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March 31, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show
39:45
Ep. 98 - Trump Thinks His Supporters Are Idiots

Trump says silly things about abortion and nukes, Pat Robertson goes off the deep end on Lewandowski, and the mailbag! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Well, here we are.
We finally made it to a Thursday and another busy week for The Ben Shapiro Show.
And we start today by talking to you, Donald Trump supporters.
So, you believe in Donald Trump and he believes in you.
He says he will fight for you.
In fact, he loves you.
He says so openly, he shouts his love into the nearest microphone at every available opportunity.
And then there's actually what Donald Trump thinks of you.
And he thinks that you're a bunch of rubes.
Here are four indicators that Donald Trump thinks that you are a bunch of rubes.
First of all, he thinks you're losers.
So yesterday Donald Trump says he likes to surround himself with losers to make himself feel better.
He said, quote, you'll find when you become very successful, the people you will like best are the people that are less successful than you.
Because when you go to a table, You can tell them all the wonderful stories and they'll sit back and listen.
Always be around unsuccessful people because everybody will respect you.
Are you listening, Trump fans?
He also thinks you're stupid.
Back after winning the Nevada caucuses, Trump rejoiced.
We won with the poorly educated.
I love the poorly educated.
There's a reason for that.
Trump thinks he can manipulate you into basically feeling anything.
Here's what he told the New York Times editorial board about how he manipulates Trump fans, people like you.
He said, quote, In other words, you're a bunch of idiots.
That's what he thinks of you.
This is what Trump thinks of you.
about leaving, I can sort of tell the audience, I just say, we will build the wall and they go nuts.
In other words, you're a bunch of idiots.
That's what he thinks of you.
This is what Trump thinks of you.
He also thinks you don't care about his changing positions.
He says this constantly.
He says, He says he never changes his positions, he's constant as the Northern Star, except he changes his positions pretty much all the time and he admits it to you.
He said in an open debate just about three weeks ago, quote, I've never seen a successful person who wasn't flexible and who didn't have a certain degree of flexibility.
He was talking about immigration policy at the time, which is supposed to be your big issue.
He apparently told the New York Times off the record his immigration position was just sort of an opening bargaining stance for negotiation.
And when he was asked to release the tape, he said he couldn't because, you know, it was off the record.
That doesn't make any sense.
Off the record is a protection for the subject of journalists, not for the journalists themselves.
Finally, Donald Trump thinks that you will worship him no matter what he does and no matter where you go.
When he said in January he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and gun somebody down and he wouldn't lose voters, he wasn't really joking.
He actually thinks this, and he obviously believes this.
It's true to a certain extent.
His campaign manager can yank and grab and bruise a woman, and can deny that it ever happened and be caught on tape doing it, and then Trump can accuse the reporter of attacking Trump and trying to kill him with a pen bomb, and his supporters just go right along with it.
So, perhaps Trump is right about you.
Perhaps Trump is right about you.
Perhaps you are losers or stupid or you don't care about his positions.
Perhaps you ignore all of these things about Trump, you ignore his low opinion of you, because you think Trump can win.
That's at least arguable, but it's a position that really isn't supported by evidence.
Whatever the reason, the fact is this.
Donald Trump thinks he has you and can do anything he wants to you.
So far, a lot of you are proving Donald Trump right.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show. - Tend to demonize people because they don't care about your feelings.
So as you can see, we are not in our beautiful home studios in Los Angeles, California.
Instead, we're on the road again.
This time we're in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
I'll tell you how that went in a little while.
I spoke at University of North Carolina, and we'll show you a little bit of video.
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Okay.
So Donald Trump, let's start with Trump because he's always in the news cycle because he drives the news cycle now.
So Donald Trump, one of the big issues with Trump is that he clearly does not think deeply about issues like in any way.
And he doesn't even bother to do his research on issues.
Donald Trump's typical campaign strategy, and I've been saying this for literally months at this point, is when asked about a topic about which he knows very little, he takes the most extreme possible position, and then, if he doesn't get a good response, he sort of walks it back.
So he'll say, we completely shut the border, we built a giant wall, and everybody cheers, and he goes, ah, I was the first one there.
And then anybody else who takes a right-wing position They must be imitating or copying Donald Trump, right?
That's the idea.
If he takes an extreme position that people don't like, right?
If he takes an extreme position that people find spurious, then he immediately walks it back.
He walks it back to a place that's more palatable.
So, yesterday's exercise in such verbal and ideological gymnastics Was on the issue of abortion.
So Trump doesn't know anything about abortion.
Trump doesn't feel anything about abortion.
Trump became pro-life about 30 seconds before he decided to run for president at the ripe old age of 69.
He didn't have a road to Damascus conversion.
He doesn't even have a good why I became pro-life story like Mitt Romney did.
All he believes is that he has to say he's pro-life in order to win the nomination.
He's now said that he's pro-life, except for the exceptions.
Again, he doesn't even know what the exceptions are.
He just says, the exceptions, right?
Because he read two sentences on the issue.
And when he's pressed on it, he gets himself into hot water.
So he's on here with Chris Matthews over at MSNBC.
And Chris Matthews over at MSNBC, he's gonna trap Donald Trump talking about abortion.
How should women be punished on abortion?
Should women have to go to jail if they have an abortion?
What are you even talking about?
Let's talk about it.
Chris Matthews on MSNBC, go!
But the churches make their moral judgments, but you running for President of the United States will be Chief Executive of the United States.
Do you believe in punishment for abortion, yes or no, as a principle?
The answer is that there has to be some form of punishment.
For the woman?
Yeah, there has to be some form.
Let me just tell you, I don't know.
That I don't know.
Why not?
You take positions in everything else.
Frankly, I do take positions in everything else.
It's a very complicated position.
So, you can see there that he's asked a question.
He hasn't thought about it at all, right?
It's never even occurred to him, this particular question.
And the hamster wheel is turning, but it's not turning very fast, because the hamster in there is not particularly powerful.
And then he settles on a decision, and then he just spits it out, but he still hasn't thought it through.
So he says, yeah, there should be some sort of punishment.
OK, two things.
One, if you really wanted to avoid the question, what he could have said is Roe versus Wade talks about how the federal government, the federal government Has to sort of take over the abortion issue, right?
There's a federal right to abortion.
If Roe v. Wade is overturned, all of this will go back to the states.
My opinion as president is not important here.
The states will decide that, right?
He could have taken the Federalist position.
That's an easy position to take, a politically palatable decision to take, and also a legally smart decision to take, right?
I mean, that's true.
These will all devolve into state laws.
He could also theoretically come out and he could say, I want a constitutional amendment that protects human life.
And then it's up to the states to implement that, right?
You don't get to kill babies.
There are a bunch of ways you could have answered this without even answering the question.
But let's say you wanted to answer the question head-on.
How would you prosecute for abortion?
Well, every pro-life group in the world says that Trump got this wrong.
And there are a couple of reasons why that is.
One is political, one is practical, and one is moral.
So there are really three.
So the political reason is because it is politically unpalatable to say that women who have abortions should go to jail.
It's politically unpalatable.
It's never been politically palatable.
It's not a winning issue.
For the same reason that a lot of Republicans will say that they support exceptions for rape and incest because they believe, okay, fine, let's make illegal the other 98% of abortions and then we'll talk about these.
A lot of Republicans find it politically unfeasible or infeasible to push forward the idea that women should go to jail.
That's the political reason.
Openly political, has nothing to do with morality or practicality.
Next is the practical reason.
So, For folks who don't know, even when abortion was illegal in the United States, in most of the United States, women were almost never prosecuted.
So abortion law was generally construed and was generally written to punish the abortion doctors.
Why?
Because that was the easiest way to shut down abortion and the most practical way to stop abortion.
There were laws against self-induced abortion, and there were rare cases in which women were prosecuted for that, but it turns out that if you get rid of a woman's access to abortion, if you get rid of her access to the accomplice in killing the baby, or the contractor in killing the baby, then you have prevented her from having the abortion, effectively speaking.
It's the same sort of logic that says, we have scarce resources, don't bother prosecuting the drug user, go after the drug dealer.
We have scarce resources, don't go after the low-level guy, go after the criminal who's actually pushing.
So that's the logic there.
So I've given you the political reason and the practical reason.
And again, for 150 years in the country, before Roe v. Wade, that was the case.
Very, very few women were prosecuted for actual abortion.
Now the moral argument.
And this one is a little bit dicier, because Folks on the left trying to force people on the right into the politically unpalatable position.
They say, you say abortion is murder.
If a woman kills her baby, isn't that murder?
And shouldn't she be prosecuted as such?
And they can make the case even stronger, right?
Now, I want to be intellectually honest to the leftist argument here, because I don't think that it's completely non-meritorious in terms of trying to hold people to their own logic.
When the left says, okay, so a woman has a premature baby at seven months, and she takes the baby and dumps it in a dumpster, how is that morally different from the woman going in and having the baby killed?
Right?
How is that any morally different?
So there are two reasons that it's morally different.
One is because the fact is that pro-life people tend to see women as a second victim in the abortion.
We tend to believe that women aren't fully informed, that women, if they knew what was in there, they wouldn't be making that decision.
Crime requires a mens rea, it requires an intent.
And one of the requirements of a crime is that you'd be able to know right from wrong.
Well, in today's America, you don't know right from wrong.
If you want to see evidence of this, look at the argument that I had with a woman the other night at Salisbury University.
She was saying that a baby all the way up to the point of birth was not a baby, it was a cluster of cells.
This is the lie that women have been told and have bought into.
If they're not even aware that they're killing a human being, it's hard to prosecute them for the killing of the human being on a moral level.
These women are victims of brainwashing by the left, by the media, by the press, and by abortion clinics.
So that's one moral reason why women should not be prosecuted, because they're ignorant of the actual morality here.
The second is because women are very often pressured into the abortion by the abortionists, who deprive them of the resources to make a fully cognizant So, Ben Carson basically expresses what everybody thinks about Trump at this point, which is Trump is ignorant.
He doesn't know what he's talking about.
and he's wrong practically, but he hasn't thought about the issue.
And so he spits this out and naturally there's blowback on this.
So Ben Carson basically expresses what everybody thinks about Trump at this point, which is Trump is ignorant.
He doesn't know what he's talking about.
Here's Ben Carson saying, here's why Trump got it wrong.
So, so Donald Trump, though, this was all happened in the space of just a couple hours this afternoon.
Uh, you know, at first he said the woman, then he said, no, not the woman, the abortion provider, the woman's a victim.
Can a president reverse himself so quickly on such a fundamental issue?
Well, bear in mind, I don't believe that he was warned that that question was coming, and I don't think he really had a chance to really think about it.
That happens very frequently, and, you know, what you develop with experience is how to answer that in a way that is not definitive.
You know how politicians are.
He hasn't really learned that because he's not a politician.
But he has now had time to come back and think about it and to talk with his people about it and come up with a more rational and informed type of answer.
So in other words, Donald Trump is ignorant, doesn't know what he's talking about, and he went back to his people, they informed him what the right position was, now he'll repeat that.
But he won't be able to explain it, but he'll repeat it.
So, but Donald Trump isn't a politician, so we shouldn't hold him to the same standards.
If that's true, then what you would imagine is that Donald Trump should double down on his non-politician-ness.
I mean, again, there's an argument that's being put out there by Trump fans that I just don't get.
It doesn't make any logical sense.
Trump isn't a politician.
That's why I like him.
Okay, if Trump isn't a politician, that should say a couple of things to you.
One, he's going to be more blunt and more honest than the politicians, right?
That's the idea.
So, that's a good thing, right?
The idea is that he's not a politician.
And the second thing they say that is now in complete conflict with that is, but he's learning.
But he's learning.
But I thought that you wanted a non-politician.
You don't want somebody learning to be a politician.
You want him in his non-politician state.
It's asinine.
I mean, saying that you like him because he's not a politician, but don't worry, he's evolving into a politician, that's not an argument.
That's not an argument in favor of Trump.
That's an argument that He's malleable, and that he moves according to the dictates of the time, and that he's a really cynical player in all of this.
But no one ever expects logic, unfortunately, of a certain subset of Trump reporters and backers.
The idea, again, that Trump's an outsider, that he's a businessman, he doesn't know this stuff.
You know, that comment was wrong.
He's getting better.
First of all, he isn't getting better at this.
He's actually getting worse at this.
And second of all, if you like that he's blunt, why would you want him to get better at not being blunt?
I thought that was one of the qualities you're looking for.
Ted Cruz rightly went after Trump.
Here's what Ted Cruz had to say about Trump's abortion comments. - You know, that comment was wrong.
And it really, it's the latest demonstration of how little Donald has thought about any of the serious issues facing this country.
I am pro-life.
Being pro-life means standing and defending the unborn, but it also means defending moms, defending women, and defending the incredible gift women have to bring life into the world.
And Donald's comments, they were unfortunate, they were wrong, and I strongly disagree with them.
Okay.
And of course he's exactly right there.
Charles Krauthammer actually hits the nail on the head better.
He explains that it's not just about Trump being wrong.
It's about this is how Trump operates.
He doesn't, he doesn't have even a basic grasp of policy.
He doesn't think about things.
He just spouts whatever comes out of his crazy brain.
Here's Charles Krauthammer.
It's not that he got it wrong.
It's that, but it shows about his attitude towards the facts or towards issues.
This is fairly elementary.
Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, who's been in this issue for decades, was explaining that what troubled him is that at the beginning of this, Trump said, many conservatives, many Republicans, think the woman ought to be punished.
Perkins said, anybody who's been on this issue, who knows the pro-life community, who knows what the arguments are and what people really believe, knows that is not true.
That is not the position of anybody on the pro-life side.
That is the position that the pro-choice people attribute this kind of hard-heartedness To the pro-life side.
And that's apparently what Trump imbibed.
And the problem isn't only that he got it wrong.
It isn't only, as Charlie indicates, he really ought to spend the time and get this right.
But it is the lack of curiosity.
We were talking about this earlier in one of his debates.
He obviously had no idea when asked about the nuclear triad, which anybody who knows anything about foreign policy has heard about, looked at, and would know.
But that's okay.
The problem was it was a later debate.
When the nuclear triad came up and he still didn't know, which indicates that in the interval he didn't even look it up on Google.
And that takes 30 seconds.
And that's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
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If you go to reaganprivacy.com right now, you get two months Okay, so it's not just that Trump is ignorant about abortion.
He's ignorant about pretty much everything.
And again, I'm gonna make the argument in a second that it's also that he's unable to win, which is the other counter-argument.
The argument has been, he's not a politician, he's learning.
As I say, I find that argument not only unpersuasive, But self-contradictory.
And then the argument is, but he's still going to win.
And I'll explain to you why this is false in just a moment.
But let's finish up with the demonstration that Donald Trump is just ignorant.
So yesterday, we played tape of Donald Trump talking about how the functions of the federal government include education, health care, and housing.
A position absolutely indistinguishable from that of Bernie Sanders.
I mean, it's a far-left position.
He also said yesterday that he wants to appoint justices to the Supreme Court who will investigate Hillary Clinton's emails, which doesn't even make any sense.
I mean, that's just nonsensical.
Coming from the same guy who said judges sign bills, I guess it makes some sense, but apparently judges are both the executive branch and the legislative branch and the judicial branch.
They do all of these things.
It's amazing.
But he's also just as ignorant on foreign policy.
So here's Donald Trump yesterday.
He starts talking for some reason about the Geneva Conventions and listen to this pile of nonsense.
Here we go.
I have been trying to think how we could conceivably use a nuclear weapon in the Middle East or in Europe in fighting ISIS.
Where can you, and why put it on the table or leave it on the table if you can't imagine where to use it?
I didn't say don't take it.
I said I would be very, very slow and hesitant.
Why would you just say I don't want to talk about it?
I don't want to talk about nuclear weapons.
Presidents don't talk about the use of nuclear weapons.
The question was asked.
We're talking about NATO, which, by the way, I say is obsolete.
But you got hooked into something you shouldn't have talked about.
I don't think.
I think.
Well, someday, maybe.
Maybe?
Of course.
Where would we drop a nuclear weapon in the Middle East?
Let me explain.
Somebody hits us with an ISIS, you wouldn't fight back?
No, to drop a nuclear weapon to a community of people.
First of all, you don't want to say take everything off the table.
No, just nuclear.
You're a bad negotiator if you do that.
Just nuclear.
Look, nuclear should be off the table.
But would there be a time when it could be used?
Possibly.
Okay, the trouble is, when you said that, the whole world heard.
David Cameron in Britain heard it.
The Japanese, when we bombed them in 1945, heard it.
They're hearing a guy running for President of the United States talking of maybe using nuclear weapons.
Nobody wants to hear that about an American president.
Then why are we making them?
Why do we make them?
We have nuclear weapons.
Because of the all-mutual-assured destruction, which Reagan hated.
Just so you understand, I was against Iraq.
I'd be the last one to use the nuclear weapons.
So can you take it off the table now?
That's sort of like the end of the ballgame.
Can you tell the Middle East we're not using a nuclear weapon on anybody?
I would never say that.
...any of my cards off the table.
How about Europe?
We won't use it in Europe.
I'm not going to take it off the table.
You might use it in Europe.
No, I don't think so, but I'm not taking... Well, just say it.
I would never use it in Europe.
I am not taking cards off the table.
I'm not going to use nukes, but I'm not taking any cards off the table.
The trouble is the sane people hear you, and the insane people are not affected by your threats.
That's the trouble.
The real fanatics say, good, keep it up.
I think they're more affected than you might think.
Okay, so he says a couple of things there.
One he says, "I won't take using nuclear weapons off the table against ISIS, for example, because you just don't take things off the table." And that's not a terrible argument.
That part you're actually, "Okay, all right." Because, excuse me, the reason for that is because, I mean, Chris Matthews mentions mutually assured destruction.
Right.
If you say that you'll never use a nuclear weapon at any point, it's not mutually assured destruction anymore.
I mean, the point of mutually assured destruction is if you use a nuke, I will use a nuke against you.
Therefore, neither of us use nukes.
You can't take the use off the table.
But the fact that he won't take it off the table in Europe, what is he even talking about?
Like, when would we use a nuclear weapon in Europe?
He won't take that off the table now?
Okay, and that's not even the worst thing he said.
The worst thing he said was clip five, where he talks about the Geneva Conventions, because he clearly doesn't know what the Geneva Conventions are.
Here's what he had to say.
He said, the problem is, we have the Geneva Conventions, all sorts of rules and regulations, so the soldiers are afraid to fight.
And the Geneva Conventions don't make the soldiers afraid to fight.
Rules of engagement make the soldiers afraid to fight if they are too narrowly drawn.
But the Geneva Conventions have been around since World War II and prior, so again, it's just basic ignorance.
Now, the other argument in favor of Trump, aside from the he's blunt, he says it like it is, which he doesn't.
I mean, you can hear in that interview with Matthews, he flips himself twice on nuclear weapons in the course of 35 seconds.
He flipped himself on abortion yesterday over the course of an hour.
He flips himself routinely all the time.
The other argument is that he can win.
He can win.
There's only one problem with this argument.
It is utter nonsense.
Donald Trump is currently losing the white male vote in the United States, which is supposed to be his big, his big crowd is the white males, right?
They're going to show up.
They're going to vote 70% for him.
He's going to win white people like Romney never won white people.
This is Ann Coulter's argument today.
Not true.
Okay.
In the polls, he is doing far worse than Romney among whites, among Hispanics, among blacks, among every subgroup.
Donald Trump does not do well among white voters.
He does well among a certain subset of older white Quasi-populist voters, but he doesn't do well among white voters in general.
He's dramatically underdrawing among all groups in any broad poll.
John Dickerson says this over at CBS News, you know, Dickerson's a lefty, but what he's saying here is correct.
Clip 10, Trump's numbers are now toxic.
He's now entered the basically, if you ever saw Back to the Future 3, There was a point where the train is running toward what they call Eastwood Ravine later, and the train is running toward Eastwood Ravine, and there's a point of no return, right?
It's a barricade that they've put up.
If the train goes past this, we can't stop the train.
We have to get it up to 88 miles an hour.
Trump is now past the point of no return, but there's no getting off the train, and it's headed for Eastwood Ravine.
Here's Dickerson making that point.
But we've also seen something else, which is that in the general election, when you look at his numbers, both among women, but then the larger public, his numbers are toxic in terms of his unfavorability rating.
So it may not matter with his supporters at the moment, but it does collect.
And cause a problem for him.
One other thing I'd say is when I talk to Republican lawmakers, it's the Trump campaign is one constant diet of unpredictability and drama and they think about what's this gonna look like in the general election where he's hurting maybe not just his brand but the entire Republican brand.
And this is right.
And again, if you look at the polls, the polls do not bear out the idea that Trump is going to overperform, that he's going to do incredibly well.
I'm looking at some of the numbers right now.
He currently has an 80% unfavorable rating with young voters.
An 80% unfavorable rating with young voters.
Okay?
That means no one, and I can testify to this, young Republicans cannot stand Donald Trump.
They cannot stand him.
When I'm speaking to college students right now, and I'm speaking to them every single day, The only people who like Donald Trump are old white men over the age of 60.
And if you look at how he's doing with white groups, with swing voting groups, I mean, these numbers are awful.
I'm looking at a poll today from the Washington Post, ABC News.
His favorable, unfavorable ratings.
Okay, his favorable, unfavorable ratings.
He is underwater by 37%.
67% of all Americans view him unfavorably.
51% view Ted Cruz unfavorably, 52% view Clinton unfavorably, 67% view Donald Trump unfavorably.
Among white women, 68% view Donald Trump unfavorably.
Among white college graduates, white college graduates, 74% view him unfavorably.
Okay, even among white men.
Even among white men.
This is supposed to be his group, right?
He's supposed to be doing great with white men.
51- and this is Republican-leaning white men, right?
Republican-leaning groups?
Okay, white men?
51%.
51% have a negative opinion of Donald Trump.
So a majority of white men, his group, don't like Donald Trump.
White evangelical Protestants, 56% don't like him.
Conservatives, 53% don't like him.
Non-college whites, right?
That's his people.
Non-college whites, 52% say they do not like him, as opposed to 45% who say that they do like him.
He's a deeply unpopular figure.
He's 85% unpopular among Hispanics, 80% among blacks, 80% among 18-34, 75% unpopular among moderates.
These numbers are awful.
Awful.
A majority of every single subgroup in the United States dislikes Donald Trump.
This is the guy who's going to win a big swath of the voting that he wasn't able to win?
That's what it was?
He's going to bring everybody to victory?
You really have to buy into miracles in politics to believe that.
One of the reasons for this is because Donald Trump is just an awful, awful liar.
And I want to make something clear, if I didn't make it clear yesterday about the Michelle Fields story.
First of all, what Michelle said was true, but that wasn't the real story.
The real story was that Donald Trump and Corey Lewandowski, instead of just apologizing, Instead of Trump disciplining Corey Lewandowski, or suspending him for grabbing a woman and bruising her, they decided to smear her and lie about it, and they continue to lie about it.
Women everywhere are watching.
Decent human beings everywhere are watching.
And again, if you watch the tape, there's one thing that is incontrovertible.
This is why when people say that the tape of Lewandowski and Michelle Fields exonerates Lewandowski, of what?
Of what?
He grabs her, he yanks her.
That's on the tape.
I don't know what, what are you missing here?
In order for you to say it exonerates Lewandowski, you have to inflate Michelle's original claims to unbelievable proportions, proportions to which she didn't inflate them.
And you see all these Trumpsters, these Trumpkins, now pushing out the video of Michelle on Megyn Kelly, talking about how it was the worst incident of her life, or this was the worst day of her life.
The reason it was the worst day of her life, gang, was not because she was grabbed by Corey Lewandowski.
It's because she was then subjected to an immense amount of blowback from people who should have been defending her.
And it's because she was smeared by a presidential candidate.
I mean, that's rough stuff.
She just moved out of her apartment, Michelle did, because BuzzFeed and Fox News ran the arrest report publicly with her address on it, and she's been hit with a bunch of death threats.
And they're just charming people.
So here is Chris Matthews over in Amitabh State asking Donald Trump over in Amitabh State about Corey Lewandowski, campaign manager.
Go!
Let me ask you about this thing the other day with your campaign manager.
Do you think you're going to handle it differently from the start?
With maybe an apology to the young woman reporter?
Something like that?
Maybe give her an interview?
Something to de-escalate the issue and show respect for her?
Have you done that before?
I don't think so.
I think if he called up to apologize, I think you'd be in the exact same place.
And people that have seen that tape are going, give me a break.
You have to be kidding me.
But there was contact?
What's contact?
I mean, there's contact every time... That's what this law says.
It's unwanted touching, unwanted... I'm walking, yeah, but she contacted me.
It's simple battery.
Excuse me.
She grabbed my arm twice.
You see the picture of me looking like, who is this person?
And getting her off me.
What do you make of the bruises on the picture?
Uh, I don't know who created those bruises.
I really don't know.
I mean, you know, two days later she comes in and she said she had some bruises.
I don't... But this kind of argument just infuriates her and a lot of women because you're not showing belief in her credibility.
Why would she make up a story about bruises?
Why would anybody do that?
Fifteen minutes away, in front of a very large crowd, I gave a speech and we talked about that.
And I said, who saw the tape?
And everybody raised, almost a lot of people raised their hand.
I'd say three quarters raised their hand.
Big audience.
I said, who thinks he did something really wrong?
I said, stand up please, or raise your hand if you don't want to stand up.
Not one person in the room, your cameras were there, not one person in the room raised their hand.
We're getting, it's out of control.
Political correctness, whatever you want to call it.
It's totally out of control.
What's the right approach though?
If you accidentally bump into somebody, accidentally trip them, you say, I'm sorry.
Don't you show some apology and respect for the other person?
Yeah, I think that's fine.
I mean, I think that's fine.
Wouldn't that have been appropriate here?
I'm not sure he didn't maybe even say it there.
What he was doing is, in my opinion, just in watching the tape, because nobody even remembers the incident because it was so minor, it's not like they, you know, got your... Even the police remember it.
He's an outright horrible lie.
He's just making facts up off the top of his head.
He says in the same interview, by the way, that Michelle was fired from Breitbart, which is an outright lie.
And then he says right there, well, I'm not sure he didn't apologize in the moment.
Really?
You're not sure he didn't apologize in the moment?
It's on tape.
I mean, it's just, and he says, oh, well, my crowd, you know, the people who watched the video, none of them thought something bad happened, right?
Because they're your fans and they've allowed their idolatry of you personally to cloud their basic human decency.
If you grab somebody by the arm and you bruise them, you apologize.
This is not hard.
And his lie, by the way, that if they'd apologized to Michelle, that she would have gone after them anyway, she went totally silent for 36 hours while Breitbart talked to them.
That's such nonsense.
It's utter nonsense off the top.
And even people who I generally like are starting to go off the rails on this.
Ann Coulter, who I'm friends with.
I like Ann.
She and I go out to dinner when she's in town.
Here's Ann Coulter talking about the Michelle Fields incident.
And I'm sorry, but this is so missing the point that it's beyond just because Ann likes Trump.
I think there are bruises there.
You think she's lying.
It's quite clear she's lying when she said that he grabbed her and nearly tried to forcefully pull her to the ground that she lost her balance.
Trump is absolutely right.
And it's one of the first things I noticed that her face is placid the entire time, even if it were a.
A justifiable touching, like in a subway, walking into a concert, in a bar.
And by the way, if that is a battery that we just saw on that screen, I've been thrown down and gang raped at bars and on the New York City subway.
But if that is such an egregious touching, Trump's right.
He could bring a lawsuit against her.
You would at least have some sort of You'd have her face respond.
In some way, you don't see that.
You see their shoulders brushing past one another.
No, that's not what you see.
What you see is her arm being grabbed and her being pulled back forcefully.
That's what you see.
My God.
It's unbelievable.
It really is unbelievable.
The police know the same thing.
And by the way, Ann, you're the woman who stood up and fought the Clintons on behalf of Paula Jones.
You used to fight against this sort of stuff, okay?
This wasn't a rape, this wasn't a sexual assault.
She was bruised.
Did she make up the bruising?
I mean, is Anne now suggesting she made up the bruising?
The whole she-deserved-it or she-assaulted-Trump, which is even more ridiculous.
You want to hear the she-assaulted-Trump story?
Here's Pat Robertson making a fool of himself, talking about how Michelle Fields was a danger to the Republic, telling the old Trump story here that And Michelle Fields was going after Trump with a pen and then like Jason Bourne was about to stab him in the throat when heroic Corey Lewandowski descended from the sky on a cable like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible and thrust her away from the presidential candidate.
Here's Pat Robertson telling that ridiculous story.
The female reporter rushed the candidate.
Where were the Secret Service people who were supposed to defend him?
But she could have had a knife, she could have had a gun, she could have had a bomb, but the Secret Service did nothing, and so now the aide is being sued.
Okay, first of all, the aid isn't being sued.
Second of all, that's such an absurd contention.
The tape is available.
Again, when your own eyes are telling you something, but your heart says follow Donald Trump, believe your eyes, because you're being a moron.
And then meanwhile, what are the Trumpsters really upset about today?
What the Trumpsters are really upset about today is they're upset about Ted Cruz making a joke on Jimmy Kimmel.
Here's the joke Ted Cruz told on Jimmy Kimmel, and people who are Trump fans are just up in arms about this.
It's clip 12.
And if I were in my car and getting ready to reverse and saw Donald in the backup camera, I'm not confident which pedal I'd put.
You know, everybody's clapping.
Is that a joke I wouldn't tell on national TV?
Yes.
Donald Trump says, however, that he would shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and nobody would care.
He says that his protesters should knock the crap out of people.
I mean, it's just...
There are two standards that have now been created in politics.
One for Donald Trump and one for everybody else.
And if you're a defender of Trump, you're willing to go after anybody else except for Trump.
He can lie.
He can cheat.
He can smear.
He can go after people's wives.
He can be violent.
Anything.
He can do anything.
And you will defend him.
And once we've hit that point, this is a cult.
This is no longer a political movement.
I hated it with Obama, and I hate it with Trump.
Idolatry is bad, folks.
Idolatry is bad.
Okay, time for something I like, then something I hate, and then a couple of entries from the mailbag.
So, first thing I like, great movie called All the King's Men.
I think we have the trailer.
Here's a little bit of the trailer for All the King's Men, 1949, best picture.
Broderick Crawford has a lot to say about our current political situation.
Don't watch the remake with Sean Penn, it's garbage.
Watch the original with Broderick Crawford, who won a Best Actor Oscar for this.
Here's a little bit of the preview.
The Pulitzer Prize novel becomes a vital, very great motion picture.
The story of a ruthless big shot, Willie Stark.
And for the last time, I tell you that nobody, Do you hear me?
Nobody will tell me how to run this state!
His manners, his morals, and his women.
If I get a divorce... Maybe we better stop seeing each other.
No.
No, we won't stop seeing each other, will we?
Okay, it really is a terrific film, and it has a lot to say.
It starts off with Willie Stark, who's the character there.
He's actually a good guy.
He's kind of a rube who decides that he's going to fight the political machine, and then he becomes the political machine.
It shows how power corrupts.
It really was sort of a... The novel is written as a takeoff on Huey Long in Louisiana, and it really does have a lot to say.
Go check out All the King's Men.
Okay, Things I Hate.
So last night I spoke at University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and I said at the very beginning of the speech, That I would hope there- I knew there were a bunch of students there who disagreed wearing Black Lives Matter t-shirts, etc.
And I said, I'm really glad you showed up.
I'm looking forward to a productive conversation.
Let me just say, if you shout me down, you're a fascist.
And if you walk out, you're closed-minded.
And five minutes later, literally five minutes later, here's what happened.
Here's the tape.
There's the walkout.
- Doing the open sports from my perspective.
I appreciate it, thank you.
- By clapping, you're not being tolerant either.
- Yeah, I can.
- I'm certainly tolerant.
And yeah, it's just demonstrable that everything I said was true, and then they proved my point.
So thank you, leftists, for falling right into proving my entire point.
It's really spectacular.
OK, time for a couple of entries from the mailbag.
So here is the mailbag.
Thank you all for writing in.
And we'll do the same thing we do every week.
We'll do the same thing we do every week.
If you are a subscriber and you can see me on video, then I'm going to give you a number right now.
Put it in your email line, and you will be given first call in the mailbag.
And for all others, bshapiro at dailywire.com.
It's true for everybody.
Here is the number.
Okay, you got it?
You got it?
Okay, if you can see that.
Okay, great.
And okay, let's go to the mailbag now.
Here we go.
Alec writes, could you explain Senator Cruz's plan for monitoring Muslim neighborhoods?
A small piece in my school newspaper discussed it and called it racist and fear-mongering.
I don't think she's doing the ideas justice.
OK, what he's talking about is the same program, Alec, that the Bloomberg administration had in New York City and Giuliani before that.
And what that was, was basically in heavily Muslim neighborhoods, you have people who are police officers going to public areas and just kind of listening around.
That's perfectly well within constitutional limits.
We're not talking about deporting people for no reason.
We're not talking about grabbing lawyer taps on people for no reason.
We're talking about having more people on the ground in potential areas of terrorism.
Not very difficult and obviously well substantiated.
Great article from Commentary Magazine in 2012 talked specifically about this program.
You can go look it up.
Roman writes, what suggestion would Ben have for a high schooler who wants to become a political writer?
Any places to submit to?
Well, Roman, we don't tend to take too many submissions at Daily Wire itself, but I would recommend, I believe, Town Hall takes submissions, American Thinker takes submissions, Daily Caller sometimes takes submissions, right for free for anybody who will take you.
That's how I started.
And if you do that, at some point, if you're good, you'll start getting paid for it.
Ian writes, "My dad, who is an avid Trump supporter, talks about the gold standard that was dropped during the Nixon era and how it was bad to get off of it.
Does this have any validity in conservative economics or is it a populist scare tactic?" No, the gold standard has a lot of validity in economics.
I'm myself of the Vienna School of Economics.
I don't believe in a constant rate of inflation from the federal government, because that's just fake money.
The reality is that services and goods have values, and those values are not dictated by how many dollars you print.
It's like saying that if I trade you one piece of paper for an apple, or if I trade you two pieces of paper for an apple, that really makes no difference, because the pieces of paper have no inherent value.
That's all that money is.
It's pieces of paper that say, I owe you more labor, If the pieces of paper are doubled, and I'm giving you the same amount of labor, I haven't helped the economy in any way.
I'm very much in favor of the gold standard, or what they like to call the gold-pegged standard, which means that you take the value of gold, peg it to the dollar, and leave it there.
It doesn't mean that you have to, you know, be able to trade in one dollar for a silver, for a gold coin of dollars.
Okay, Enoch writes, how do you give a counter-argument who compares terrorist attacks to gun ownership?
For example, when an attack happens, their argument is that it's only a few people versus over 1 billion Muslims that exist.
And then we say, well, it happens that this religion is responsible for most of the attacks.
And then they say, how come when a few shootings happen, people don't blame gun owners or guns?
Okay, the reason is because if you are looking at ideology, I believe that guns don't kill people, people kill people.
I don't believe that bombs kill people.
People kill people.
So the idea is that whatever drives you is what creates the killing.
It's not the weapon itself.
It's whatever drives you is what creates the killing.
I think we have to run here because Clavin has to tape his new show.
So we'll drop it at this point, but we'll do more Mailbag next week, hopefully.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Have a good weekend, and make sure That you stay out of trouble, particularly if you're near Donald Trump's campaign manager.
Make sure that you keep a healthy distance.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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