many of them from outside Washington, who are ready to come into the next administration, if in fact the president and his administration hires them, the left of course has done this for decades. And they have expected to continue to beat conservatives, not just in the political arena, but in the policy implementation arena. - So Robert says that because Project 2025's primary aim is to dismantle the bureaucratic power in Washington that is overwhelmingly left-wing, in fact some have called it the deep state, he says the left is afraid of how effective this blueprint could be at returning power to elected officials rather than the administrative state. - But now Trump also seems to be somewhat put off by Project 2025, at least he made comments on Friday to distance himself from it. He said he has nothing to do with the project, even using the terms ridiculous and abysmal, is that correct? - Yes, and what I can tell you is that since those comments, I have been on the phone in text messages and email exchanges with Republican policymakers and average conservatives, and a lot of them are pretty disappointed. I think you could even say demoralized by those remarks. They felt encouraged by Project 2025 and by the sense that conservative organizations are working to ensure that a second Trump administration isn't undermined in the same way that they believe it was in 2016. So Robert's told me that they should continue to support Trump, that heritage respects him, and that really what we're seeing is just politics on the campaign trail. But he did also say that Project 2025 is about more than a potential Trump administration. - So Project 2025 is something that is going to transcend me, you, President Trump, political leaders elected in this generation. It really is the apparatus for governance, for the conservative movement, for the 21st century. So I think all of these things can be true, that President Trump has got to do what he thinks he must do in order to win the election. But we also understand there's a tremendous amount of overlap, tremendous amount of agreement, especially on those issues that are very popular, like closing the border, dismantling the administrative state, revitalizing the American economy, and of course, ending the nonsense of the Green New Deal. - So perhaps something that even if Trump loses, they could use in some future administration. - It's gonna be interesting to see what those areas of overlap are if Trump does indeed return to the White House. Megan, thanks for reporting. - Anytime. - Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back later this afternoon with more news you need to know. - Hey guys, producer Brandon here, balanced nature is my go-to source for whole food ingredients. 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