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May 5, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:45
Ep. 113 - Why The Media Can't Stop Trump

Ben explains how the media built their Frankenstein monster, why Trump just proved he suckered conservatives, and the vaunted mailbag! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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If Democrats could have constructed a candidate in a laboratory designed to do two things this fall, those things would have been one, lose dramatically to Hillary Clinton, and two, destroy the conservative brand at the same time.
Which begs the question, was Donald Trump actually constructed in a laboratory by Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Barack Obama?
Polls show Donald Trump will lose by double digits to Hillary Clinton.
At this point in the 2012 presidential race, the last 10 polls in the RealClearPolitics polling average showed Mitt Romney trailing Barack Obama by 2.2 percentage points on average.
Romney ended up losing by 3.9 percentage points.
At the same point in 2008, Senator John McCain trailed Obama by an average of 2.4 percentage points in the prior 10 polls.
McCain ended up losing by 7.3%.
Today, Donald Trump trails Hillary Clinton by an average of 6.9 percentage points.
Such results are mirrored in state polling.
Trump is way more unpopular than McCain or Romney ever were.
Unlike McCain and Romney, he has far less room for movement given his 100% name recognition.
And the left has already spent most of its media attention treating Donald Trump with kid gloves for ratings purposes.
They haven't even opened up their guns yet.
Get ready, there's a tsunami coming.
But here's the thing.
It's not merely enough for Trump to lose.
He also has to lose after consolidating the support of all the mainstream Republicans.
So the Democrats can then claim that Republicanism is really just a reflection of Trumpism.
A brand of big government politics with a real nativist streak, a white power politics agenda, an isolationist international approach.
Fortunately for Democrats, Republican leaders are morons and are therefore falling right into this trap in the name of stopping Hillary Clinton.
Leaders ranging from Texas Governor Greg Abbott to South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, they're already lining up to embrace the guy who burned conservatism down inside the Republican Party.
And the left could not be happier, gang.
For decades, they've been falsely accusing Republicans of being just what Trump is.
Now they can claim they were right all along.
They can paint conservatism with the broad brush of Trump.
Here's Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine today, quote.
Virtually the entire Republican apparatus will follow Trump sooner or later because without the voters they have no power.
And those voters have revealed things about the nature of the party many Republicans prefer to deny.
On the ground, Republican politics boils down to ethno-nationalistic passions, ungoverned by reason, The paranoid mendacity of Joe McCarthy, the racial pandering of Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and George Bush, the jingoism and anti-intellectualism of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Sarah Palin, all these forces have embodied the essence of American conservative politics as it is actually practiced, rather than as conservative intellectuals like to imagine it.
Trump has finally turned that which was always there against itself.
It's Andrew Sullivan talking about it.
This is a brutal libel on conservative politics, of course.
It's a libel on Goldwater and Bush and Reagan, but it is true of Trump.
And so now that truth will be read back into history to justify all the left's favorite lies about the right.
Here's Democratic National Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
She says, quote, the decades old Republican strategy of exploiting unfounded fear of immigrants, minorities, the poor, LGBT and more, all for political gain, have laid the groundwork for Donald Trump.
Here's the New York Times editorial board yesterday.
Quote, it is the Republicans who are making a clear choice in 2016, one that seems unimaginable a year ago to stamp what they still like to call the party of Lincoln with the brand of Donald Trump.
That brand of fool's gold.
It's going to mar the Republican Party for the next generation.
Thanks to both the minority of voters who handed Trump the nomination and the establishment that refused to consolidate to stop him and who now support him in the name of raising cash and stopping Hillary Clinton.
Donald Trump, he's a Democrat's dream come true.
He is conservatism's nightmare, and we're all living in that nightmare now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
I tend to demonize people because they don't care about your feelings.
So the most unsurprising news of the week happened yesterday when John Kasich, his mission in life, fulfilled having split the vote with Ted Cruz to prevent either one of them from winning the nomination.
John Kasich finally dropped out, demonstrating that there, I guess, was at least an ounce of sanity to him.
I thought maybe he was just going to come out yesterday and declare himself president.
I mean, it's been that kind of race.
He's won one state, his home state, and he kept declaring that he was You see, I have always said that the Lord has a purpose for me as he has for everyone.
than Marco Rubio and having less delegates.
Here was John Kasich in full-on delusion mode talking about how he was dropping out and apparently doing it from some sort of hardware store.
You see, I have always said that the Lord has a purpose for me as he has for everyone.
And as I suspend my campaign today, I have renewed faith, deeper faith, that the Lord will show me the way forward and fulfill the purpose of my life.
Thank you.
Thank you, and God bless.
It's all about him.
It was always all about him, right?
I mean, it's all about God had a purpose for me, and I don't know what God's purpose for me anymore.
Apparently God's purpose was for you to be a giant douche and stay in the race a month too long to split the votes so that Donald Trump could be our nominee.
Good job, God!
Well played, God, if that was your plan.
Ah, God.
He must hate us.
It's all coming to fruition.
Okay, so, meanwhile, the Trump consolidation has begun.
We talked a little bit earlier about Greg Abbott and Nikki Haley and all the rest of these folks jumping into the fray on behalf of Donald Trump.
They're sort of jumping into the frays a little much.
Mitch McConnell, all these people, they've issued kind of tepid statements of endorsement.
It's kind of like, ew, okay, I guess.
It's kind of like when my wife asks me to kill a bug and it's like, oh god, fine, okay.
That's sort of what it's like.
There's that feeling that's creeping up.
And to see all these people's faces, by the way, you should subscribe because it is amusing to watch all these people kowtow to legitimately one of the worst people in the United States.
If you subscribe, then you get to see my face, the face of skepticism, the face of joy, Right?
And so you'll get to see all those variations of my face, which I know everyone loves.
So go to DailyWire for that.
More importantly, you also get to take part in the mailbag.
Yay!
We now have an actual mailbag submission system over at DailyWire.com.
So you'll get to take a look at that.
So you'll want to stop on by DailyWire.com and subscribe.
But the Never Trump movement is now getting it from all sides.
People like me, oh, you have to vote for Trump or you're a bad person.
You're making Hillary the president.
In a minute, I'm going to go through the five most common arguments and I'm going to go through them realistically and talk about why I think they're wrong.
First, here's Newt Gingrich, who's irrelevant, Washington, D.C., corrupt politician, talking as though he has credibility about the Never Trump movement harming the country after backing Donald Trump for the presidency.
Well, first of all, I'd urge them to drop Never Trump and put in Never Hillary.
The risk they're running of Hillary Clinton appointing a truly radical Supreme Court, eliminating the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, eliminating religious liberty, imposing further radical values on the country, I think that by itself, just the issue of the Supreme Court, should convince most rational people that Never Hillary is a lot more powerful slogan than Never Trump.
So I am both never Trump and never Hillary.
I will not vote for either one of them.
So being never Trump doesn't mean that I'm pro-Hillary, it means that I'm never Hillary and never Trump.
And I'm indifferent as to who wins this election on that level.
Because I'm not involving myself in this moral turd fight.
That's not something I'm interested in.
But to directly address this particular argument, this one's the one they like to bring up.
Justice Scalia dies.
So, I guess the suggestion is if Justice Scalia hadn't died, then we'd be okay, right?
If Justice Scalia were still alive and 79 years old, then we would just be sitting around going, oh, well, we'd have some sort of different excuse.
But let's go directly at this.
Okay.
So, the logic says that Trump is going to suggest a more conservative Supreme Court justice than Hillary Clinton.
There is zero evidence to support this.
Zero.
Republicans, number one, are probably going to lose the Senate to Democrats.
Do you really think that Donald Trump is going to nominate a hardcore conservative to pass through a Democratic Senate?
Does anyone really believe that, for even an instant?
Of course he won't do that.
Of course he won't do that.
Beyond that, does anybody think that Trump, in any case, has the stomach to fight for a constitutional conservative when he hasn't read the Constitution or know anything about it?
Ronald Reagan had three Supreme Court picks.
Hey, two of the three were terrible.
George W. Bush had two.
Only one was okay.
Ronald Reagan, again, two out of three.
George H.W.
went one for two.
Ford went zero for one.
Nixon went one for four.
Okay, so the idea that Donald Trump is going to do better than all these other folks, he's going to select exactly the right justice.
Does anybody really believe this?
Trump has never backed a constitutional balance of power or separation of powers.
He doesn't believe in restrictions on the executive branch.
He doesn't believe in the Second Amendment strongly enough to fight for it.
He doesn't believe in somebody who's going to overturn Roe v. Wade.
He's basically said that openly.
The idea he's going to... that your real reason for voting Trump is because he'll put in a great justice.
Again, no evidence whatsoever to support that.
If you actually want to support the Constitution, elect good governors who are going to resist federal encroachment.
That's the actual way to support the Constitution, not to rely on Donald Trump to pick a lawyer.
That's ridiculous.
Beyond that, Donald Trump is just untrustworthy through and through.
If you're trusting him to do anything, you're making a grave mistake.
So just in the last 24 hours, Trump has lied to you this many times.
This is a big four for those who can't see.
He's flipped on four separate positions.
That he took during the primaries.
This is Trump pivoting to shore up his base, by the way.
We're not even in general election mode yet, right?
This is just him shoring up his base.
So here is Donald Trump on the minimum wage, for example.
So Bernie Sanders says he wants $15 an hour minimum wage.
And he has really gone after you lately for saying you're happy with $7.25, the current federal minimum wage.
You can't live on $7.25 an hour.
And I'm actually looking at that because I'm very different from most Republicans.
I mean, you have to have something that you can live on.
But what I'm really looking to do is get people great jobs so they make much more money than that.
So they make much more money than the $15.
Now if you start playing around too much with the lower level, the lower level number, you're not going to be competitive.
Okay, so there's Donald Trump basically saying, I'll consider raising the minimum wage.
I'm old enough to remember, like five minutes ago, when he was saying that the wages in the United States were too high and they were uncompetitive, and that's why raising the minimum wage would be a bad idea.
So now he's flipped on raising the minimum wage, or at least he's different than most Republicans.
I love that he can say this now.
We can all say this now.
Now it's okay.
When he said he was a New York values Republican, That was the end of the world!
No, how dare you!
Now he comes out and he says, I'm a different type of Republican.
We like to, it's pronounced, in my world, we spell Republican D-E-M-O-C-R-A-T.
I'm that kind of Republican.
I'm the kind of Republican who's not a Republican.
You might call me a Republican in name only, actually.
When he says this, it's totally fine.
Okay, that was lie number one.
Lie number two, remember all through the campaign, I'm self-funding.
Anyone who is funded by someone else is being bribed.
Ted Cruz, he's taking money from all these various super PACs, and that means that he is being bribed.
Here's Donald Trump, is he going to self-fund?
Of course not, that would be money out of his pocket.
Let's be real, here he is.
Setting an audacious fundraising goal.
I'm making decisions right now, but probably we'll work with the Republican National Committee, raise a lot of money, and go out and beat Hillary.
We're gonna try and raise over a billion dollars, which is what's gonna be necessary.
Okay, line number three.
Donald Trump, you remember he said about Ted Cruz, for example, that Ted Cruz was bought and paid for by Goldman Sachs.
So is Hillary Clinton.
Goldman Sachs this and Goldman Sachs that.
So, he now has a new fundraiser, the head of his fundraising campaign.
The guy's name is Steve Mnuchin.
Now, you may recognize that name.
That's because he is the former Goldman Sachs partner, Steve Mnuchin, who's heading up his fundraising campaign.
Also, happen to work at a little place we like to call Soros Fund Management.
Yes, that's Soros.
George Soros.
This guy's a lifelong Democrat who worked with George Soros and at Goldman Sachs, he's leading up Donald Trump's fundraising campaign.
Yes, all you people who voted for Donald Trump on the notion that he was gonna shake up Washington, you're all a bunch of suckers.
You're suckers and he's proving you suckers in the first five minutes after you confirmed his nomination.
Finally, Donald Trump bashed his own tax plan today.
He was on CNBC.
And he was asked about his tax plan, which originally was slated to lower the taxes for people in the top bracket.
He said, quote, I am not necessarily a huge fan of that.
I am much more into middle class who have been absolutely forgotten in our country.
What did he say about his tax plan?
Exactly what he said about his amnesty plan.
He said it's a starting negotiation position.
Right.
He says, don't worry is what I say, but I don't really mean it.
Quote.
You know, when you put out a tax plan, you're going to start negotiating.
You don't say, OK, this is our tax plan.
Lots of luck, folks.
There'll be a negotiation back and forth.
And you can see that going up, to be honest with you.
Right, okay, so that's legitimately what he says.
His tax plan was just a starting negotiation.
Yeah, I trust that guy to pick Supreme Court justices so much that I'm willing to sacrifice the Republican brand, the conservative brand, to his ethno-nationalistic idiocies just because I think he'll be that trustworthy.
I think he's just gonna be that trustworthy.
And in case you thought he was gonna be some sort of financial whiz kid, by the way, here's Donald Trump on debt.
Okay, Donald Trump on debt.
Here we go.
So I've seen what can happen, and it's not a good picture.
But what do we do with all of the money that we owe everybody when rates go up and now all of a sudden we have to borrow at two points more, one point more even is devastating, but two, three, four, five points more.
It's a real dilemma and we have to be very, very careful.
And I am the king of debt.
I do love debt.
I love debt.
I love playing with it.
But of course, now you're talking about, you know, you're talking about something that's very, very fragile.
I do love debt.
I do love playing with it.
Remember that time when he said that he was totally solvent?
And people like me said he built his empire on the back of massive loans that he still hasn't paid back?
Yeah.
Yeah.
A lot of suckers out there, gang.
A lot of suckers.
Okay, so I already talked about the one argument for voting Trump over Hillary, the Supreme Court argument.
As someone who actually studied the Constitution, as someone who believes in the Constitution, which Donald Trump has never read, as someone who got an A-plus at Harvard Law in Constitutional Law, I can tell you, Donald Trump doesn't know, doesn't care about, and doesn't believe in the Constitution.
This is a guy who literally said, literally said, his litmus test for Supreme Court justices would be appointing someone to prosecute Hillary Clinton.
Note to Donald Trump, Supreme Court justices are not federal prosecutors.
You don't.
And Donald Trump is also the guy who talks about how various judges had signed bills.
He does not know what government does.
He doesn't even know what it does.
Why would I think that he's going to appoint a great Supreme Court justice or that he's just going to sign off on whatever his advisors say?
When has he ever signed off on something his advisors just tell him?
This notion that Trump is going to be swung by his advisors behind good ideas Who believes this?
When has he ever done this?
Paul Manafort said, start acting more presidential.
So he fired him and brought back in Corey Lewandowski, who said, let Mr. Trump be Mr. Trump.
By the way, I'm an adult.
As an adult, the last time I called another adult Mr. Something was when they were somebody who I had known as a child and I called Mr. Something.
I would never call my employers Mr. Something.
It's ridiculous.
It's ridiculous.
But everybody who surrounds Donald Trump calls him Mr. Trump.
So, of course, to do all the media members who work for him, but we'll get to them in a little bit.
So here's a couple more arguments that have been posited for why you should vote Trump above Hillary, why I don't think they wash.
One is the Hillary's worse argument.
This is probably the most common, aside from the Supreme Court.
Hillary is worse.
Okay, two things.
Yes, Hillary is corrupt and evil.
Trump is also corrupt, and he is also a believer in personal self-aggrandizement and ad hoc authoritarianism.
So what he believes is evil, too.
It's just a different kind of evil.
Hillary's an ideologue who's evil.
Donald Trump is a narcissist who's evil.
And so they're brands of evil.
Neither of them are good for the country.
People who are saying, well, you know, this is just the... I hear this all the time.
This is like when we supported Stalin to stop Hitler during World War II.
No, it's actually more like supporting Hitler to stop Stalin, first of all, considering that a nationalist populist is more Hitlerian, and a communist is more Stalin-esque, so it's more like if you sided with Hitler to stop Stalin.
But number two, this is more like having that debate not in 1941, when it was clear what Hitler was doing.
It's more like having the debate in 1936, when it's not clear what either one is going to do.
We know they're both gonna be bad, it's just a question of how bad.
So, you know, there is a risk there, and people who fail to acknowledge the risk are just lying to you.
Because what we know about Trump is that he's not conservative, as we just showed over and over and over.
Hillary's actually more conservative than he is on free trade.
She's more conservative than he is on European alliances.
Hillary may present a vulnerable email server to Vladimir Putin and hand him a reset button.
Donald Trump was asked yesterday, have you been talking to Putin?
He said, I don't want to answer that question.
I don't want to answer that question.
Yeah, that guy's gonna be getting classified briefings.
I can't imagine this going poorly at any point in the future.
Beyond that, my standard for Republicans and Democrats is not the same, gang.
I don't want a Democrat taking over the Republican Party.
I'd prefer to keep the Republican Party conservative.
I heard Dennis Prager say today on his show, and of course I love Dennis, but Dennis said today, well, if you sit out this election as a conservative to prove something to the Republican Party, all you're gonna prove is that you're irrelevant.
This seems nonsensical to me.
It seems nonsensical to me.
I will give you an example of how nonsensical it is.
Trump's voters sat out 2012.
Now they own the party.
Okay?
The fact that if you sit out, and the candidate loses, then they're gonna have to find some way to bring you back.
When you become irrelevant is when they know that your vote is in their pocket already.
That's when you become irrelevant.
The second argument is that Trump is going to change.
Trump is not going to change.
This idea that Trump is going to change ignores the fact that he's 8,000 years old and he has never changed in his life except changed his wives.
Then there's the Trump will work with Republicans argument that if he had a Republican Congress he'd work with them, Hillary wouldn't.
This presumes there will be a Republican Congress.
There won't be.
Senate Democrats are probably going to win out.
But let's assume that Trump ended up with a Republican House and Senate.
George W. Bush had a Republican House and Senate.
Was that any basket of roses?
Well, Trump will be a lot worse than Bush was.
The fact is, Congress tends to follow the lead of the President, not the other way around.
Not the other way around.
Finally, there's the argument that if you just sit out, if you don't vote, that you're abdicating the decision, it's moral cowardice.
Well, I'll tell you what's moral cowardice is pretending that your vote is only an instrument of policy as opposed to a moral imprimatur.
You put your stink on Donald Trump, and his stink goes right back on you.
You put your vote on Donald Trump, you own that.
You break it, you bought it.
So, that's my case against voting for Donald Trump, and they're the most common arguments that you hear in favor of voting for Donald Trump.
Okay, with all of that said, the race is now on.
Rush Limbaugh believes that Donald Trump is going to schlong Hillary.
He's gonna beat her in a landslide.
Here's Rush talking about it.
My instinctive feeling right now is that Trump is gonna win, beat Hillary badly.
That it could be landslide proportions?
I still don't think people understand why Trump won this.
I don't think they understand at all the reason people support Trump.
Okay, the reason people support Trump is because they're pissed.
That's the reason people support Trump.
And presumably what Rush is saying is that they're still going to be pissed when Hillary Clinton is up.
Now, I'm going to make the case for why Trump can win.
It really has nothing to do... There are only two reasons that Trump could actually win.
And I'm not going to pretend that Trump can't win because I thought that during the primaries and I was wrong.
So I'm not going to make that same mistake again, obviously.
So there's only two reasons that Trump can win.
One is that Hillary Clinton has no idea how to deal with Trump.
No clue how to deal with Trump whatsoever.
Trump is a wild card.
He's a wild card.
And he says things that are going to be popular because he's pugnacious.
And people like pugnacious.
People like the guy who stands up to them.
So here's Donald Trump yesterday.
Vincente Fox, who was the former president of Mexico, he came out and he said that he apologized to Trump.
He wanted Trump to come visit Mexico.
Here's Donald Trump responding to Vincente Fox.
Alright, Vicente Fox coming up later on in the program.
Got any message for the former president of Mexico?
Yeah, get your money ready, because you're going to pay for the wall.
You're not backing off that, right?
No, of course not.
Look, we lose a fortune with Mexico, trade deficit.
Fifty-eight billion dollars a year.
The wall's going to cost ten.
Believe me, they'll be able to afford it.
And we're going to end up having a very good relationship with Mexico.
But right now, sadly, like everybody else, they're taking advantage of our country on trade and at the border.
So we'll get it straightened out.
They're taking advantage of our country on trade, which is why Mexico is one of the poorer countries on planet Earth.
They're defeating us on trade.
But put all that aside, the attitude of Trump is appealing to people who feel like they've been let down by a pansy-esque and intentionally negative, on America, Obama administration.
And Hillary doesn't know how to deal with this kind of attitude.
She doesn't know how to deal with it at all.
So here's Hillary's case against Trump, and this is weak tea gang.
You know, Anderson, I've seen the presidency up close from two different perspectives, and I think I know what it takes.
And I don't think we can take a risk on a loose cannon like Donald Trump running our country.
You know, Donald Trump has said it's okay for other countries to get nuclear weapons.
I think that's just downright dangerous.
He has said wages are too high.
I think we need to have a raise for the american people uh...
raise the minimum wage get wages back going up i think when he says women should be punished for having abortions that is you know just beyond anything on that i can imagine i think most women can imagine you'd walk that back he's a loose cannon I mean, he's somebody who has said so many things, and I'm sure he'll be scrambling, and his advisors will be scrambling, but he's already said all of these things.
He says climate change is a Chinese hoax, and I think it's real, and we've got to pull the world together to deal with it.
So you can go down a long list, some of which he's tried to bob and weave a little bit, but I think it's a risk.
I think he is a loose cannon, and loose cannons tend to misfire.
Okay, she is the mother telling you to take out the garbage.
That's not going to work.
It's not.
This is Jeb Bush tut-tutting Donald Trump about his tone and tenor on stage.
And I'll explain why this is going to fail in just a second, why this is insufficient, because what normal politics would say is that a loose cannon like Trump should not be president, but people are saying, okay, well, I'd rather have a loose cannon who speaks the truth than a rehearsed Ridiculously corrupt politician like Hillary Clinton who's tut-tutting everybody from the sidelines.
Jeb Bush, again, tried the same tactic and it didn't work.
By the way, when she says that she's seen the presidency up close twice and we can't afford a loose cannon, that's the easiest response for Trump in the world.
Your husband was unslinging his loose cannon on the closest available intern.
Routinely.
So you can't talk about loose cannons that way.
And the president you served next was getting people killed in Benghazi and going off to hang out with Beyonce at the same time.
So don't talk to me about loose cannons.
Right?
You're the one who's getting drunk, you know, and dancing.
And then he shows the video of her dancing with the black lady that's been making the rounds all over the internet for years.
So that's not gonna work at all.
And then Hillary tries this one.
She says, I dare Trump to come after me with everything he's got.
This is not going to work.
She dared Donald Trump to use the 1990s playbook against her.
And that is not – if he uses the 1990s, it won't be the 1990s playbook.
It will be the 2016 playbook, which has been updated since the 1990s, it turns out.
Trump, meanwhile, is going to hit her right back, right?
So here's what it looks like when Trump hits her right back.
He says, okay, well, you're going to talk to me about being an adult.
You started this whole birther thing.
You know who started the birth of a woman?
Do you know who started it?
Do you know who questioned his birth certificate?
One of the first?
Hillary Clinton.
She's the one that started it.
She brought it up years before it was brought up by me.
Let me just clarify.
The whole birther thing.
Where do you stand on that now?
I don't talk about it anymore because every time I talk about it, it becomes a story.
So I don't want to waste my time talking about it anymore.
But she's going to raise this issue against you.
I don't care.
I'm going to raise it against her.
And this is exactly it, right?
Trump is gonna... So Trump, again, he still hasn't answered the question, does he think Obama was born in Kenya or not?
This idiotic conspiracy theory.
But he's just gonna avoid it, and if Hillary brings it up, he's gonna say, you're the one who originally said it.
She does not have a playbook against him.
She doesn't have a playbook against him.
And so that's one element of why, you know, if he becomes president, it's because Hillary is so terrible at this, and terrible in general.
And also because Hillary can't get her own people together.
So, Michael Moore and Bernie Sanders are sort of the representatives of the hard left.
Barack Obama went down to Flint, Michigan, or up to Flint, Michigan, rather, to drink water there yesterday.
And he said that it was all government neglect that caused all of this.
Yes, Democrat government neglect.
The people who you ally with.
Michael Moore says, well, Obama has not done anything to help Flint.
I'm very disappointed in this.
I've been listening to the speech.
It's still going on right now at Northwestern High School.
And he is just trying to reassure people that everything's okay.
To drink from a glass of water, a flint water, when a number of experts are still saying that this water is not safe, it's still going through the same corroded lead pipes It was such a disappointing thing to see.
Your clip you just showed about he hopes that Flint can get back to where it was.
Where was that?
You mean before the water crisis two years ago?
After we'd lost 75,000 General Motors jobs back to then?
Or are we talking about back to 20 or 30 years ago?
Okay, so there it is.
And I think that's evidence that the left is even fed up with the typical politics of the Democratic Party.
Bernie Sanders is, meanwhile, tearing the party apart.
He's saying he's going to stand until the last vote is counted.
Point of fact, Bernie Sanders could finish California with more pledged delegates than Hillary Clinton.
Right now, all the delegate counts you see with Hillary at 2,200 and Bernie Sanders at Like 1,300 or 1,400?
Those count 500 superdelegates for Hillary Clinton.
Those superdelegates are not like unpledged delegates who are elected in the Republican Party.
They were chosen by Democratic Party insiders specifically to give Hillary the nomination.
There are 538 delegates in California alone.
Sanders is going to win California and he's going to win it pretty big.
There's a real possibility that Bernie Sanders leaves California at parity with Hillary Clinton in the unpledged delegates, or rather in the pledged delegates.
Here's Bernie Sanders saying he's not going to stop fighting this fight until it's all the way at the convention.
I think we have a path toward victory.
I admit that it is a narrow path.
But we think everybody in this country, people in California, in Kentucky, in West Virginia, have a right to determine who they want to see as President of the United States and what kind of agenda they want the Democratic Party to have.
So we're going to fight, Scott, for the very last vote that we can get.
Okay, so he's going to stick around for evas and evas and evas.
And the fact is that because he does so, it's going to be a problem for Hillary.
She can't put Sanders away.
It's going to be difficult to put Trump away.
Trump and Sanders are basically the same character.
Right?
The difference is that Sanders is an ideologue who believes what he's saying.
Trump believes what he's saying, but he's a narcissist, so it's whatever goes through his head at that given instant.
Hillary will have a tough time dealing with Trump.
The reason that Hillary will have a tough time dealing with Trump, one of the reasons is because the media are totally in the tank for Trump.
And for Hillary.
So it's actually both.
So here's the way that it works.
So the media may have created a Frankenstein monster in Trump.
The truth is, David French pointed this out yesterday, and I thought this was totally right.
David French pointed out that most people in the United States don't know Trump from this presidential run.
Most people in the United States know Trump from being on the cover of Playboy, and 14 years on The Apprentice, and he's always on TV talking about business, and they think of him as some sort of James Bond slash Richie Rich Enormously wealthy real estate genius who's great at business and has the guts to fire people.
That's how most people think of Donald Trump.
And they've spent decades building this up.
The media have built this myth of the business god king.
Fox and Friends interviews talking about politics with him for 20 years.
Tim Russert asking him in 1999.
He's been around longer in the public eye than I've been alive, Donald Trump.
And so most people had an image of Donald Trump long before he ran.
That's been a good thing for him in the sense that when he says crazy things, it doesn't break out of the pocket of people who care about that and into the general ledger.
When people are told that this man who they've gotten to know and admire and like and find amusing, when they're told that he's a racist con man, that he panders to the lowest common denominator, a lot of people want to be conned because they feel like, "Okay, well, I don't want to repent of the fact that I liked him." It's like if you said to somebody, "You know, all those actors, you know, it turns out that Ross and Rachel, you know, on Friends, it turns out they were real people and they're really quite terrible.
They're really quite terrible people." Most people would reject that.
If you watch Survivor or any of these other reality TV shows, if you watch Shark Tank, and you've been watching Shark Tank, and Mark Cuban's on it every week, and you've been sold this bill of goods that Mark Cuban is a genius businessman who makes great business decisions, and then somebody comes along and they say, he's really not a very good businessman.
Also, he's a racist.
You're gonna say, well, wait, I watched him on TV the other night.
He didn't look like a racist to me.
What are you talking about?
You know, you're saying he's a bad businessman?
He doesn't look like a bad businessman to me.
There he is, with all the other rich people, talking about just throwing $100,000 around.
Doesn't look like he's a bad businessman to me.
Well, Mark Cuban, take Mark Cuban and multiply him by about 15, and that's the size that Donald Trump is in the public sphere.
And so, there are a lot of viewers of Donald Trump who are not going to buy into the old Democratic playbook that they tried to use against Romney and McCain, that these are bad people, you don't know them, you've never met these people, but I'm telling you, now that you're meeting them, they're bad guys.
It's going to be very hard for the media to tear them down.
Beyond that, the media want Trump in the public eye all the time.
They can't resist the temptation.
The only way to stop Trump would be if the media deprived him of air.
If the media actually deprived him of air.
When he says stupid things, they just didn't cover it.
Or they just didn't cover it.
They let it kind of simmer under the surface and all you got were tastes of the stupid.
But instead, they're gonna cover him every minute because he drives up the ratings.
He drives up the ratings.
Chris Wallace said exactly this.
Chris Wallace said, yeah, the reason we cover him so much is because he's good TV.
He's ratings.
Did the Trump support drive the media or did the media drive the Trump support by diminishing real estate for other candidates?
Now, you know, I get asked this question a lot.
I have to say, I think to a certain degree it became a vicious or virtuous cycle, depending on how you view the Trump campaign.
But I think we were followers, not leaders in this.
In other words, I think that the reason we put him on so much, and I think we did, all of us, whether it was cable, whether it was broadcast, all of us put him on too much.
I think to a large degree it was because Every time we did, it spiked the ratings.
We were, in a sense, following what the ratings were, which was the response of the public.
Having said that, the fact that we put them on so much, it did crowd out, take a lot of the oxygen away from the other candidates.
But I think at least the initial impulse was, you know, if you put them on, you get ratings, and we're in the news business.
And there it is.
So, you know, they're in the news business, and so they get ratings.
That's an amazing acknowledgement.
It really is because there's something linked to that.
There's a human tendency to always justify your own behavior.
Always.
And so let's say that you've spent your entire time in this election cycle putting Donald Trump on the air.
And now you're being asked to give your objective opinion of Donald Trump.
That he's a bad guy.
That he's somebody who's unstable.
That he's somebody who hangs out with, who panders to the David Duke types.
He's somebody who says ridiculous things about disabled people and veterans and women.
How do you justify that to everybody when they come back and say, well, you knew all of this way back when.
Why did you put him on the air?
Right?
All the NBC executives, you knew this.
You knew this about him.
He was always like this.
You put him on the air.
You made him into a thing.
When you unconsciously are the Lenny Reifenstahl for this supposed Hitler, what do you do except for get in his corner?
And justify to yourself, okay, well, I did it for ratings, but he's not that bad a guy.
He's not that bad a guy.
How do you justify putting this guy on all the time?
If it had been David Duke and they gave him that much attention, people would say, oh, you're pro-David Duke, that makes you a bad guy.
But he's not.
They made him famous knowing all these bad things about him, but he was a ratings bonanza, and then they had to justify themselves post-facto, and it becomes, okay, well, he must not be that bad a guy, right?
Network executives have to sleep at night, too.
Network executives have to sleep at night, too.
And so it's amazing to watch some of these media figures now trying to buy it back.
So Joe Scarborough, who has spent this entire campaign cycle with his lips firmly plastered to Donald Trump's anus, Joe Scarborough came out yesterday and he said, no, you know what?
I'm not going to vote for Trump after all.
I'm not going to, you know, now I'm going to buy it back.
I don't like Trump.
After all this time, talking up Trump, writing post after post in the Washington Post about the glories of Donald Trump, I'm going to buy it back now.
I was surprised and disappointed, Willie, that yesterday he stuck by the Muslim ban.
Yeah.
That's a loser.
It's a loser with the majority of Americans and you've got Republicans like me.
I just, I'm not going to vote for a guy.
I'm not going to vote.
Okay, well that's what he's got to do.
He's got to make the turn and say, okay, this is a system we can put in place where we can get Muslims, allow Muslims to come into America, but maybe not from Syria if they don't have the proper...
But he's got to start making turns like that, because I can tell you, I'm never going to vote for a guy that is saying he's going to ban somebody just because of the God they worship.
And he's got to make that turn fast.
He didn't do it yesterday, maybe he does it over the next couple weeks.
Uh-huh.
So now Joe Scarborough has found his anti-Trump spine after months of him and Mika just pushing Trump up the wazoo.
Yeah, now they've found it.
This is them buying it back a little bit now, now that they have to turn toward Hillary, so they've got to buy it back, and it's just awkward.
Rob Reiner, who is never right about anything, you know, the director, of Sleepless in Seattle and Princess Bride.
Rob Reiner, he came out and he bashed, this is the first time ever I'm going to agree with Rob Reiner.
Here he is going after Joe Scarborough.
What does this man say?
What does he say?
Of course we do.
He's not pinned down.
I want to hear how he's going to deport 12 million people.
I want to hear how he's going to, how is he going to wait?
Because you're just talking and you're not letting anybody else talk.
We have asked those questions.
I could, I would bet you your proceeds for your next 20 films that I could find you any question that you bring up.
Now about the wall, which Mika tried to nail him down.
The Muslim ban.
We gave Bob Woodward 20 minutes.
We said go for it.
And what he does is he talks around in circles.
So the questions are asked and they're repeated.
And we've asked repeatedly.
So then the next question is?
Why are you talking around in circles?
Why are you not answering my question?
Yes, we've asked that question.
And then what does he say?
He says, I am.
Believe me.
Well, wait a minute, I'll be you.
I'll be you.
Believe me is not an answer.
That's what I said to him, Rob Reiner.
No wait, then what does he say?
He keeps going on and on and on, in circles.
You act like you have some special sauce that you think we're not adding to the equation.
This is what everybody thinks, and it's one of the great frustrations of covering Donald Trump.
People say, you know what you should really ask him?
I go, well we did.
send you the clip.
You know you should really ask him this.
And so finally, we will.
So finally you say, would you like me to actually get on top of him and like pin him down with my knees?
Maybe I should stick my heel down his throat and tell him he's not answering the question.
Does that make you feel good?
Is that not one of the frustrations that people always come to say, well why didn't you ask him this?
Well I did and this is what he said.
Okay we can stop it.
Okay the frustration is not just that you don't ask him, it's that when he talks around in circles, afterward you laugh with him.
After he lies to your face, you laugh with him.
If Ted Cruz did that, you wouldn't be laughing with him.
You'd pull the plug on his interview.
If Donald Trump talks like that, the final word is, you keep lying to me by talking around in circles.
If you do that, I'm pulling the plug on this interview.
They never have done that.
That has never happened.
And it will never happen.
Because the fact is, they like Donald Trump, and they laugh right along with this whole routine.
They ask a few questions for cover, but in the end, they never pull the plug.
And they never will pull the plug.
You got people like Sean Hannity, and this pains me because I like Sean a lot personally.
I think Sean...
He's a good guy, but Sean has really done yeoman work pushing Trump and making him the nominee.
It's really sad.
Last night, Sean did a full-on monologue trying to justify why he had pushed so hard for Trump as the nominee and basically disowned his own impact.
He basically said, it's not my fault.
Sure, I just spent the last six months really, really pushing Trump, like getting behind him with a bulldozer and pushing Trump, but not my fault.
Don't blame me.
It's just the people.
It's just what the people want.
Now, some of you out there, you're blaming, let's see, Fox News or blaming talk radio.
By the way, personally, I wish I had that much power and that much influence.
I don't.
Neither does anybody else.
If I did, Obama never would have been president.
Now, those of you who have that analysis, I think it's extremely shallow.
And by the way, also predicated on this notion that, well, people are stupid.
People were bamboozled.
Sorry, I don't buy that for one second.
Okay, so he's making two arguments there.
One is he doesn't have enough power to push Trump.
If he had, he would have stopped Obama.
What?
This is just numerical idiocy.
The fact is that he has way more impact as people like Sean Hannity in a Republican primary than in a general election where none of the swing voters are watching Fox News, right?
I mean, we all understand this.
And then his second argument is, the voters did it, I didn't have anything to do with it.
Well, then why are you on TV?
Then what are you doing there?
I hope I have some impact.
I hope people believe what I say.
I hope that I'm helping to push people.
The reason people are disappointed in Sean is that he's actually a conservative, and he just helped nominate the single most leftist candidate in the history of the Republican Party.
That's why people are frustrated that the media will defend themselves in this defense, this kind of self-serving defense.
Oh, we did our best to stop Trump, but we just couldn't.
There's a good book by Ed Morrissey called Going Red that's out now.
I'm in the middle of it.
I want to do a Q&A with Ed for our website.
Things I like and a couple things I hate and then mailbag.
Okay, so things I like.
There's a good book by Ed Morrissey called Going Red that's out now.
I'm in the middle of it.
I want to do a Q&A with Ed for our website.
He focuses in on seven different counties in the United States that are sort of swing counties and what exactly do they want.
Instead of focusing on 300 million Americans, most of whom don't vote, he focuses in on the swing counties.
It's a very interesting book and worth going to get.
It's at Amazon and your local bookstore.
Next, things I like.
Chris Matthews got caught on a hot mic.
This is always entertaining.
So Chris Matthews is talking about Melania Trump.
There she is, Melania!
And he feels a thrill run up his leg higher and higher and higher in this clip.
You'll hear it.
And the party will trust Trump to be able to make that decision?
Well, I think the party won't have a role in it.
We just heard from the likely nominee of the Republican Party.
We will go to a break here.
The discussion continues right after this.
So if you can't hear what he's saying, he's saying, I think it's like a runway walk.
It's unbelievable!
I didn't watch you do that all day.
I went, God, Melania.
Just walk it.
Walk it.
Oh!
Oh!
This is even better than when I was with President Obama in the Oval Office.
It's unbelievable!
Melania Trump!
Unbelievable!
Hey, Kathleen, I hope she's not watching this.
I hope I'm not in a hot mic or something.
I mean, this would be really awkward if people found that.
I don't know what to do!
I get up in the morning and just come in here, brush my hair with a shoe, get in front of here.
Not a lot to enjoy.
I mean, come on.
I'm looking across the desk at Rachel Maddow.
Come on.
I'm looking across the desk at Michael Isikoff.
Come on.
I got Melania.
Gotta look at that.
Come on.
I mean, look at that.
She's a model.
She's beautiful.
Walks that line.
I mean, I could look at that all day.
Oh boy, could I look at that all day.
I could look at that like I was looking at Ted Kennedy right in the face while he's drinking and guffawing.
Oh my God, this is great.
Chris Matthews on MSNBC doing the kind of coverage that no one else does.
Okay, couple of things that I hate.
Yesterday, I had a 20-year subscription.
Since I was like 12, I've been subscribing to Sports Illustrated and enjoying it every week.
In the last few years, Sports Illustrated has become a wild leftist outlet, and it's really irritating.
I have a basic rule.
During my day job, I watch politics.
During my evenings, I don't watch anything about politics.
I won't watch House of Cards.
I won't watch political movies.
I only do things that have nothing to do with politics, right?
I like to watch sports, and I like to watch Daredevil.
And that's pretty much it.
And I like to hang out with my kid and my wife.
That's my life.
I don't like my sports being infiltrated with stupid garbage.
So, Caitlyn Jenner is apparently going to pose nude with the American flag on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
Caitlyn Jenner, right?
So first of all, good luck to that American flag.
Second of all, Caitlyn Jenner posing nude on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
Bruce Jenner was the relevant athlete.
Caitlyn Jenner is not a relevant athlete.
Caitlyn Jenner has never done anything in athletics if you assume that now Bruce Jenner is a woman.
If you assume that Bruce Jenner is still a man, Then it is just a circus, and a ridiculous circus at that, to slap this nonsense in my face.
It is cruel to the mentally ill.
It is cruel to the rest of society to suppose that Caitlyn Jenner is some sort of hero for getting a boob job and retaining his male appendages.
Because he's mentally ill?
This is not something that I want to hear about generally as something that is good for society, and it's certainly not something that I care to subsidize with my dollars and have to read about in a sports magazine when all I really want to read about is how the NBA playoffs went.
I mean, for God's sake, can't I just watch the NBA playoffs?
Can't I just watch the NBA playoffs?
There are certain bouncing balls that I'm interested in watching, but they are not on Caitlyn Jenner.
Okay, I'm not interested in that, in those sorts, in those sorts of balls.
Okay, so that's one thing.
Second thing, the Department of Justice has now declared that the North Carolina bathroom law that says men should go to the bathroom in men's bathrooms and women should go into the bathroom in women's bathrooms, they've declared that this violates federal law, that this is discrimination against women.
This is what they're saying now, it's discrimination against women if men can't pee in the women's bathrooms.
Yes, we've reached the end of the world.
Okay, couple of mailbag questions.
I know that we're running a little bit late, so we'll pick a couple of short ones.
Sorry to skimp on the mailbag, but...
We do what we can.
Okay, Rosemary says, Is Trump still capable of destroying the media?
You commented in the past if you had to choose between destroying the media and Hillary, you would destroy the media.
My vote is unearned at this particular time.
Trump is not capable of destroying the media.
He's capable of exploiting the media.
The media will remain just as powerful as they ever did because they are happy to promulgate Trump's lies because Trump is a leftist.
Because Trump is a leftist.
So, He's an exception to the rules.
They can call him a racist and it won't apply, but when they turn around and they call someone who's less well-known a racist, it will still apply.
This is sort of like the question I get about Hollywood conservatives.
People will say, well, you know, there's some Hollywood conservatives who work, like Gary Sinise and Adam Baldwin.
And the truth is, if you even ask people like Gary or Adam, do you feel like you've been discriminated against in Hollywood, usually they say no.
Usually they say, no, you know, I've had a very successful career.
Right, because you were successful before you became conservative.
For the grip, who's starting on the film, the last thing you want to do is start by saying, by opening up with, oh yeah, by the way, I backed Ted Cruz in the primaries.
The fact is that Donald Trump is like that with the media.
For the unknowns, going up against the media, the media will still crush you underfoot.
Donald Trump was built by the media, so now he's an exception to all of the media rules.
Tyler writes, hey Ben, is protectionism ever justified?
What if foreign countries impose tariffs on our goods?
Should we do the same to make up for the trade deficit with specific entities?
Thanks.
Protectionism is only justified on moral grounds, not economic grounds.
It is not justified on economic grounds.
So, assume for a second that, for example, you do business with a grocery, right?
You do business with a grocery, and the grocery offers the lowest prices.
You also happen to sell shelves to the grocery.
You're in the shelving business, and you sell shelves to the grocery.
Let's say that the grocery decides that they're not going to buy shelves from you.
Okay.
Does it benefit you now to say, oh, well, I'm not gonna buy food from that grocery?
Of course not.
If they're still selling the lowest priced groceries, it benefits you because you can take the money left over and can spend it on marketing so that you can go sell your shelves someplace else.
That's why, if they raise trade barriers and we're still getting cheap goods, okay, so we find somewhere else to export.
But spending our own money at a higher level in order to... in order to...
Presumably subsidized industries that can't get into these tariff-laden countries.
That's economic foolishness.
It doesn't work that way.
Wesley writes, "Is it time for you to flush the Rhino Party and become a Libertarian?
It is for me." If the Libertarian Party were not wildly incompetent, then sure.
Unfortunately, the Libertarian Party is the height of incompetence.
Okay, let's see, who else?
Colin, we got a bunch of letters like this this week.
Hey Ben, I was wondering if you would consider jumping in the presidential race.
I know the Constitution says you are not old enough to be president, and since none of the remaining candidates or their supporters care about the Constitution, you may as well run.
This is a fair point, and I cannot argue with that.
I can't argue with that.
Vince writes, The fact is that many of these transgendered men will use the ladies room and nobody will ever know.
If pervs enter a ladies room and behave like pervs, they'll be arrested and prosecuted.
Where am I wrong?
This is a good analysis.
I agree.
This is why I don't think that the main argument against the transgender bathroom thing is that men are going to go in and victimize women.
I think the main argument is that women deserve to be able to pee in privacy.
That's the main argument.
It's not that I think that men are going to go in and start randomly raping women.
If rapists want to rape, they'll rape.
What I am saying is that I will say that there's more of an excuse for men to leer and ogle at women under the guise of being transgender if they do this.
It doesn't have to be outright rape.
And then when they're asked about it, then they can claim discrimination.
This could happen.
But the main argument is, why is it bad for women to want to feel comfortable in a place where they're exposing themselves?
Why is it bad for them to not want to look at a penis when they are going to pee in the women's room?
Why is that a bad thing?
I don't understand.
It seems to me a bit of mansplaining, if you ask me, to say to women, no, no matter what you say, that penis you're looking at in the bathroom without your consent, that is, that's a woman.
That's a woman.
And you just don't understand because you're not a proper woman.
If you were really a proper woman, you'd understand that that penis is quite female.
Right?
This seems to me a little bit of mansplaining.
Okay.
Final question.
Someone writes, Vaccines.
Do you believe the government should require parents to vaccinate their child?
Should parents be held responsible for the death of their child or other children due to lack of vaccination?
Is it acceptable for schools to require students to be vaccinated?
As I've said many times, yes, I'm in favor of regulations that force vaccinations.
The reason I'm in favor of this is because I'm in favor of regulations that prohibit externalities.
The point of vaccination is herd immunity.
The idea is if you don't vaccinate your child, somebody else could get sick.
There are women who are pregnant who can't get the vaccination.
There are kids who have leukemia who can't get the vaccination.
If you're an idiot and you didn't get the MMR for your kid, and your kid gets measles, yeah, it's your kid.
Until it turns out that you got a pregnant woman sick with the measles, and now her kid is put in danger.
That is a problem.
That's a problem.
And by the way, a lot of these vaccinations, like Pertussis, are not 100% effective.
They're like 80% effective, which means that if 100% of the population is 80% effective, then there's a much lower chance of an epidemic of Pertussis than if 50% of the population is 80% effective.
Right?
That's the basic math.
Okay, actually we'll do one more.
Hey Ben, I'm a young college student.
Majoring in criminal justice, I want to practice law.
What advice would you have for being able to perform well in school and on the LSATs?
Love the show, keep the faith.
Okay, so the LSATs, I recommend Testmasters, very good testing program if you can afford it.
They're not that expensive, I don't think.
And they're a very good test prep program as far as doing well in school.
You know, the same rules always apply.
Buckle down, study hard, and tell your professors what they want to hear.
Don't fight them on the tests.
And I lied, one more.
Okay, Daniel writes, do you think businesses should be allowed to reject service for any reason?
Does every American have the right to exchange with every business?
Daniel, no, I don't have a right to exchange with you.
I have a right to offer you my services and you have a right to reject my services.
I have a right to... I have a right to offer my services and you have a right to reject them.
And that's the bottom line.
Yes, I can reject service to you for any reason.
That's the essence of freedom.
Anything else is indentured servitude.
Now, that doesn't mean that I may not be a jerk for picking the reason.
But, there are lots of things in America where I think you have a right to do them even if you're a jerk.
I think people in the United States have a right against the government to say the N-word.
I also think that they're pieces of human crap.
But, you have a right to do that.
I think people have a right to get people pregnant out of wedlock.
I don't think there has to be a prohibition on that.
Do I think you're a bad person if you do that?
Yeah.
I think there are lots of things in America with which I don't agree.
This is why I'm a believer in freedom.
This is why the left is not.
The left believes that if they don't like something, it has to be made illegal.
That is the only way for the society to function properly.
Okay, we've reached the end of the week.
I would say that don't ruin things over the weekend, but screw you, you already did.
It's already been ruined.
So have yourself a merry little weekend, but don't worry, we'll be back on Monday.
Maybe with a new baby.
Maybe.
We'll see, we'll see.
So we'll keep you updated on that.
Have a wonderful weekend.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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