It's the end of the world as conservatives know it, and Ben doesn't feel fine, plus why Kid President is the most annoying crap on the planet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| It's a Monday, and here we are. | |
| It's after the South Carolina primary. | |
| The new, the, what is it, Nevada caucuses are coming up soon. | |
| Soon I have one reaction to how South Carolina went, and I can basically sum it up in one word. | |
| There's some hyphens in there. | |
| I'm Ben Shapiro. | |
| This is The Ben Shapiro Show. | |
| I tend to demonize people who don't care about your feelings. | |
| As is my custom at the beginning of a new week, I like to preface everything with the statement, I hate everyone and everything. | |
| Because that's where we are right now. | |
| Donald Trump wins South Carolina and it's becoming a constant refrain that things keep happening on Saturdays. | |
| While I'm enjoying my Sabbath, I'll have a nice relaxed Sabbath. | |
| Sabbath will end, I'll come back online and the world is completely on fire. | |
| I'll come back online and it feels like Lex Luthor has succeeded in destroying the San Andreas Fault And Lois Lane is being sucked down into the chasm. | |
| It's just, it's so bad. | |
| So I come back, and Trump has won the South Carolina primaries, I think 32, and then it was 22 for Cruz and Rubio. | |
| I said on Friday, at Daily Wire anyway. | |
| And I maybe even said it on Thursday on the show, that the worst case outcome was exactly this. | |
| Right? | |
| And at this point I'm gonna stop using the phrase worst case outcome, because there's apparently always an outcome worse than what I have imagined. | |
| But what I said is, if Rubio were to surge, you end up with Cruz and Rubio basically even, and you end up with Trump on top, and then neither Cruz nor Rubio will drop out, we're just in it for the long haul. | |
| And that's precisely what happened, because that's the way that this is all gonna go. | |
| It's just gonna be crap all the way from here, There's a real deep desire on the part of a lot of Trump supporters for Trump, and I think a desire on the part of people who aren't Trump supporters to kind of see what happens. | |
| I was talking with Andrew Klavan and Jeremy Boring before the show, and one of the things I was saying to them is that there's a famous rule in drama. | |
| It's a rule that's written by Anton Chekhov, the famous dramatist, famous playwright, and what he said is if you're writing a two-act play, never put a gun over the mantle in the first act unless you're going to use it in the second act. | |
| Because it creates a feeling of suspense if the gun is there, and if it doesn't get fired by the end of the second act, then you really haven't done your job as a playwright. | |
| It's beginning to occur to me that this is not just normative. | |
| It's not just something you should do. | |
| It is also descriptive, meaning that human beings have an intense desire to see the trigger pulled. | |
| So if we know that the gun is up on the mantle, It's got to be pulled before the end of the second act. | |
| We want it to be pulled before the end of the second act. | |
| I remember when I was watching Lord of the Rings, the trilogy, I hadn't read the books and I did what a lot of folks did with the new Star Wars movie. | |
| I blacked myself out on all knowledge of what was going to happen in Return of the King. | |
| I mean, we got to the very end of Return of the King. | |
| I'm not going to issue a spoiler alert since the book has been out for 70 years and the movie's been out for 10. | |
| At the very end of Return of the King, You get to the very end, and Frodo is about to throw the ring into Mount Doom, and instead, he turns around and he says, the ring is mine, and he takes it. | |
| And it's really dramatically satisfying, because if he hadn't done that, if he just took it and threw it into the flame, you'd have gone, well then, it wasn't that strong a ring, was it? | |
| I mean, you have to see it work on him. | |
| You realize that For all three movies, you haven't been waiting for Frodo to throw the ring into the fire. | |
| What you've actually been waiting for is for Frodo to be seduced by the ring. | |
| You've been waiting for him to go full scale from Innocent Hobbit and the Shire to full Gollum. | |
| And, you know, the ring ends up in Mount Doom anyway along with Gollum, but that's the point. | |
| It's the same thing with Trump. | |
| There's a desire, and I think I said this even before the Iowa caucuses, That if Trump were to flame out, it would be so anticlimactic after all this buildup. | |
| And so I think there are a lot of people out there who sort of feel the same compulsion. | |
| It's like, you know, you want to be part of the story. | |
| You want to be part of history. | |
| There's only one problem. | |
| This story is not a good story. | |
| This story does not end well. | |
| This story ends with Donald Trump as the nominee, and then we've got the most corrupt person maybe in the history of American politics, Hillary Clinton, on one side, and on the other side we've got Donald Trump, who doesn't know his ass from his elbow on policy, and that's the kind interpretation. | |
| The less kind interpretation is that he does, and he just does whatever is convenient for him, because this is all about Trump. | |
| And here's just a couple of examples. | |
| Again, this has become sort of a daily phenomenon where we fact-check Donald Trump, which is essentially a fool's errand. | |
| But here is Donald Trump talking about what was in his head in 2002 with regard to Iraq. | |
| So he actually said to Howard Stern back in 2002 that he thought it'd be a good idea to invade Iraq. | |
| And Chuck Todd says, yeah, but in all your debates, you keep saying that you thought it was a bad idea. | |
| What did you mean by that? | |
| And here is Trump explaining it away. | |
| We have an idea who the enemy is, and a lot of times the politicians don't want to tell you that. | |
| Are you for invading Iraq? | |
| Yeah, I guess so. | |
| I wish the first time it was done correctly. | |
| Now, clearly, you didn't sound like an enthusiastic supporter of the war. | |
| But I am curious of the second part of that quote. | |
| I wish the first time it was done correctly. | |
| What do you mean by that? | |
| Well, what I mean by that is it almost shouldn't have been done and, you know, I really don't even know what I mean because that was a long time ago and who knows what was in my head. | |
| I think that it wasn't done correctly. | |
| In retrospect, it shouldn't have been done at all. | |
| It was sort of, you know, it was just done. | |
| It was just we dropped bombs. | |
| If you look back, actually, that was probably the correct way of doing it, not going in and not upsetting, giving him a lesson and not. | |
| I mean, I think Senior actually did a pretty good job of what he was doing. | |
| He went in, he taught him a lesson. | |
| What happened is he was taunted because Saddam Hussein was saying, we drove back the Americans. | |
| The ugly Americans were driven back. | |
| The power of Iraq, the power. | |
| Well, we were driven back. | |
| He just decided not, General Schwarzkopf and others said, Maybe let's not go in. | |
| I'm not sure, although I think Schwarzkopf actually maybe wanted to go in. | |
| I think he maybe did the right thing. | |
| I can say this. | |
| If you look at my conversation with Howard, who's a friend of mine, who's actually a very good person, a good guy. | |
| Different from what you see on the radio. | |
| Okay, I won't tell you. | |
| But if you look at my conversation, I was a very... That was probably the first time... Don't forget, I was in business. | |
| I was a businessman. | |
| I was a real estate man and a businessman. | |
| That was the first time I think that question was ever even asked of me. | |
| That was long before the war took place. | |
| That was, you know, many, many months before the war took place. | |
| And you could see by my answer, I wasn't exactly thrilled. | |
| He said, in that clip, that one clip, which is like 45 seconds long, Trump takes, I think, four separate positions on this. | |
| One, I don't know what I was talking about. | |
| Two, the war was prosecuted badly. | |
| Three, the war was prosecuted great. | |
| And four, it didn't matter what I said anyway, because I was a businessman at that point. | |
| He took four separate positions in one 45 second clip and his people are going, oh, we can trust him. | |
| We can totally trust him. | |
| He's gonna be completely consistent. | |
| We know for what he stands. | |
| I know what he stands for. | |
| He stands for Trump. | |
| That's what Trump stands for. | |
| And that's an amazing... It's an amazing... I don't know what I was talking about, but I guess, you know... The part that's amazing is where he says that we shouldn't have gone in in the first place, but then we should have gone in, but we did it wrong, but we did it right... What? | |
| But that wasn't his only big boo-boo of the weekend. | |
| He was also asked about whether he wants to defund Planned Parenthood. | |
| And here's Donald Trump talking about Planned Parenthood with Chuck Todd. | |
| There's some comic actor he's beginning to look more and more like, and it's slipping my mind. | |
| We'll have to come back to it when I figure it out. | |
| Okay, here's Trump and Chuck Todd. | |
| If you knew the government money were only going to that, would you support funding Planned Parenthood? | |
| Yeah, if it didn't have to do with abortions. | |
| Look, I understand it. | |
| I have many, many friends who are women who understand Planned Parenthood better than you or I will ever understand it. | |
| And they do some very good work. | |
| Cervical cancer, lots of women's issues, women's health issues are taken care of. | |
| I know one of the candidates, I won't mention names, said, we're not going to spend that kind of money on women's health issues. | |
| I am. | |
| Planned Parenthood does a really good job in a lot of different areas, but not on abortion. | |
| So I'm not going to fund it if it's doing the abortion. | |
| I am not going to fund it. | |
| Now they say it's 3% and it's 4%. | |
| Some people say it's 60%. | |
| I don't believe it's 60% by the way, but I think it's probably a much lower number. | |
| But Planned Parenthood does some very good work, but I would defund as long as they're doing abortions. | |
| Okay, so now, I mean, he reduces you to guttural moans because his butchery of the English language and of ideas and of conservatism, I mean, he's basically the Attila the Hun of politics, just carving a swath through anything decent and good. | |
| When Donald Trump says things like, Planned Parenthood, I have many women who understand Planned Parenthood better than any of us ever will. | |
| Really? | |
| Really, will they? | |
| What do they understand about Planned Parenthood because they have vaginas, Donald, that the rest of us can't understand? | |
| It's just beyond our ken to understand what exactly Planned Parenthood does. | |
| And then he says that only 4% of their services are abortion? | |
| That's because what Planned Parenthood does is if you walk into Planned Parenthood and you pick up a brochure and a condom and an abortion, they count that as one-third of the services they have rendered. | |
| Even if it takes 90% of the time. | |
| Well over 90% of Planned Parenthood's budget goes to actual abortion. | |
| And that's where all their money comes from, too. | |
| They perform 300,000 of them a year. | |
| But there he is, defending Planned Parenthood. | |
| There's your guy, your conservative thought leader, defending Planned Parenthood. | |
| And this is the part that's so maddening. | |
| Jerry Falwell Jr., who leads Liberty University. | |
| Okay, Liberty University was created by his dad, Jerry Falwell. | |
| Jerry Falwell Jr. | |
| leads Liberty. | |
| Liberty has a policy. | |
| You cannot go to Liberty University if you have an abortion. | |
| If you are on campus and you go for an abortion, you are expelled. | |
| Jerry Falwell Jr. | |
| spent yesterday defending Donald Trump over what he said over Planned Parenthood. | |
| And by the way, I still don't understand what he's talking about. | |
| He says, so long as they're performing abortions, we can't fund them. | |
| So long as they're performing abortions... So that means you can't fund them. | |
| Why not just say we can't fund them? | |
| The answer is because he got himself into a little bit of a rhetorical pickle. | |
| He said he wanted to fund them, but not the abortions. | |
| And then he says, well, I don't want to fund them at all so long as they're doing abortions, which means don't fund them at all. | |
| And it's as though every word that you say about Trump falls on deaf ears. | |
| And I'll explain why I think that is in just a moment. | |
| Marco Rubio is tentatively kind of tapping at Trump now. | |
| Trump today said that Marco Rubio isn't eligible for the presidency. | |
| So this is his new strategy. | |
| Every single person other than Donald Trump is actually constitutionally ineligible to be president of the United States. | |
| Here's Donald Trump being knocked a little bit by Marco Rubio. | |
| Rubio and Cruz are spending all their time and effort bashing each other, but here's Rubio going after Trump a little bit. | |
| You say that this is now a three-man race, so I want you, lightning round rules, to do a little comparison shopping. | |
| Why should a voter who's undecided choose you over Donald Trump? | |
| Well, I think one of the reasons why is we have a real sense of optimism about America's future. | |
| I'm realistic about our challenges, but I'm very optimistic about our future. | |
| And we need someone that will restore, a campaign that will restore our confidence in who we are as a people and what we're capable of doing. | |
| And Trump won't do that? | |
| We also need real answers to real problems. | |
| Rhetoric is not enough. | |
| Well, I think Donald's campaign has largely been about how bad things are. | |
| And there's no doubt we need to recognize how difficult things are. | |
| But you can't just say you're going to make America great again. | |
| You have to explain how you're going to do it. | |
| I mean, at this stage in the campaign, voters deserve to know in great detail just exactly how it is that you are going to achieve some of these things that you're saying you're going to achieve with specific public policy. | |
| So I look forward to having a policy debate, if we can make it a policy debate, and we'll see what direction he wants to go, but I think that's a big difference in this campaign. | |
| And then just a fundamental understanding of foreign policy, which I think is critical for the Commander-in-Chief to have on day one. | |
| To this point now, three states in, he still has not really demonstrated that, but again, we'll see. | |
| As the weeks go on, maybe he'll spend some time and learn more about it, and we can have a debate about those issues. | |
| Raise your hand if you think that critique has any impact on Trump's campaign whatsoever. | |
| Any impact on Trump's campaign. | |
| Anybody? | |
| Anybody? | |
| Bueller? | |
| Bueller? | |
| Yeah, that's right. | |
| This will have no impact on Trump's campaign because what Marco Rubio is saying is basically Trump is a candidate with no substance. | |
| That's true. | |
| But, by the way, I'm not sure Marco Rubio has tremendous substance to him either. | |
| The Chris Christie sort of critique of Rubio, that he's mechanical, It's on full display in little clips like this. | |
| Okay, so Trump wins South Carolina, and then it's up to the other candidates to explain how really, even though they lost, they won. | |
| So here's Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, talking about how secretly he won. | |
| Nobody knows it, but secretly, he actually won South Carolina. | |
| But listen, Chuck, the important thing is we had an incredible evening last night. | |
| Last night, what we saw happen in South Carolina, particularly when you put Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina together, two things have happened. | |
| Number one, there is now only one strong conservative in this race who can win, and we see conservatives continuing to unite behind our campaign. | |
| But number two, for anyone who doesn't believe that Donald Trump is the best candidate to go head-to-head with Hillary Clinton in November, and that's about 70% of Republicans nationwide who don't think Donald Trump is the right guy, our campaign is the only campaign that has beaten Donald Trump and that can beat Donald Trump. | |
| So what we're seeing Is we're seeing Republicans coming to us in incredible numbers, going to TedCruz.org, signing up, volunteering, contributing. | |
| You finish third in a state with the highest evangelical turnout that we've seen yet, and you finish third. | |
| That sort of doesn't support what you just said, that conservatives are coming together and rallying to your cause. | |
| So Chuck, our path to victory from the beginning was always do well in the first four states and then have a strong, strong night on Super Tuesday coming up on March 1st. | |
| In Iowa, everyone in the press said we couldn't win. | |
| We want an overwhelming victory in Iowa. | |
| In New Hampshire, everyone in the press said a conservative couldn't do well in a moderate New England state. | |
| We want a strong third there. | |
| And then in South Carolina, we were effectively tied for second. | |
| A week ago, Donald was 20 points ahead. | |
| We closed that gap. | |
| And what we saw there, there were a number of very encouraging things. | |
| For one thing, we won young people in South Carolina. | |
| Our campaign was in first place with young people. | |
| By the way, we won young people in Iowa as well, and we were in second place with young people in New Hampshire. | |
| One of the things we're seeing is young people who are optimistic, who want a future, who want our constitutional rights. | |
| So this is Cruz's spin? | |
| Is that he's actually doing better than expected. | |
| In South Carolina, that's not true. | |
| He expended real resources, real on-the-ground resources. | |
| Trump is going to clean up in Nevada. | |
| In a second, I'm going to talk about what the rest of this race looks like. | |
| He also, you heard him use that statistic, 70% of Republicans don't want Trump. | |
| Now Marco Rubio says the same thing. | |
| Here's Rubio explaining how secretly he won. | |
| Yeah, he lost also, but it's a secret. | |
| Secretly, under the surface, he also won in South Carolina. | |
| Here we go. | |
| Taking a shot at your campaign, he's saying it's crazy that nobody else is trying to win except Trump. | |
| Rubio is not going after the person who is winning. | |
| I've never seen a campaign that seems as satisfied not to go after the leader. | |
| Is it time to take on Mr. Trump directly? | |
| Well, this is not an election like others up to this point. | |
| As I said, you know, there's seven, eight people dividing up 70% of the vote. | |
| And so we had a very unusual circumstance. | |
| I was being attacked from all sides. | |
| I mean, I had one super PAC that spent $40 million going after me. | |
| So you can only take on so many people at one time. | |
| And this is not about going after Donald Trump. | |
| It isn't. | |
| I know people want to obsess about that. | |
| This election is about who is best capable of uniting the Republican Party. | |
| I know that I am. | |
| Well, he's the frontrunner when you have seven people running and they're dividing up 70% of the vote. | |
| We need to remember here, over 70% of Republicans nationally have basically said, we're not voting for Donald Trump. | |
| And as long as that 70% is being divided up by five people, of course he's a frontrunner. | |
| But once that number narrows, we'll have a different election and we're getting closer to that point. | |
| Okay, we'll stop him there. | |
| But the number isn't narrowing. | |
| This is the problem. | |
| The number is not narrowing. | |
| Okay, so we'll get to Trump's response to all of this in a second. | |
| But take, for example, Jeb Bush. | |
| So Jebru, exclamation point, gradually turned into a semicolon, and then gradually turned into an ellipsis, and then finally ended in a period. | |
| And so yesterday, the exclamation point campaign came to an inglorious close. | |
| Jeb Bush got up there and he dropped out, and he was given all sorts of plaudits for this, which I think are completely Silly. | |
| Here's Jeb Bush dropping out of the presidential race after underperforming and getting 8% of the vote in South Carolina. | |
| Here we go. | |
| Jebberoo. | |
| I'm proud of the campaign that we've run to unify our country and to advocate conservative solutions that would give more Americans the opportunity to rise up and reach their God-given potential. | |
| But the people of Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina have spoken, and I really respect their decision. | |
| So tonight, I am suspending my campaign. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Who's the lady shouting no, by the way? | |
| No, Jeff, don't do it! | |
| I congratulate my competitors that are remaining on the island on their success for a race that has been hard fought, just as the contest for the presidency should be, because it is a tough job. | |
| In this campaign, I have stood my ground, refusing to bend to the political winds. | |
| We put forward detailed, innovative, conservative plans to address the mounting challenges that we face. | |
| Because, despite what you might have heard, ideas matter. | |
| Policy matters. | |
| And I truly hope that these ideas that we've laid out will serve as a blueprint for a generation of conservative leaders at every level of government so that we can take back our country. | |
| We laid out plans on everything from reforming our tax and regulatory system, to reviving our economy, to rebuilding our military, and to fixing the VA once and for all. | |
| Okay, so he goes on in this vein and people are saying, oh, it's so honorable that Jeb finally dropped out. | |
| What a good guy to finally drop out. | |
| And all I have to say is, so what? | |
| He drops out and nothing happens. | |
| Some of his money shifts behind Rubio. | |
| That's it. | |
| Nothing else happens, right? | |
| He's got no votes left. | |
| Nobody supports him. | |
| He dumped out all of his resources. | |
| By the way, the person shouting no when Jeb says he's dropping out, the person who goes no in the background is for sure Mike Murphy, the head of his super PACs, who spent like $100 million. | |
| How much money did Mike Murphy make in this election cycle for running the least successful campaign in American history? | |
| How much money do you think he actually got? | |
| Any ideas? | |
| Any ideas? | |
| The answer is he got $14 million. | |
| Won $4 million to run the worst campaign in presidential history. | |
| He was the one in the back shouting, no Jeb, keep running! | |
| Keep running! | |
| You can see the bank account just spinning like a lotto wheel. | |
| So there we go. | |
| So Jeb is out. | |
| Alright, so what that brings us to now is Donald Trump. | |
| So Donald Trump actually won in South Carolina. | |
| And here's the thing. | |
| Everybody's using these stats. | |
| 70% of Republicans don't like Trump. | |
| 70% of Republicans don't like Trump. | |
| If you use the same sort of math, that means that 85% of Republicans don't like Rubio, right? | |
| And it means that, you know, 90% of Republicans don't like Cruz. | |
| Whatever percentages you're using, if the idea is whoever didn't vote for you doesn't like you, well then more people like Trump than the other guys. | |
| If the idea is that these public opinion polls that show that Trump has high unfavorables Are trusted, and people don't like him. | |
| That's true, except for the fact that he's consistently outperforming those when it comes time for election day. | |
| So, yes, his unfavorable numbers are really high. | |
| But, will people get behind him against Hillary Clinton? | |
| Probably yes. | |
| I mean, Trump is actually right when he says this. | |
| Here's Trump, after winning, here's what he had to say about how this is all gonna break down. | |
| You know, I was watching upstairs, and it was really amazing to be watching what I was watching, and some of the pundits, and you know, overall fair, but not too much, but a number of the pundits said, well, if a couple of the other candidates dropped out, if you add their scores together, it's going to equal Trump. | |
| Right? | |
| These geniuses, they're geniuses. | |
| They don't understand that as people drop out, I'm gonna get a lot of those votes also. | |
| You don't just... You don't just add them together. | |
| So... I think we're gonna do very, very well. | |
| I think we're gonna do very well. | |
| So, he's not wrong, by the way. | |
| He's not wrong. | |
| If Bush drops out, there's a significant percentage of those people, believe it or not, some of those people will go to Trump. | |
| If Cruz were to drop out, some of those people would go to Trump. | |
| If Rubio were to drop out, probably very few of those people would go to Donald Trump. | |
| And Donald Trump continued along these lines. | |
| He says, look, I'm the one who has the best shot at winning. | |
| I'll win states that are not currently in play. | |
| Trump continues. | |
| He's looking, I have to say, he looks more and more like the Kool-Aid man with each clip. | |
| I mean, he's just going to bust through that back wall and go, hey, here's Donald Trump, the Kool-Aid man. | |
| Here we go. | |
| They say that it'll be the largest voter turnout in the history of United States elections. | |
| And I want to say that's a great compliment to the country because we have such a low voter turnout compared to a lot of other countries. | |
| So I think it'll be the greatest voter turnout in history. | |
| I mean, if it's Hillary against me, that's going to be a tremendous turnout. | |
| I'm gonna win. | |
| I'm gonna win places like Michigan that the Republicans can't even think of. | |
| You know, they always talk about the six states, right? | |
| With Ohio and Pennsylvania and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. | |
| I won't go through the numbers, but I will win places like Michigan that people don't even talk about. | |
| I will have a chance of winning New York. | |
| If I win New York, the election's over, okay, from an electoral college standpoint. | |
| I have a chance of winning New York. | |
| I'll win states that aren't in play. | |
| I'll win states that the Republicans don't even think of. | |
| And one of them that comes to mind is Michigan. | |
| And another one is New York. | |
| Upstate New York. | |
| I'm like the most popular person that's ever lived virtually upstate New York. | |
| They're great friends of mine. | |
| And we will do very well in New York. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Maybe win it, maybe not. | |
| But we're going to do very... We're going to come awfully close to winning it. | |
| I think I have a great chance. | |
| So he's not just the most popular person in the Republican Party, he's the most popular person who ever lived in upstate New York. | |
| Ever. | |
| He's more popular than Jesus. | |
| And you take a poll, it's like, Jesus here, and then Trump here. | |
| Trump is even better than Jesus. | |
| By the way, he's not wrong. | |
| Again, the case for Trump is that he's electable. | |
| The case against Trump is that he's none of the other things that you could possibly want in a presidential candidate. | |
| He's a boor. | |
| He's a totalitarian. | |
| Today, Trump actually tweeted out a threat directed at the Ricketts family. | |
| These are the people who own the Cubs. | |
| He said, I see the Ricketts family have been giving money to my political opponents. | |
| Well, I can threaten them. | |
| I know some information about them they don't want to get out. | |
| It's like, oh my God, if this guy is the president of the United States and he has the power of the state behind him, that's a little scary. | |
| Trump, when it comes to this kind of stuff, when it comes to boosting himself, it's what he's best at. | |
| And a campaign, contrary to what Barack Obama once said, campaigns are almost entirely boosting yourself. | |
| So here is Donald Trump talking about how what he's engaging in is actually not a hostile takeover of the GOP, he's just taking it over. | |
| Here we go. | |
| To use a business term, are you involved in a hostile takeover of the Republican Party? | |
| No, I'm not at all. | |
| I get along with the Republicans. | |
| There's nothing hostile about it. | |
| I was a Republican establishment figure. | |
| And then the day I decided to run, I became an outsider. | |
| And more so than I even thought. | |
| People that were totally establishment, that loved me. | |
| You know, I was a very big contributor. | |
| I gave $350,000 just before to the Republican Governors Association. | |
| What's your view of the GOP establishment now, sir? | |
| I think it's a mess. | |
| I think it's a mess. | |
| And I think they better get their act together because they're going to keep losing elections. | |
| With the kind of thinking that we have with the Karl Roves and the Stephen Hayses and these characters that can't get themselves arrested, if you want to keep people like that, if you want to keep listening to people like that, you're never going to win. | |
| You're never going to win. | |
| They're from a different age. | |
| They're from a different world. | |
| They can't get themselves arrested, except by President Trump, presumably. | |
| And again, part of what's driving the Trump phenomenon is resistance to Karl Rove. | |
| I understand. | |
| I'm part of that. | |
| I think Karl Rove is terrible. | |
| I think that Stephen Hayes, not so much. | |
| I think some of his stuff is good. | |
| He's just a pollster for Weekly Standard, basically. | |
| I think Rove is awful. | |
| But that doesn't mean that I'm willing to fall into the arms of a demagogue. | |
| And Reince Priebus was asked by George Stephanopoulos over the weekend. | |
| Reince Priebus is the head of the RNC. | |
| Stephanopoulos is the chief anchor at ABC News, which again is insane since he almost made love to Hillary Clinton. | |
| But here's George Stephanopoulos asking Priebus, okay, so Trump is running against you guys. | |
| What do you do if he's the nominee? | |
| Many Republicans said a liberal left position. | |
| He was called unchristian by the Pope. | |
| He embraced torture to fight terrorism. | |
| He supported Democrats much of his adult life, taking positions in this campaign at odds with the Republican Party. | |
| Sir, are you really prepared to have him as spokesperson for the Republican Party and to lead a convention that nominates him? | |
| If the delegates get accumulated in such a way that any one of these candidates becomes a nominee, it's our job to support that nominee, and we will. | |
| So yeah, we're prepared to support whoever the nominee becomes. | |
| I think it's early in the process, but certainly When the time comes and when we're sitting either before Cleveland or at Cleveland or whenever that point may come and we have a presumptive nominee, what will happen is the RNC will join in with that nominee and we will put together the biggest, which we've already started doing, the biggest ground game and data operation that we've ever seen. | |
| And you know we've made incredible strides at the RNC in becoming far more prepared today than we were four years ago. | |
| So yes, we will support. | |
| To me, it's a no-brainer. | |
| A lot of top Republicans think that's going to break the party apart. | |
| You know what? | |
| Winning is the antidote to a lot of things. | |
| And so, the name of the game is winning in November. | |
| If we win in November, all those armchair quarterbacks will fall in line and they'll obviously be pretty pleased, I think, if we win in November. | |
| But who the nominee is going to be is not my choice. | |
| And obviously, we're going to support whoever that is. | |
| But you could play a big role if no nominee goes in with enough delegates before the convention to win on the first ballot. | |
| You've said it's early in the process. | |
| Are you prepared now for a brokered convention? | |
| Are you planning for it? | |
| And what does that mean? | |
| Um, you know, planning can mean a lot of things. | |
| We are prepared for anything. | |
| I was general counsel for two years before I was chairman of this party. | |
| I've been chairman for six years. | |
| I don't think there are too many people that are more familiar with the procedures of nominating someone at a convention than I am. | |
| So, I am prepared, and we will be prepared if that happens, but again, I don't think that's going to be the case. | |
| If it did... So here's the deal. | |
| You know, when he says, the key line here is where he says that victory is the antidote to everything. | |
| That depends on whether you think the Republican Party is just a vehicle for victory, in which case they're fulfilling their mandate, or whether you think the Republican Party should be a vehicle for conservatism. | |
| And these are two different things. | |
| If you think it's a vehicle for victory, then you could just nominate, you know, somebody who's really far left and say, okay, that person's most likely to win, let's do that. | |
| What have you gained through that? | |
| If you think it's a vehicle for ideology, then you have to look at Trump and wonder, okay, is he going to actually be conservative? | |
| And do I think the party will be torn apart? | |
| Yeah, I kind of do. | |
| I do. | |
| I think that there will be a lot of people who stay home. | |
| Eric Erickson, over at RedState, or formerly of RedState, I think he has a new site called The Resurgent, Eric Erickson writes today that he won't vote for Trump. | |
| I don't think he's the only one. | |
| We'll talk in the future about whether this is a good idea or a bad idea as this becomes kind of closer to eventuality, as it becomes closer to reality. | |
| But these are questions the party is going to have to face because they didn't stop the rise of Trump. | |
| So let's talk about what happens next in the Republican race because in a couple of days or tomorrow, right, what's – What's the date today? | |
| Today's the 22nd. | |
| So tomorrow is the Nevada caucus. | |
| Trump's gonna blow everybody out. | |
| He's gonna win the Nevada caucus by leaps and bounds. | |
| And then, Trump has a shot to run the table. | |
| So right now they're saying that Trump currently leads the polling. | |
| In 10 of the next 14 states. | |
| Problem is those polls are really old. | |
| So the states in which he currently trails, the states in which he currently trails that are coming up over the next week and a half, he trails Ted Cruz in Texas. | |
| But in the last available poll, he was trailing by five points to Cruz and that's a poll that's three weeks old before South Carolina and New Hampshire and Nevada. | |
| So after Trump wins three consecutive victories, does Cruz maintain his five-point lead, his slim five-point lead in Texas, even with Rubio nipping at his heels? | |
| I doubt it. | |
| Trump trails Rubio by two points in the latest Colorado poll. | |
| But that latest Colorado poll was taken way back in November, so Ben Carson was actually winning that poll. | |
| So it was Carson 25 and Rubio 19 and Trump 17. | |
| You think maybe now Trump is winning Colorado? | |
| I would be hard-pressed to say no. | |
| He's probably winning Colorado. | |
| And he's supposedly losing in Arkansas, but that poll's really old. | |
| And, again, he was running, like, one point behind, I think, Ted Cruz in Arkansas. | |
| He was four points behind in Arkansas, and that was, again, as of early February, before South Carolina or New Hampshire. | |
| And in Kentucky, supposedly, he's behind, but the last poll that was taken was last June. | |
| So, that's completely irrelevant. | |
| So, there's a good shot that Trump wins all 14 of the next states. | |
| If that happens, I mean, come on, how long can you play out this string? | |
| How long can you play out the string if you're Rubio and Cruz? | |
| And this is the maddening part, the truly maddening part, is that Trump has some narrative points in his favor. | |
| One is the sort of inevitability feeling, the idea that we have to take that gun off the mantle and it must be used or we haven't fulfilled the dramatic quotient here. | |
| But Trump also fulfills the anti-Wall Street narrative. | |
| He fulfills the anti-establishment narrative better than anybody. | |
| Rubio's being endorsed today by Tim Pawlenty, the former senator from Minnesota, governor from Minnesota. | |
| Like, who cares? | |
| Mitt Romney was supposed to endorse Rubio. | |
| That's not happening because Rubio specifically went to Romney and said, I don't want your endorsement right now, you're gonna hurt me. | |
| And the more establishment endorsers I have, the worse it looks for me. | |
| Cruz is actually anti-establishment, as I've been saying, but the problem is that Trump looks more anti-establishment than Cruz, even though the establishment would certainly prefer Trump to Cruz. | |
| And Trump is an angry guy, and he's channeling that anger. | |
| And finally, the real reason that Trump is the frontrunner right now is because of the ego. | |
| Because again, it comes down to, if Cruz dropped out, Rubio would win. | |
| If Rubio dropped out, Cruz would win. | |
| Neither of them will drop out, and so Trump will win. | |
| That's what it's coming down to right now. | |
| Rubio spent the last few weeks attacking Cruz, so the chances that Cruz would go along with any plan to drop out and take a second slot really low. | |
| Cruz has been attacking Rubio. | |
| More importantly, Rubio doesn't think he needs Cruz in order to win. | |
| Rubio apparently has been making overtures to John Kasich. | |
| Trying to gain his 7% of the vote, as though that's going to make any difference in any of these states. | |
| So, if you're a betting person, you would have to put your money on Trump right now. | |
| I've been saying that for the last couple of weeks, really ever since New Hampshire, that Trump is the frontrunner, and he's a very real frontrunner. | |
| It's very frustrating that Republicans continue to pretend that he's not. | |
| You have Cruz and Rubio going at each other. | |
| It's a waste of time. | |
| Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, Nevada caucuses happened for the Democrats, and Hillary won by 6 points. | |
| But the Democrats have a problem too, and this is what's so frustrating. | |
| The Democrats are actually vulnerable here. | |
| They're actually vulnerable here. | |
| Listen to the sort of ire from the Sanders camp over Hillary winning. | |
| So Chris Matthews, for heaven's sake, he combed his hair with a shoe, as is his wont, and then he proceeded to say on MSNBC that the only reason that she won in Nevada is not because she's a better politician, but because of backroom politics. | |
| And there you see Brian Williams, fresh off his latest tour in Vietnam, Shooting down random Vietcong planes and fighting aliens in space and blowing up asteroids like Bruce Willis. | |
| Here's Brian Williams on MSNBC along with Rachel and Chris Hayes. | |
| No, it's Rachel Maddow. | |
| Sorry, Rachel Maddow. | |
| And here is Chris Matthews. | |
| Chris, it was having watched hours of you that I heard Ralston say that the casino caucuses, the day shift workers who were allowed to come out and caucus, those were coming in in Clark County, the environs of Las Vegas, so heavily for Hillary Clinton. | |
| And that, it turns out, turned it for her. | |
| You know, I think it's an example that we have to pick up on ourselves, which is not all politics happens on television. | |
| It's not all speeches. | |
| It's not TV ads that are paid for. | |
| It's not free media. | |
| We give interviews to people. | |
| It's not debates. | |
| Things happen on the telephone. | |
| They happen in back rooms. | |
| They happen in labor halls where labor leaders still have strength. | |
| They can be engaged in pulling operations and get people Out of their homes on a beautiful Saturday, like out here in this gorgeous weather, to spend several hours inside, involved in this kind of wrestling match, to see how you actually vote. | |
| Off the screen is what happened here. | |
| Harry Reid is not Mr. Charisma, but he is one forceful figure. | |
| Why do you think he's leader of the Senate Democrats? | |
| Because he can work the phones, he can work relationships, and he has a great set of... | |
| ...as to what's going to happen. | |
| He saw Hillary Clinton in trouble out here. | |
| And he put together the best organization, which he's done so many times before, to make things happen. | |
| And that included the working people here. | |
| If you come out here, you actually see people doing their jobs. | |
| It's an amazing place because you see the crew PAs. | |
| Dealing the cards. | |
| You watch the pit bosses standing over them with those grim faces. | |
| You watch the waitresses running around. | |
| You watch the concierges when you ask them, can you get me tickets tonight? | |
| So you see what their jobs are. | |
| They don't make a lot of money, but they all showed up today. | |
| Three hour breaks according to MGM Grand. | |
| MGM that owns New York, New York, which is our host here. | |
| So you really saw democracy in action, but it wasn't a TV event. | |
| Until our guy, Jacob Sovorov, and of course, Chris Hayes got in there and showed us a bit of it. | |
| And what was going on is people... | |
| Okay, so we can stop it. | |
| The bottom line is that Hillary got out her union buddies to push all of the croupiers and all of the pit bosses and all the people playing cards and all the people serving drinks and janitors and people who serve food over the buffet and people who clean all the windows and every other employee of these hotels like New York, New York and Paris and the MGM Grand and the Flamingo and all the different hotels in Las Vegas and other cities like Las Vegas, like Atlantic City and Las Vegas and Atlantic City like all those different cities. | |
| So, they got all... | |
| The bottom line is Hillary twisted people's arms to get out there. | |
| She works with the unions, they twisted arms, they got the people out for Hillary. | |
| And if you looked at those numbers in that little video there, Hillary won less than 5,000 votes in Nevada. | |
| Massive victory! | |
| Massive victory! | |
| She's very vulnerable, and Bernie Sanders is very angry about the fact that he lost, and he's saying, Hillary has no message, she's copying my message. | |
| Here's Bernie Sanders going after Hillary Clinton. | |
| So I think people are responding to our message. | |
| of a rigged economy where ordinary Americans work longer hours for lower wages and almost all new income and wealth goes to the top 1%, a corrupt campaign finance system in which billionaires are buying elections. | |
| I think our message is resonating and obviously the proof of that is that Hillary Clinton is more or less echoing much of what we are saying. | |
| I think that indicates the success that we are having. | |
| Okay, so he says that Hillary is echoing his message, and then Hillary is stumbling around. | |
| She doesn't know what she even has to say. | |
| So Hillary, she was asked why she's in the race, and she said she understands voters saying that she's in it for herself, is clip 15. | |
| Here's Hillary Clinton talking about why she's in the race, and the answer is she has no idea, but she's just going to wear odd outfits until she's handed the nomination. | |
| What is she wearing in this thing? | |
| She looks like something out of Star Trek. | |
| Here we go, Hillary Clinton, threat level red. | |
| Hillary Clinton. | |
| I understand that voters have questions. | |
| I'm going to do my very best to answer those questions. | |
| I think there's an underlying question that maybe is really in the back of people's minds, and that is, you know, is she in it for us or is she in it for herself? | |
| a question that people are trying to sort through. | |
| Yes. | |
| And I'm going to demonstrate that I've always been the same person, fighting for the same values, fighting to make a real difference in people's lives, long before I was ever in elected office, even before my husband was in the presidency. | |
| So I know that I have to make my case. | |
| I have to demonstrate what I've achieved. | |
| I have to really make clear that, look, we want to make progress in our country. | |
| She's struggling so hard here. | |
| We want to make a real difference in people's lives. | |
| OK, we can stop her there. | |
| That's what I've always been about. | |
| She has no idea what she's talking about. | |
| She's struggling for an answer here. | |
| And she's starting to look like Ian Holm in Alien. | |
| Like, her head is going to come off and she's going to continue talking. | |
| And maybe that's why she has that bizarre collar, is because she's actually hiding the robotics within. | |
| So, the Democrats are really vulnerable, and meanwhile the Republicans are messing around with a guy who clearly is a demagogue, like Trump. | |
| And it's very frustrating all the way through. | |
| You know, the only good news in any of this is that the outrage is real. | |
| The reaction is wrong. | |
| The outrage is okay, but the backlash, the idea that we're gonna go with somebody like Trump, who's, he is reaching out for all the wrong answers, it's disturbing and it's problematic and it's a waste of an opportunity more than anything else, whether he wins or whether he loses. | |
| Okay, time for some things that I like and then some things that I hate. | |
| Okay, things that I like. | |
| I started reading a book called The Rise and Fall of Crime in America by Barry Latzer. | |
| As I mentioned last week, I finished the book Nudge by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler over the weekend. | |
| And it's a somewhat creepy book. | |
| The idea is that the government should basically set your defaults. | |
| So if you have an option between eating a healthy meal and a non-healthy meal at a restaurant, then the restaurant should basically put out just the healthy meal options and hide the non-healthy meal options. | |
| That if you are going to be enrolled in a certain type of social security, the government should encourage you to enroll in one type of social security over another. | |
| They call it libertarian paternalism. | |
| The idea is the government shouldn't force you to do things. | |
| The problem is they assume a huge, powerful government, and then they say the government that's already huge and powerful should push you toward one option or another. | |
| If they're real libertarians, they'd say the government should get out of this completely, and we should just encourage people to be aware of their own cognitive biases, what they call cognitive biases. | |
| We all make sort of cognitive mistakes, and those mistakes actually have ramifications for the choices that we make in our lives. | |
| And so if we're aware of them, it makes it more obvious for us not to do it. | |
| And so that part of the book is valuable. | |
| Their solutions, however, are problematic. | |
| Okay, other things that I like. | |
| The Rise and Fall of Crime in America, as I mentioned. | |
| I've read about the first half of it and it is very good by Barry Latzer. | |
| I recommend it highly. | |
| It's a very informative book from Encounter about why it is that the crime rates dropped so dramatically. | |
| Okay, a bit of musical things that I like. | |
| So normally I do classical music, and I talk about all the classical music that I love. | |
| The Brahms String Quintet, if you haven't heard it, is just a spectacular piece, piano quintet rather, is a spectacular piece of music. | |
| But for a little bit of pop music, I get a lot of questions in the mailbag, and the mailbag's been chock full lately. | |
| bshapiro at dailywire.com. | |
| And if I haven't had a chance to reply to you personally, I apologize, but we're literally at this point getting over 100 emails into the mailbag every single day, so I don't really have time to respond to everyone. | |
| I do my best. | |
| If I don't respond, then maybe we'll force Lindsay to do it, but somebody will respond to you and let you know at least that your letter was received. | |
| But as far as pop music, I mentioned, I think, Jim Croce a couple of weeks ago. | |
| Along those same lines, really underrated songwriter is Carole King, who started off as a songwriter, and then she didn't think that she was a good singer, and she doesn't have an amazing voice, but she's a terrific songwriter. | |
| You know Carole King from songs like You've Got a Friend, which is a terrific song. | |
| For those who haven't heard it, here's Carole King doing You've Got a Friend. | |
| *applause* The 1980s here, actually. | |
| Great song. | |
| It's a great song. | |
| Close your eyes and think of me. | |
| And soon I will be there to brighten up even your darkest night. | |
| You just call out my name. | |
| And you know-- We can cut it off there, but that's good stuff. | |
| And she's done a bunch of albums. | |
| Her early albums are really, really, really good. | |
| Her early albums are great. | |
| And her versions of the songs are better. | |
| Like, James Taylor does a version of this that's not nearly as good. | |
| She's really talented. | |
| It makes me sad she's a Democrat, but so are most of these people. | |
| And unlike Democrats, we don't bias how we view art in terms of the political views of the artist. | |
| So that's really good stuff. | |
| Okay, a couple of things that I hate. | |
| Speaking of things that people in Hollywood who I really can't stand because of their politics, Luke Skywalker has now actually joined the dark side. | |
| So Mark Hamill apparently raised $130 million for Hillary Clinton in January. | |
| He'll raise $130 million for Hillary Clinton in January. | |
| He's Luke Skywalker. | |
| Luke, this is how you end up on an island by yourself, alone. | |
| Right? | |
| This is how it happens. | |
| You end up there, staring at some chick who brought you a lightsaber. | |
| Just staring at her for hours on end, for no apparent reason, as the camera does a 360 viewpoint. | |
| He finally turned to the dark side. | |
| This is how you elevate- He should have learned his lesson. | |
| If you elevate a dark Sith Lord to one of the leading figures in the galaxy, this is what happens. | |
| You end up on an island talking to moss and rocks. | |
| So that sucked. | |
| Okay. | |
| Other thing that I hate. | |
| People have gotten- This is kind of old, but I got a couple of emails on it, so I figured I'd mention it. | |
| And I forget who wrote to me about this. | |
| I apologize if I forget your name. | |
| There's this thing called Kid President. | |
| This kid now has books out, and he has videos out. | |
| Hundreds of millions of views. | |
| I think we all need a pep talk. | |
| thing here is kid president telling you how you should live your life i think we all need pep talk the world needs you Stop being boring. | |
| Yeah, you. | |
| Boring is easy. | |
| Everybody can be boring. | |
| But you're good at that. | |
| Life is not a game, people. | |
| Life isn't a cereal eater. | |
| Well, it is a cereal. | |
| And if life is a game, aren't we all on the same team? | |
| I mean, really, right? | |
| I'm on your team. | |
| You're on my team. | |
| This is life, people. | |
| You got air coming through your nose. | |
| You got heartbeat. | |
| That means it's time to do something. | |
| A poem. | |
| Two roads diverged in the woods, and I took the road less traveled. | |
| And it hurt, man. | |
| Really bad. | |
| Rocks, thorns, and glass. | |
| My pants broke. | |
| Not cool, Robert Frost. | |
| But love didn't really work two paths. | |
| I want to be in the one that leads to awesome. | |
| Okay, we need to pause this. | |
| I'm sorry, I can't take any more of this. | |
| This is the stupidest crap anybody ever put on a film. | |
| This is legitimately stupid crap. | |
| So basically what he's saying, I don't even know what that means. | |
| Don't take the road less traveled, take the road more traveled? | |
| Is that the idea here? | |
| And we're all on the same team. | |
| Thank you for the list of platitudes, President Obama. | |
| And it really is. | |
| I mean, it's President Obama and it's Trump. | |
| Our politics is all platitudes now. | |
| The Obama thing has no reference to the race of the kid. | |
| That doesn't matter. | |
| It's the fact that our politics is all just a list of platitudes. | |
| Everything this kid is saying could be coming out of the mouth of Hillary or Sanders or Trump They all say the same stupid crap, and it's all crap like this, this faux-inspirational, Dr. Phil garbage that doesn't mean anything. | |
| And then they put it coming out of the mouth of the kid, and you're just like, oh, that's so cute! | |
| It's so cute that the little kid is saying things that we all should hear! | |
| Just listen to the children! | |
| You may have noticed, there's a theme to my programs. | |
| Never listen to the kids! | |
| Don't listen to children. | |
| They're tiny people, okay? | |
| But they're not tiny adults. | |
| They're tiny people, meaning their brains are less developed. | |
| Don't listen to them. | |
| When they tell you to do things, it's because they're children, okay? | |
| It's your job to be the adult. | |
| I love my baby, but I don't take political advice from my baby. | |
| She's the best, but she's not the best because she gives me life advice on my finances or tells me about Robert Frost poems. | |
| Hey, don't listen to kids. | |
| First of all, don't listen to kids whose scripts are being written by adults either. | |
| That's particularly silly. | |
| So, Kid President, just something else that I despise. | |
| Stop using the children for all of this. | |
| It's really dumb and it's really irritating. | |
| Okay, that's it for today. | |
| We'll be back tomorrow with more news in the death of the Republic, presumably. | |
| Perhaps Donald Trump will have actually declared that the Cubs will never win a World Series because he's... That at least would be good. | |
| I hate the Cubs. | |
| But, you know, it's... It's a disaster. | |
| Don't worry. | |
| We'll get through it together. | |
| We'll get through it together. | |
| And the good news is this. | |
| If the wrong people get elected, then you and I, everybody who's watching this, will probably all end up in the same prison together. | |
| So then we'll get to hang out personally! | |
| So if I didn't answer your emails, I'll see you there! |