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May 11, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:37
Ep. 116 - Trump: I'm Popular, So I Can Be Awful As I Wanna Be

Trump never apologizes because people like him, Hillary's campaign collapses, and Samantha Bee now has the worst show on television. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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So yeah, we all got it wrong.
Everybody who wrote Donald Trump off as a political charlatan destined to flame out, and everybody who called Trump a clown who would probably return to his reality show and leave us all alone, and everybody who suggested that this circus couldn't, just couldn't continue, Yeah, we were all wrong.
Maybe we were guilty of believing that Trump's mistakes would break out into the mainstream rather than dying slow deaths on cable TV.
Maybe we thought that voters would wake up to Trump's bombastic narcissism and just sort of turn away.
Or maybe, as statistician Nate Silver put it, we were guilty of not predicting that the Republican Party would lose its effing mind.
Whatever the rationale, Trump's definitely a shock to everybody but the political commentator Ann Coulter and a few other Trump stalwarts.
So, here are five lessons to take away from Trump winning the nomination.
First, failure to utilize ideological purity tests actually leads to the rise of leftist candidates in your own party.
So the bizarre paradox of people who think like Trump is that the same people complaining about Republicans caving to Obama now want to nominate a lifelong Democrat ad hoc politician with no centralizing principle other than his own glorification, a guy who brags openly he'll cut more deals with Democrats.
And when conservatives object, Trump supporters point to GOP nominations of Mitt Romney, who created Obamacare, and John McCain, who created campaign finance reform and amnesty, and they're being hypocritical, these people say.
McCain and Romney were, by any measure, more conservative overall than Trump, but the feeling that conservatism doesn't matter any longer, it's hard to quell when, to so many major Republicans, it really didn't matter that much in 2008 and 2012.
Second lesson.
If you ignore social issues, that means that the only way to now appeal to disgruntled blue-collar voters is if you move left on economics.
We talked about this a couple of days ago.
There's been a lot of loose talk about Donald Trump's appeal with disenchanted white voters who didn't show up for Mitt Romney.
Trump does indeed appeal to them with lies about how he's going to create tariffs that bring back jobs and taxing the rich.
This is straight from the Bernie Sanders playbook.
Now these people did used to vote Republican, Before the Republican Party decided to toss social policy, same-sex marriage, abortion, out the window to pander to New Yorkers like Donald Trump.
Third lesson.
The moral narrative?
Way more important than policy knowledge.
Trump knows way less, way less, about policy than my four-day-old child.
And he cares less about the Constitution than my boy does.
But that doesn't matter because he's fighting the establishment.
By which Trump means everyone who disagrees with him.
And because he's conflating the establishment with a political establishment that insists on cutting deals with Obama, Republican voters buy in.
Fourth lesson.
When there are no good guys in politics, character just stops mattering.
There was an Indiana voter last week.
She was asked about the fact that Trump always lies.
She said, yeah, well, you know, all the politicians lie.
At least Trump lies differently than other politicians.
That's kind of weird, but it's true.
If all the politicians are automatic liars, then Trump's lack of character and credibility, that sort of fades into the woodwork, and all that's left is him saying outrageous things that need to be said.
Final lesson.
Lack of institutional trust leads to a rise in fascism, not to liberty.
Okay, we hate the media, but instead of seeking honest members of the media, we revel in people who lie to the media and get away with it, like Trump.
We hate the political establishment, Instead of looking for people who will abide by constitutional limitations and minimize the role of government, we look for a strong man, a bad strong man, to break apart the system.
Trump's rise reflects and foreshadows a really ugly future for the country.
I hope I'm wrong on that prediction.
I certainly was about Trump's rise.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show. - I tend to demonize people who don't care about your feelings. - Alrighty, here we are and you should subscribe.
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Okay, lots to talk about today, including Mathis's new podcast, which we'll get to later.
But we will also be talking about Donald Trump and his various promises to various interest groups.
So Donald Trump is playing this double game right now.
He's playing one game for the conservatives and one game for everybody else.
So to the conservatives, he's sort of making his usual overtures.
And what this does is we don't believe him.
We think he's lying and we think that he's full of it.
But by him saying this, it gives cover to people like Rick Perry and people like Bobby Jindal who say, oh, he'll definitely better be better than Hillary.
So, for example, yesterday Trump said that he would appoint pro-life judges.
Here's what it looked like.
I will protect it, and the biggest way you can protect it is through the Supreme Court and putting people on the court.
Actually, the biggest way you can protect it, I guess, is by electing me president.
Alright, so you're going to get a judge who would overthrow, overturn Roe v. Wade.
That's a specific thing that you would do?
Overturned.
Look, I'm going to put conservative judges on.
I think one of the biggest things happening in terms of this election are, you know, it could be as many as five judges will be appointed over the next four and a half years.
So we're talking about five judges.
And I think probably the most important thing that one of the most important thing other than the security itself of the country is going to be the appointment of Four to five Supreme Court Justices and I'll be doing that.
Diane's question is answered.
Your specific thing to protect the sanctity of life would be appointing a Supreme Court Justice that would overturn Roe v. Wade.
Do I have it?
Well, they'll be pro-life, and we'll see what about overturning, but they will be, we will appoint, I will appoint judges that will be pro-life, yes.
He's absolutely meaningless.
The man's absolutely meaningless, because O'Reilly asks him the specific question, right?
The only thing that matters, if you're a pro-life person, the number one obstacle to the pro-life position in America is Roe v. Wade.
So O'Reilly asks him, you say that you'll appoint pro-life justices.
First of all, I love that Trump doesn't know the difference between judges and justices.
Okay, you're appointing five justices to the Supreme Court.
At the Supreme Court level, they're called justices.
At the lower court level, they're called judges.
In any case, he says that he's going to appoint all these judges, these justices, and then he says, I'll appoint pro-life justices.
I don't know what they'll do about Roe v. Wade.
Then they're not pro-life.
They're also not pro-Constitution because it's a really, really bad constitutional decision by any order.
But what this does is it allows people like O'Reilly and Sean Hannity and allows people like Laura Ingram and Ann Coulter to say, what are you pro-life people whining about?
He said he was pro-life.
He said he's going to appoint pro-life judges.
Well, I don't believe him.
And the reason I don't believe him is because he reverses himself every five minutes on policy, and you can tell what he cares about.
And the only thing Donald Trump cares about is his own personal aggrandizement, his own personal power.
So, for instance, I'm supposed to believe him now that he's going to appoint a pro-life justice to overturn Roe v. Wade when he won't even say that the justice that he appoints will have a litmus test Of overturning Roe v. Wade.
I mean, look at his specific language.
You can always tell where people stand when you lock them down to the specifics.
It's easy to say things in broad terms.
It's very hard to get down to specifics.
The left loves talking in broad terms about gun control.
When you try to narrow them down to specifics, okay, what do you suggest that we do, and what does that look like, then they run from the fight immediately.
They don't want any part of it, because the fact is they don't know what they're talking about.
And it's the same thing with Trump on Pro-Life.
I'm supposed to trust him anyway, even if he had said, I'm going to appoint justices who will reverse Roe v. Wade.
Would I believe him?
Well, given the fact that he flip-flops on all of his positions simultaneously, and it's kaleidoscopic nonsense, probably not.
Here's Donald Trump, for example, on taxes just today.
I was a little upset because my taxes are going to go up if you win.
I'm going to be paying more now.
I thought I was going to be paying less.
No.
No?
It was incorrectly, if you read the Wall Street Journal front page today, they covered it exactly correct.
I am going, I have the biggest tax cut of anybody running by far, and that includes the 16 people that are vanquished, okay?
Nobody even came close, but I may have to raise it from that point.
It was incorrectly reported.
So your original statement in the debate, you might have to go up a little for me.
For me, I might have to pay more.
No, you're going to actually perhaps go down, actually.
Everybody's going to go down.
But who's really going to go down is the middle class, who have been absolutely destroyed by taxes.
But you said you wouldn't mind paying more.
You yourself wouldn't mind paying more.
I would not mind paying more.
No, honestly, I would not mind paying more.
That's kind of an indication.
That's kind of an indication to guys in your bracket.
No.
No?
No.
The question was asked, would I mind paying more?
I wouldn't mind, but the fact is that everybody's going to be paying less and we're going to run a much better, a much better, we're going to run a, hey Bill, we're going to run a country that works.
We're going to get this country going again because right now this country is stalled so badly and taxes are going to go down and that's one of the ways we're going to get it to work.
Man, it's just, it's so incoherent, and it's so back and forth.
He did say he would raise taxes on the wealthiest.
Then he said, what I mean is, I'm gonna lower taxes on the wealthiest, but then they might have to rise again.
Sort of like his immigration plan.
I'm gonna deport everybody, but then they can all come back in.
Right?
This is what he has said, right?
Touchback amnesty.
They leave, they come back, and now they're here and they're citizens again.
And this is all nonsense.
So when he makes promises, I wrote a piece for National Review today, I'm now a contributor over there.
I wrote a piece for National Review today, and one of the things that I said is, he has to, if Trump actually wanted to woo conservatives, and I'll explain why he doesn't in just a moment.
If he actually wanted to woo us, what he would actually be doing is he would actually be attempting to prove to us that his promises can be kept.
That he's actually going to be consistent.
He has to show like a little bit of consistency because otherwise he can make all the conservative promises he wants.
I'm not going to believe him.
You know, I don't believe people who routinely cheat me in business that next time they won't cheat me.
They have to give me a long record of now they've gotten past all the cheating in order for me to start trusting them with my money.
I'm not going to trust Donald Trump on his positions when the man legitimately flip-flops every position he has ever held in a matter of moments depending on who's asking him the questions.
So, there's Trump.
Now, I say again, He's doing a lot of this as cover.
So he's saying something to everyone that they presumably like, so that when they're asked about it, why do you support Trump?
They can give their version of the positions that they like.
So when Rick Perry is asked, what about Trump do you like?
Rick Perry, the same guy who called Donald Trump a, quote, cancer on conservatism, who's now backing Donald Trump.
When people ask him, okay, so why do you support Donald Trump?
He can say, well, he says he's gonna lower taxes for the rich.
Well, he says he's gonna appoint pro-life justices.
And then you find somebody who's pro-choice, and the person who's pro-choice will say, Well, you know, he's not really that pro-life.
I mean, he said that he's not going to touch Roe v. Wade, basically.
He says he backs Planned Parenthood.
The person who wants higher taxes?
Well, you know, he says that sort of for public consumption.
When you signal to people that you're lying all the time, then you are going to draw, actually, a larger group of people to you, because the bottom line is, there's always something somebody can find a reason to back you.
And so, you know, this is sort of Trump's campaign in a political nutshell.
Now, there's another element to Trump's campaign that is very telling, and this is why I think that Trump is a relatively scary character, and that is that Trump has never apologized for anything.
He's never apologized for anything.
Now, I remember, a few months back, there was a host on NPR, and I'm trying to remember her name, but there was a host on NPR, Diane Rehm, I think?
And she's a host on NPR.
And she has a very... It's hard to listen to her voice.
It's very hard to listen to her voice.
And I was on my morning show out here in LA, and I mocked her voice on air.
And I found out during a break that she actually had a throat condition.
She had something that's wrong with her throat, and that's why her voice sounds back.
So we came back from the break, and I said, you know, I really want to apologize for that.
I didn't know she had a throat condition.
Obviously, that changes the nature of the mockery, and that's not any fault of her own.
Not only that, she actually has a disability.
That's really sad, and I'm sorry I did that.
That was not nice.
That was bad.
That's what normal, decent people do.
When you hurt people, you apologize to people.
When you're wrong, you apologize to people.
Donald Trump never apologizes for anything, because Donald Trump is the candidate of might makes right.
Donald Trump is the candidate of, if I am more popular after saying something than I was before saying that thing, then it must have been that I was right.
Popularity means that I was right.
Me being popular means, it's justification for what I do.
If people like that I did something, that means that it's an okay thing that I did.
And if people don't like it, then it must be because they misconstrued what I said, like on the tax proposal there.
So, you're about to see Donald Trump, this is his new routine.
It really isn't new, but it's now coming to the forefront because he's won the nomination.
Katrina Pearson, who is his really kind of nasty spokesperson, she's on with Fox, and she's asked by Martha McCallum about why he doesn't just apologize to women for saying nasty things about women, and here's what she says.
and he closed that gap. - All right, I hear what you're saying.
But you know, what he needs to do is grow his base.
He needs to bring people into the tent who are not in the tent right now, right?
So wouldn't it be smart for him to win a no, but wouldn't it be, you say he only said those things when he was an entertainer, and you know, you could beg to differ with that, that some of those comments have continued on But if that's the case, why doesn't he come out and talk about that?
Why doesn't he say, you know what?
I said things that might have been off-color, that I wouldn't really want my children or my grandchildren to say.
I was trying to be funny with Howard Stern.
And he has said that to a certain extent.
But perhaps apologize.
Say, if I've offended any of you, I apologize.
And I don't mean, you know, to be mean-spirited against women.
Why not do that?
Well, because that's the politically correct thing to say.
No, it's not.
It's the polite thing to say, Katrina.
In this case, it's just the polite thing to say.
It's what I would imagine he would expect from his children or anyone else.
But let me tell you this, Martha.
At the same time, this is a response.
If he has said anything like that since the entertainment world, it's in response to criticism of him.
He doesn't just wake up in the morning and wanting to offend people.
He's responding to people who are offending him, his supporters, even his staff for that matter.
This is a response.
Mr. Trump has always said, It is a counter punch.
And just because you criticize a woman after she criticizes you, that doesn't make you a sexist or a misogynist.
I get what you're saying.
I mean, your argument is that he's an equal opportunity offender.
That, you know, he, Carly Fiorina made him mad.
He said what he said about her.
He also called, you know, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz lots of names as well.
And in some ways, I can understand that that's interpreted as basically, you know, equality, right?
He's treating everybody exactly the same.
But the fact remains that he does not do well with women in many of these polls.
So when you look at the national polls, right?
So politically, wouldn't it be smart for him to maybe, you know, speak a little bit differently on these issues?
Well, he has said on The Stump and in some interviews that some of those comments were pulled out of context for the entertainment realm.
But I also think that taking his message out to the public and showing that many of these women have no idea who Mr. Trump really is when it comes to women, because they don't get to hear about all the women that Mr. Trump brought into his organization.
They don't know that the majority of his executives are women.
We can stop it here.
So bottom line is you see even how Fox is covering this, the way that they're showing pictures of Melania while we're talking about women that Donald Trump was mean to, right?
No pictures of Megyn Kelly, no pictures, excuse me, of Michelle Fields, or no pictures of Carly Fiorina, no pictures of Heidi Cruz.
What did Heidi Cruz do to him that caused him to come out against Heidi Cruz, right?
Well, what exactly caused that?
But Donald Trump, his people say, bottom line, he's not going to apologize because it's not hurting him and because he's a winner.
He's a big winner, so he's never going to apologize for anything that he says.
Now, as you remember, you remember way back in August, Donald Trump said this about John McCain, right?
So I never liked him as much after that because I don't like losers.
But, Frank, Frank, let me get to it.
He hit me.
He's not a war hero.
He's a war hero.
He's a war hero.
He's a war hero because he was captured.
I like people that weren't captured, okay?
I hate to tell you.
Okay, we'll stop it there.
He likes war heroes who were captured, who were not captured.
You know, he doesn't like war heroes who were captured.
He's not a war hero.
Right?
So he was asked about this yesterday.
And here was Donald Trump's response.
Because McCain said, why don't you just apologize to veterans?
Why don't you just say, I shouldn't have said that.
You know, that was a nasty thing to say.
You know, it's my fault.
Why won't you just apologize for that?
Here's Donald Trump.
Listen to his response.
Again, this is the Might Makes Right campaign.
Here's Trump.
Has said that he doesn't want an apology from you for him personally, but he thinks you ought to apologize to the tens of thousands of POWs who were captured by no fault of their own.
Well, I've actually done that, Don, and I've, you know, frankly, I like John McCain and John McCain is a hero.
Also heroes are people that are, you know, whether they get caught or don't get caught, they're all heroes as far as I'm concerned.
And that's the way it should be.
So do you regret saying that?
I don't, you know, I like not to regret anything.
I mean, you know, you say things and what I said, frankly, is what I said.
And, you know, some people like what I said, if you want to know the truth.
I mean, there are many people that like what I said.
You know, after I said that, my poll numbers went up seven points.
No, I understand a lot.
Do you understand that?
I mean, some people liked what I said.
I like John McCain.
In my eyes, John McCain is a hero.
Okay, we can cut it off there.
That's all that matters.
That's all that matters.
Okay, so now he wants it both ways, right?
John McCain, he quasi-apologizes.
Well, John McCain's a war hero, but do you regret saying that?
No, I don't regret saying that, because I'm popular, because people liked it.
It made me rise in the polls.
Guess what?
Saying lots of terrible things, doing lots of terrible things can make you rise in the polls.
Doing terrible, terrible things to people can make you rise in the polls, it turns out.
It turns out that there are places in the United States where holding slaves and standing for slavery made you rise in the polls.
Today, it will help you rise in the polls in California if you say that babies should be aborted the day of birth.
You'll rise in New York in the polls if you do as they said yesterday.
There's a new law in New York that if you are a bartender and a pregnant woman walks into your bar, you are not allowed to deny her alcohol.
Maybe this makes you rise in the polls in New York.
It's also evil because you're now participating.
You're forcing bartenders to participate in the possible harm to an unborn child, right?
But all these things could make a rise that doesn't make them right?
Doesn't make them right?
And this might-makes-right idea from the Trump campaign is really quite troubling.
It's really problematic because the bottom line is that what's going to happen now is that as Trump goes forward, if he wins, if he wins, everything that he does now is justified on the basis that he's the president.
Everything that he does is justified on the basis that might makes right.
And when you're the president, you're the most mighty person alive, you're the most powerful man on planet Earth.
Once that's the case, nothing he does... He says he doesn't like to have regrets.
No regrets.
Right?
He's the YOLO president.
He's gonna come along and it's YOLO.
He only gets to do this one time, and so he might as well go for broke.
And you have no way to argue with him because he's popular.
The people like it.
And here's the thing about Trump.
He doesn't even pay attention to the polls, so it doesn't even matter whether the people like it.
It doesn't even matter whether the people like it.
He just has this world in which everything he says is popular.
If he likes what he says, it's popular.
If he doesn't like what he says, then somebody made a mistake about it.
This is the recipe for authoritarianism.
This is the recipe for being an authoritarian.
Is the idea that popularity is equal to decency.
I get this argument on art all the time, by the way.
It extends all the way across the board.
I think there is such a thing as quality, I think there is such a thing as good, and there is such a thing as bad.
There is such a thing as moral, and there is such a thing as immoral.
And these things don't change based on their level of popularity.
The morality of abortion does not change because a million abortions a year take place in the United States.
The morality is the same as it ever was.
You know, the fact that rap sucks is not a... that's not affected by the fact that so many Americans think that rap is great.
It still sucks.
The fact that so many Americans love Barack Obama doesn't mean that he's a great president.
Popularity is not a reflection of quality.
Popularity is a reflection of popularity alone.
That's all that's happening here.
And so when Trump says this sort of stuff, and when you hear his folks saying, well the will of the people must be respected, how dare you disrespect the voters?
Listen, I disrespect the voters all the time when they make bad decisions.
The decision doesn't become better just because somebody made it with a majority, or plurality in this case.
The founders feared exactly this kind of logic.
The founders thought this stuff was nonsense.
Why do you think we have a constitution?
There are many countries, many liberal western countries, that do not have a constitution.
Why do you think the United States has a constitution?
The reason is, the reason for a Bill of Rights, is because the founders did not trust the people not to be stupid.
The founders felt like, okay, there will be a time, probably, when freedom of speech becomes unpopular.
That time, it turns out, is now, when freedom of speech becomes unpopular.
Doesn't matter if people don't like it.
It's still a right.
It still exists.
The basis of the Declaration of Independence is not, we're rebelling because it's popular to rebel.
A third of Americans supported rebellion against Great Britain.
They said, we're rebelling because there are certain inalienable rights that adhere to all of us that have been violated by the British Crown, and we're not going to stand for that.
Right and wrong are not adjudicated based on the popularity of the issue in question.
And yet, that's exactly Trump's entire case.
He says, I don't even have to apologize for slandering veterans.
I don't have to apologize for slandering POWs because, hey, I went up in the polls and that's all that matters.
And you can see, and this is the part that scares me, you can see everybody in the Republican Party or large segments of the Republican Party falling in line.
Trump is popular, therefore he's right.
Ann Coulter, with whom I've been friends for a very long time, but I've been very disappointed by Ann's take on this particular election, and I think that she's been saying untrue things about Donald Trump and about his opponents.
Here's Ann Coulter saying that we all need to get on the Trump train or be run over because obviously he's popular.
Um, no, I think you're absolutely right.
I think it shows that Trump is being unbelievably gracious.
He doesn't need to have this meeting.
He is the party.
He is the heart and soul of the party.
Um, and I mean, I think he could have just said, um, hope he comes aboard.
We're going to have a lot of fun, but if he doesn't, oh well.
So no, I think it's very nice, but I don't think you should waste a lot of time on these meetings going forward.
Right, so she's saying he shouldn't even bother meeting with Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House.
The Speaker of the House, which is, by the way, the most powerful position in Congress, that Trump should not bother meeting with Paul Ryan because Paul Ryan has said he's not sure he's ready to jump on the Trump train.
She says he shouldn't even bother because obviously the heart and soul is with Trump.
And the people are with Trump.
The people are with Trump is not a good argument.
It is not a good argument.
It doesn't mean that he's right.
It doesn't mean that he doesn't have work to do on his candidacy.
You know, I have to tell you, folks, on a very personal level, I was having this conversation with Andrew Klavan the other day.
You know, when you're in the fight all the time, when you fought the left your entire career, now you see the left begin to infiltrate your own party, when you begin to see top-down, daddy government ideas begin to infiltrate your own party, It's very difficult because a lot of people who you thought were friendly allies, it turns out they're not allies.
They were just fellow travelers.
And when the pedal hits the metal, they're willing to break off and do whatever is necessary for them to win politically against their enemies.
And yeah, I've spent more time.
Here's the thing about the Trump supporters.
I've spent more time in this election second-guessing myself than I think any time in my political life.
Because when I fight the left, I don't have to second-guess myself.
I know where they are.
I know what they're saying.
I know who they are.
This new right is something with which I'm not familiar, because it's something, honestly, I didn't believe existed on the right.
This sort of ugly, white nationalist bent that you see online, or the know-nothingism of Trump, the kind of stupidity of Trump's policy positions.
I didn't think that this was a thing on the right.
I didn't think this was a thing in the conservative movement.
And so I've spent an awful lot of time thinking, okay, maybe I've just got it wrong.
Maybe I've just got it wrong.
Maybe Trump isn't what I think he is.
Maybe Trump isn't the sort of authoritarian thug he seems to be.
Maybe Donald Trump is, you know, he will be better than Hillary Clinton.
He won't do damage to the Republican brand.
Maybe I'm getting it wrong.
I don't see that sort of doubt anywhere on the other side of the aisle.
I don't see that doubt anywhere in the Trump camp.
The doubt, well, maybe these critiques of Trump are true.
Maybe there's something that's a little bit off-putting and disquieting about Donald Trump.
Now, there are people like Bobby Jindal, as we mentioned, or Dennis Prager, people who say, I don't like Trump, but he's better than Hillary.
Again, that's an argument I respect, but I'm talking about the ardent pro-Trump people.
Even as an ardent anti-Trump person, I spend a lot of time thinking, maybe I'm getting this wrong.
Listen, I would love to give Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt, except that he doesn't provide me any reason to do so.
You think I want to be sitting out an election where Hillary Clinton's on the other side?
You think that makes me feel good?
You think it makes me feel good about myself or about my movement?
That I feel morally compelled to sit out an election where the worst example of democratic corruption in my lifetime is on the other side?
You think that makes me feel good about myself or makes me feel good about politics or what I do?
Of course it doesn't.
It's painful.
It's difficult.
But, as I am fond of saying, of course facts don't care about your feelings and Donald Trump is who Donald Trump is.
Donald Trump, and I don't care how many people line up behind him, he's still wrong.
And the things that he says are still wrong.
I don't care how many people liked that he called John McCain not a war hero because he was captured.
I don't care who liked that.
That makes those people bad people.
I don't care how many people.
And Donald Trump does this on a routine basis.
He does it on a routine basis.
If he knows people like it, then he just lets it go.
I know that I mentioned before this exchange that Trump had with with Wolf Blitzer.
I don't think we have it today.
I think that Clavin played on a show yesterday.
But there's there's a there's an exchange that Trump had with Wolf Blitzer about this this journalist Julia Yaffe or EO if it's spelled with an I.
And she is a journalist for GQ.
She wrote a piece that was not flattering about Trump or Melania.
And a bunch of anti-Semitic Trump supporters began sending her death threats via mail and on the phone.
And Trump was on Wolf Blitzer about it.
And Blitzer asks him about it.
And Trump says, well, I don't know anything about those people.
I don't know anything about those threats.
But the article was really bad.
The idea being, all these people like me, they must be okay.
Vladimir Putin likes me, he must be okay.
Right and wrong change based on whether these people like or dislike Donald Trump.
Donald Trump's North Star is his own personal popularity.
That is his moral North Star.
It's his guidepost.
Some of us actually use the idea of a godly, objective morality that guides us.
Some of us actually use the idea of the Constitution of the United States as our governmental North Star.
The idea of constitutional liberty as our governmental North Star.
Donald Trump's North Star is Donald Trump, which means it's constantly moving, and the people who follow that North Star are likely to get lost at sea.
People like Ann, by the way.
And that makes me sad to say, and you see it all over the place.
Look at this debate between Stephen Hayes over at the Weekly Standard and Tucker Carlson from Daily Caller.
This was with Brett Baer yesterday, and it's making some headlines because you'll see the debate, and I think it's an interesting one.
It doesn't mean you should back it.
It does mean you need to rethink your comfortable assumptions about immigration, if you're the Republican Party.
Sure, but if you have principles, if you believe that we shouldn't, in effect, ban a religion, don't ban a religion.
In a country founded on freedom of religion, it's not a good idea to ban a religion, even with asterisks.
Republicans can't just cast aside their principles and free trade because Donald Trump comes around and, you know, this orange guy suggests that free trade is bad.
We're going to throw away 300 years of Adam Smith.
I've been here a long time.
I haven't noticed a lot of principles among Republicans in Washington.
Perhaps they're there.
They're hiding them.
Well, I would just say look at Europe.
Look at the destruction of Europe underway now.
What are the lessons we've dropped?
It doesn't mean you need to ban people who are Muslims.
I agree.
That's an overstatement and kind of crazy.
But it does mean keeping your immigration regime the same in the face of what's happening now.
It's equally crazy.
No, I agree with you entirely.
I think they need to respond to this.
Clearly there's a massive consensus.
And they have, but they refuse to.
But if you make the argument, you're not making it, others have made it, that they just cast aside these pillars of conservatism.
But open borders is not a pillar of conservatism.
Because Donald Trump is making certain arguments about trade and about other things.
I think that's unwise, and I think that's one of the reasons that you're seeing this resistance from some people.
They don't want to support somebody who opposes the things that they fought for and held most dear for years.
So if open borders is one of the things they held most dear for years, they're going to have to give up on it because the country just doesn't support it, they've defended it, and they need to change.
Okay, so he keeps coming back to open borders, says Tucker Carlson.
It's such a Trump lie, this idea that everyone who opposes him opposes him on the basis of open borders policy.
Are you kidding me?
I've been for a while, long before Trump was.
I was in favor of restricting immigration long before Trump was.
Look at an interview I did with Ann Coulter last year on her book, Adios America, about restricting immigration flow.
No, what Stephen Hayes is saying, and he keeps mentioning free trade, and you notice Tucker Carlson deliberately avoiding talk about free trade, right?
He keeps going back to immigration, he won't talk free trade.
What Hayes is saying is, look, there are certain principles that guide us.
And Tucker Carlson is saying, even about immigration there, he's saying, well, it's unpopular.
Just got to abandon it.
Just got to move beyond it.
Truth does not change just because it's unpopular.
It's still truth.
But what you're seeing the Republican Party do, because it's a vehicle for victory, it's not a vehicle for conservatism.
And this has always been the tension inside the Republican Party.
Is it a vehicle for conservatism or is it a vehicle for victory?
Right now, it's pretty clear this has become a vehicle for victory, not a vehicle for conservatism.
You're seeing all the Republicans jump on board behind Trump, including people like Marco Rubio.
Rubio, who again, basically suggested that Trump's politics are egregious, he says he'll support the nominee too.
Would those reservations keep you?
Do they right now preclude you from endorsing him?
Well, I've set out... I've signed a pledge that said I'd support the Republican nominee and I intend to continue to do that, but we're... Look, here's a situation that we're in.
On the one hand, I don't want Hillary Clinton to be the President of the United States.
I don't want her to win this election.
On the other hand, as I said, I have well-defined differences with the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party.
And like millions of Republicans who try to reconcile those two things, I intend to live up to the pledge that we made.
But that said, these concerns that I have about policy, they remain and they're there.
You know, that doesn't mean that Donald needs to change his positions in order to get my support or what have you.
As I said earlier today, I think he should be true to what he believes in and continue to campaign on those things and make his case to the American people.
You know what, Marco?
Stick it.
Stick it.
Of course you should change his positions if they're wrong.
If they're wrong.
And this whole, I'm gonna support the nominee, I signed a pledge.
You know, I'm maybe the only person in American commentariat who said that that question was stupid in the first Republican debate.
That no one should be forced to sign a loyalty pledge to anybody else.
You should be loyal to principle, not to people or organizations.
Loyalty to principle, over people or organizations, is what keeps people alive.
Loyalty to organizations and individuals leads to death.
Okay, it leads to legitimate death.
Because if you are more loyal to an organization or a bad guy than you are to basic principles like decency, you're going to do very, very bad things.
And that's what the Republican Party is about to do.
The final kind of domino here is going to be Paul Ryan.
There's sort of an open question.
Paul Ryan is meeting today with Trump.
Not clear how that's going to go.
Paul Ryan was asked about this yesterday.
He said, well, you know, we have to unify the party.
This is his routine.
He just keeps saying, unify the party, unify the party.
This is all prelude to him saying, Okay, well, in order to unify the party, I'm going to have to back Trump, even though he's expressed his reservations.
Here's Paul Ryan.
Look, we've got a process we're just getting started.
So the last thing I'm going to do is say exactly what the end of this process is going to be when we're just beginning this process.
The point, I'll just make one more time, is I really believe that if we're going to be successful this fall, we have to unify our party.
We have to go forward with a positive message that Americans see that we have solutions to their problems.
When 7 out of 10 Americans don't like the path that this country is on, and Hillary Clinton is basically promising to keep going down the same path, we have an obligation to merge and to unify around our common principles to offer this country a choice, a better way forward, and that's going to take some party unification to do that.
We just finished probably one of the most grueling primaries in modern history.
It's going to take some work, and that's the kind of work we're dedicated to doing.
Okay, so he says unify the party, and here is Trump.
This is why I think all of this is a prelude to a big conciliation.
Here's Trump last night trying to woo Paul Ryan.
Number one, I have a lot of respect for Paul, and I think we're gonna have a very good meeting, I hope.
He's a very good man, he wants what's good for the party, and I think we're gonna have very positive results.
And I'd love, frankly, for him to stay and be chairman.
Okay, so he had said earlier that maybe Ryan should be removed as chairman of the party because he opposes Trump, or has said that he won't support Trump.
Alright, so the bottom line is that this could all change.
I mean, tonight if Ryan says he's not endorsing Trump, Trump will be on O'Reilly talking about how Paul Ryan is a terrible man, a chameleon, somebody who lies, and all the rest of it.
The worst liar since the snake in the garden.
And we'll get that whole routine.
Okay, so, bottom line is the Might Make Right campaign does have followers because might does attract followers.
Might does attract followers.
It doesn't make right, however.
That said, Donald Trump is running, and there's a new poll out today from Reuters.
This poll had Hillary up by 13 points last week, and now has them running dead even, and now has Trump at 40, and it has Hillary at 41%, well within the margin of error.
Of course, that shows that there is a 19% gap between that and full voting.
So where do those other 19% go?
Nobody really knows.
Trump says that he's going to run a new sort of operation.
He says that in this campaign, he's not going to run a data-driven operation.
He's not going to invest in a robust ground game.
He's going to invest in his rallies.
He's going to have big rallies because he's hoping that sort of the free media that he generates is going to be like the primaries.
He generates big media, big rallies, and then all these people go out and vote for him sort of spontaneously.
This seems to me unbelievably stupid.
You need both.
You need a good ground game too.
Apparently there are some super PACs who may or may not pick up the slack for it, but this is dumb.
But Trump, again, because it's all about, look, ground game is not about self-aggrandizement.
Ground game is about organization.
Trump hates that stuff because it requires work.
It's much easier to just say things on TV.
And so Trump's, one of Trump's top aides, Paul Manafort, he's on TV and he says that Trump is not going to run this thing like a normal campaign.
Listen to what he compares American politics to.
It's kind of amazing.
Well, I'm going to Cleveland on Thursday and Friday.
We're sitting down with the RNC leadership, running the convention, and we're going to begin to start talking about that.
We have some ideas, but we want to listen to the RNC.
You're going to have to break some eggs, though, right?
I don't think we have to break any eggs.
Ryan's Priebus is going to give us an exciting convention?
Come on!
Donald Trump is going to give you an exciting convention.
Okay, how?
What do you do?
Do you have movies?
We're going to put a program together.
It's not put together yet.
We have ideas.
A reality show of some kind?
Well, this is the ultimate reality show.
It's the presidency of the United States.
So it will be a program where we will be talking to America about not just Donald Trump but the Republican Party and we put it in ways that we hope will be entertaining but more important informative.
Okay, so it's going to be like a reality show, which it already has been.
Has this been good for American politics, this whole reality show?
Does it make you feel better that it's turned into a game of Survivor and the only thing we're lacking is Donald Trump tromping naked through the woods?
Is that really what is making you feel better about American politics?
Look, here's one thing about Trump.
He understands that right now politics has become a reality show.
He's living inside reality, right?
Reality is now the reality show.
I mentioned the Truman Show yesterday.
We are all living now in the Truman Show.
This is the Truman Show.
We are all inside reality TV.
This is Donald Trump's world and we're all strangers in it if we don't believe that.
So that, you know, he's got it right.
We need some more glitz and glamour at the convention.
The fact that it takes Donald Trump to do it is sort of amazing.
Okay, meanwhile, as we say, Donald Trump is doing the Might Makes Right campaign.
Hillary is just falling apart.
She's terrible at all of this.
And even her own people are looking at her and saying, what is wrong with you?
Joe Biden came out this morning on Good Morning America.
He said, yeah, you know, I probably would have been a better president.
I had planned on running.
It's an awful thing to say.
I think I would have been the best president.
But it was the right thing, not just for my family, for me.
No one should ever seek the presidency unless they're able to devote their whole heart and soul and passion into just doing that.
Bo was my soul.
I just wasn't ready to be able to do that.
My one regret is my Bo's not here.
I don't have any other regrets.
Okay, so he says that he wishes that he'd run, basically.
And if he had run, he would have beaten Hillary.
Excuse me.
And then he probably also would have won the election.
So if he had run, he probably would have been the president.
But she's in trouble, and that's why you're seeing these people feeling freer to speak about it.
Bernie Sanders, he's come out and he says he's not quitting.
He's not going anywhere.
He says the polls show that he continues to, that he, not only would he beat Hillary, he'd beat Trump.
If you look over the last month or six weeks at every national poll, Bernie Sanders defeats Donald Trump by big numbers.
But it is not only national polls where we defeat Trump by bigger numbers than Secretary Clinton.
It is state poll after state poll after state poll.
Just in the last day, just in the last day, Okay, so he's now doing the reverse Trump routine.
He's saying that I would crush Trump and the polls show it.
the reverse Trump routine. - Four statewide polls. - Okay, so he's now doing the reverse Trump routine.
He's saying that I would crush Trump and the polls show it.
The polls, the polls, the polls, the polls.
Okay, so Hillary's got a problem, and even her own biggest supporters George Stephanopoulos, the Keebler elf, who said in his autobiography that he loves Hillary Clinton.
George Stephanopoulos, he says these losses she lost in West Virginia last night in the West Virginia primary because she was stupid enough to say several years ago that she wanted to put coal miners out of jobs.
Just a genius thing to say.
Here's George Stephanopoulos lamenting the fact that his former boss has some problems.
Bernie Sanders cannot catch up, can't get 98% of the delegates, and the Clinton team is explaining away this loss in West Virginia, but it is bogging her campaign down.
Well, yeah, you know, they say they did not advertise in West Virginia.
They say the demographics favor him there.
But the reality is she's got a real problem going forward.
She's had a hard time winning over white working class voters, George.
And that, as you know, is a group that Donald Trump has done especially well with.
Okay, so even Democrats beginning to acknowledge now that Hillary's a terrible candidate and has problems.
Chris Matthews said the same thing last night over on MSNBC.
Gotta brush it down to this show.
And then he says, let's talk about Hillary and her problems in this campaign.
Go!
The early elections in the 50s and 60s and the Kennedy races.
And I have to tell you, back then being a Democrat was great.
You talked about unemployment, you talked about jobs, you talked about putting people to work, you talked about minimum wage, you talked about Medicare.
Now you've got to talk about guns, which the people don't want to hear.
You've got to talk about how coal is bad for the country and bad for the world.
You've got to talk about same-sex in a part of the country that isn't too keen on that kind of cultural stuff.
Abortion.
So all of a sudden you're talking about things that aren't really well received.
But in the old days, a Democrat could just say, a lot of poverty here, let's do something about it.
And he's saying basically that Hillary can say those things, but Trump is also saying those same things.
This is why if the Republican Party is a vehicle for victory, basically you just make it the Democratic Party, and put a loudmouth in charge, and yay, everything is happy-dappy-do.
The Democrats have a problem here.
I mean, listen, I'm a never-Trump guy in the sense that, and I said I won't vote for Trump as he currently stands.
That was never based on the idea Trump can't win.
There are some people who say Trump can't win.
You know, my head says that he's going to have a tough time winning, but he could certainly win.
I mean, there's certainly a possibility that he can win.
The point of not voting for him is that I don't want him to win.
I don't want Hillary to win either.
I want both of them to drift off in a lifeboat somewhere in the middle of the sea.
I think that would probably be the best solution for America.
But Debbie Wasserman Schultz, she's now in the position that Mitt Romney's campaign was in the last days of the 2012 campaign.
Jar Jar Binks, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, she says that she no longer trusts the polls.
She doesn't put a lot of stock in the polls that show that Trump is doing well against Hillary.
What's embarrassing is that the Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump doesn't have the support of his own Speaker of the House, doesn't have support of either Bush President, has many United States Senators and candidates questioning or outright rejecting that they're going to attend their own party's convention because Donald Trump is radioactive and they know it.
The national polls are a little early to be hanging your hat on national polls, but the polls that I have seen across the board, the Quinnipiac result is an outlier, but I'm, in May, not one that puts a lot of stock in the polls.
Okay, so she's saying that the polls don't exist anymore, even though three days ago she was saying that Trump was getting crushed in all the polls, that she was going to run to victory.
So, Hillary has some problems of her own, and, you know, so this could be a competitive election.
The part, again, about Trump that scares me is that the authoritarian nature of Trump, the never-apologize-I'm-right-because-I'm-winning routine is not good for American politics.
In any sense.
Okay.
Time for some things that I like, and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like... I haven't... I can't fully vouch for this yet.
I can't fully vouch for this yet.
I'll have to listen to it.
But our producer, Mathis, has a podcast called Hello & Ado.
And I suggest you check it out.
It looks like fun.
It's all culture talk.
I guess the latest episode is talking about Captain America.
It's him and his best friend, and they live across the country, and they talk to each other.
So that's kind of fun.
So check that out, his podcast, Hello & Ado.
Um, if it sucks, I'll come back and I'll put it in the things I hate like a couple of days from now, so I'll let you know, but for now it's in the things that I like.
Other things that I like, there's a movie that came out that really did not get, I thought, the plaudits that it deserved a couple of years ago.
I'm a huge Christopher Nolan fan, and I think that this is his best film, although he's made many really good films.
Yeah, Dark Knight.
It's hard to say this is better than Dark Knight, but this is a really, really good film that was underrated by a lot of people because they thought that it was too bulky and they didn't like the plotting.
This is the movie Interstellar with Matthew McConaughey, which I thought was just a riveting film.
I saw it twice.
I rarely see films twice.
And here is the trailer for those who missed it.
What are you going to do with it?
I'm gonna give it something socially responsible to do.
Can't we just let it go?
This thing needs to learn how to adapt, Murph.
Okay, let's mask up.
Like the rest of us.
So basically, if you can't see the visuals, you're missing, you know, everything that's good here, because the visuals are really pretty.
This world was treasured.
But it's been telling us to leave for a while now.
Your daughter's generation will be the last to survive on Earth.
You're the best pilot we ever had.
Get out there and save the world.
Everybody ready to say goodbye to our solar system?
To our galaxy?
- Everybody ready to say goodbye to our solar system?
To our galaxy.
Here we go.
It's really good.
So, okay, we can stop it there.
It's really good.
The bottom line is that the premise of the movie is that Earth is having an environmental crisis.
Basically, people are going to die, and so we need to find a different place to live.
And so they go out and investigate.
It's Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway.
They go out and they investigate other universes for places that human beings can live.
And it's cool, and it's spiritual.
It's a really neat movie.
I like it a lot.
Okay, other things that I like.
On the lighter side, there's this... I don't know if you've seen this clip.
Sometimes local news just provides you joy.
And this is a local news clip from Kentucky, where apparently there's some sort of tornado.
And if you can't see this, you're missing the joy also.
This is why you need to subscribe at Daily Wire.
But there's a man who has to be 111 years old, standing there, and he's wearing a shirt that says, Young and Getting It.
And he's standing, and we'll just play a little bit of this clip, because it's pretty ridiculous.
God is good, because that van, it tipped it a little bit, and that tornado just went over that van, because it came straight to us.
And when I said, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, that tornado went up over his van.
You guys are very lucky.
Thank you for talking with us.
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.
The tornado went up and over his van.
It's this black lady standing next to a guy who is 190,000 years old wearing a shirt that says young and getting it.
Pretty awesome.
Okay, a couple of things that I hate.
Baltimore's mayor just did this routine where she banned travel to North Carolina for all government employees.
Of course, nobody needs to ban travel to Baltimore.
Because no one's going to Baltimore, okay?
No one wants any part of Baltimore.
So, someone suggested online, some Twitter follower of mine suggested online, I think this is right, that North Carolina should just identify itself, self-identify as Baltimore, and then really put the mayor of Baltimore in a bind.
It would really be a problem.
It may not be Baltimore, but if it identifies as Baltimore, we have to treat it as Baltimore, correct?
So that's all very exciting.
Other things that I hate.
Samantha Bee has this show on TBS, and you knew it was gonna suck.
You knew from the first moment you saw it, it was going to be bad.
Its tagline was something like, if you don't watch this, you're a sexist, and you just knew it was gonna be lefty garbage.
So she has on absolute troll Patton Oswalt, who is in fact like a human, he's like a troll in human form.
And Patton Oswalt, he and I have gotten into it on Twitter a little bit.
Because he's a very, very wealthy socialist who refuses to answer how much he's worth and how much he gave to charity last year.
Patton Oswalt was on with Samantha Bee and they just make fun of pro-life pregnancy centers.
These are places that women who are pregnant go to get more information about their child.
And Patton Oswalt thinks this is just awful.
It's just the worst thing that ever happened.
The best cons are the lies that hide in plain sight.
The Electoral College.
God.
But tonight, we'll look at both sides of the coin.
The truth and the illusion.
This is not funny at all, by the way.
We are casting our gaze toward the ultimate hustle.
A conception deception.
A masterpiece of gynecological grift.
Crisis pregnancy centers.
A crisis pregnancy center is a fake abortion clinic.
They spread these lies, hoping to frighten women and to persuade them not to go ahead with obtaining the abortion that they want.
They create the illusion that they're an abortion clinic.
Illusion.
By adopting names that are similar to abortion clinics, adopting the same logos and fonts.
Copperplate Gothic Bold.
They try to have women come in to have a free pregnancy test or a free ultrasound and then their goal is to detain them.
So I ended up at a crisis pregnancy center after looking in the yellow pages.
I chose that listing because it was the largest ad.
They locate next to an abortion clinic, sometimes in the same building.
They con women into thinking that they provide the full range of reproductive health care services when they absolutely do not.
I did feel like when I was in the facility for the ultrasound that I was talking to a real nurse, giving me real medical information about my body.
Most of these fake clinics do not have licensed medical staff.
Women are often given false ultrasound results.
Okay, so we can stop it here.
So the whole idea is that these crisis pregnancy centers are the worst place on earth.
First of all, it would be illegal to impersonate a medical professional without a license.
Okay, that's illegal.
So you can report that and these people would be prosecuted.
That's number one.
Number two, they say they give them false ultrasound results.
Okay, Planned Parenthood refuses to perform 3D ultrasounds.
They've stumped against 3D ultrasounds because they're afraid that women are going to look at their babies and realize that they're babies.
Okay, one, even if you were to grant all of these premises, right?
It would be bad.
You don't want to deceive people because lying is not worthwhile.
But, even if you were to grant all these premises, lying in order to get a woman not to kill her baby seems to me less objectionable than lying to a woman in order to get her to kill her baby, which is what Planned Parenthood actually does.
So, you know, but this is how the media treat all this.
The media are really quite terrible.
Okay, the last thing that I want to talk about that I really dislike here is, um, well, now I have to decide.
Should we play the most ridiculous Trump question in history from Fox & Friends, or should we do Joe Biden talking about cancer?
Lindsey, which one?
Biden about cancer, or Trump?
Okay, it's always Trump.
Okay, so Fox & Friends asked Donald Trump legitimately the most ridiculous question in television history yesterday.
Here's what it looked like this morning.
Donald Trump, do you think you had something to do with Budweiser changing the name of their beer for the summer?
Are they Budweiser to America?
I think so.
They're so impressed with what our country will become that they decided to do this before the fact.
Yeah, okay, so Trump replies, as he should, with a joke, but they're asking Trump, of course, Budweiser is going to rename itself America for the summer, and so he's asked whether they think that they renamed Budweiser after Donald Trump's campaign slogan.
Yes.
Yes, this is how our media treat things these days.
But don't buy the hype, folks.
It turns out that truth is still truth, lies are still lies, and it doesn't matter who's speaking truth and who's speaking lies.
All that matters is what is a truth, And what is a lie?
You don't just get to follow the person who you think is going to be the nicest to you or the person who is the most popular.
Speaking of popularity, we'll be back tomorrow with the Vaunted Mailbag, where apparently I am both unpopular and deeply unpopular this week, so we'll talk about all of that.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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