All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 17, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:32
Ep. 167 - Category 5 Turd Tornado Warning

Everything you need to know about new campaign manager Steve Bannon, Trump gives a terrific speech on race, and a bit of Bible talk. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Serious acrimony has now broken out among conservatives about whether to vote for Donald Trump.
As I've made clear, as of now, I have no intention of voting for Trump.
He's personally unpalatable, of course.
He's a serial adulterer who brags about sleeping with married women and says he doesn't repent.
He's an extreme narcissist with delusion of grandeur.
He's not conservative.
He thinks Planned Parenthood does great work.
He doesn't have coherent foreign policy.
He wants to leave entitlement programs in place.
He supports tariffs and government subsidies.
He doesn't care if Republicans lose the Senate.
He has nothing to say about religious freedom for business owners.
And that's just the start.
He's volatile and he's nasty.
He's mocked prisoners of war and disabled journalists and compared his own sacrifices to those of Gold Star families and gone soft on the KKK.
He lies constantly about nearly everything.
Just as importantly, Trump is doing serious brand damage to conservatism.
He's poisoning the well of female voters.
Look at the polls, and minorities, and young people.
Many ardent conservatives have been co-opted into lying for him and perverting their own conservatism in order to stop Hillary Clinton.
If Trump wins, he'll turn conservatism into Trumpism.
If he loses and conservatives go along for the ride, he'll have sunk conservatism for an entire generation of voters.
Not supporting Trump is a perfectly defensible position, but, but, but, but, it is a tough call.
On the other hand, I totally understand and I fully sympathize with people who say they have to hold their nose and vote for Trump in order to stop Hillary.
She will be a full-scale disaster.
She'll appoint the Fifth Supreme Court Justice to gut the First and Second Amendments.
She will cripple our military.
She'll cram down tax increases.
She'll use the regulatory infrastructure to snap the knees of American industry and conduct, basically, raids against religious people.
Choosing Trump over Hillary is an absolutely Perfectly defensible position.
But it is a tough call.
Every morning these days I really do, this is true, I ask myself the same question.
Which is more costly to America?
A possible loss of conservatism to Trumpism?
Or, or, another four years of Hillary Clinton?
Another four years of Hillary Clinton's radical destruction which could deal the death blow to America's freedoms?
It's a very serious question.
And good people are going to come down on both sides of it.
I myself have felt compelled to come down on both sides of it at one time or another.
But acknowledging that the choice isn't easy seems like a stretch for a lot of commentators.
Some people insist that if you forego the Trump train, that makes you a traitor.
In order to reach that conclusion, they either ignore Trump's foibles or they lie about what a wonderful guy, what a wonderful conservative he is.
Some people on the other side, they insist that if you jump on the Trump train, that makes you a traitor.
In order to reach that conclusion, some of them downplay Clinton's evils or exaggerate Trump's riskiness.
Here's what does make you a traitor to conservatism.
If you lie for Trump or you lie to your audience that he's a serious conservative.
Lying isn't just non-conservative, it's actually immoral.
But neither voting for Trump nor refusing to vote for Trump makes you a traitor to conservatism.
Nobody knows the answer to the hypothetical I pose to myself each morning because nobody has a crystal ball.
We don't know how bad things will be under Trump.
We don't know how bad things will be under Clinton.
We don't know what will happen to the future of the conservative movement.
But one thing is certain.
If we don't recognize that the choice is tough, thanks to Trump's utterly incomprehensible foolishness and vitriol, and Hillary Clinton's radical leftist corruption, we're not taking the question seriously enough.
More importantly, we're destined to go to war with our own ideological allies after the election is over, and there's no need for that war.
Our war should be on behalf of conservatism.
Trump has divided conservatives on the proper tactics in this election, but once November 9th hits, we're all on the same page again.
We either have to stop leftist policies from President Trump or from President Clinton.
We'll need to be allies.
The first step should be recognizing the goodwill of people who fight alongside us, even if we don't make the same risk calculations with regard to a conservative future.
I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Okay, so it turns out there's been some news.
There are things to talk about today.
There's things to talk about today.
So we'll launch right off the bat, right off the bat, this today will be an epic episode of Good Trump, Bad Trump.
Good Trump, Bad Trump, which one will we get today?
All right, thank you to, of course, Brandon Snipes for providing us the theme for Good Trump, Bad Trump.
Which one will it be today?
Well, there is actually plenty of good Trump.
There actually is plenty of good Trump.
And I mean really good Trump.
He gave, I thought, the best speech of his entire career, the best speech of his political campaign last night.
I thought it was truly a stellar speech.
I'm not exaggerating.
I thought his speech last night was great.
I thought it was great, great, great.
I have to start, of course, we're on Facebook Live, so that means I have to front load the material that people are tuning in for today.
And that, of course, is the announcement that Trump is shaking up his campaign.
And here's where we get bad Trump.
Ooh, sad.
Okay, so, let's begin.
Let's begin with the campaign shakeup today.
So here's what we know about the campaign shakeup today.
Stephen K. Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News, and by former I mean like from 30 seconds ago, he is now going to be the new Trump campaign chairman.
The new Trump campaign manager is a gal named Kellyanne Conway.
Kellyanne Conway used to be the kind of the mouthpiece for the Mercer family.
The Mercer family are some of the bigger Republican donors in politics.
I think they were the single largest political donor in this election cycle.
They gave a bunch of money to Cruz, and now they're gonna give a bunch of money to Trump.
She used to be the mouthpiece for them, now she's moving over to the Trump campaign.
Here's what you need to know about all of this.
So first, I'm gonna try and remove myself, okay?
It's tough for me.
I'll admit it freely and openly.
I think that Steve Bannon is one of the worst people I know.
I think Steve Bannon is a bad guy.
I think he's vicious.
I think he's aggressive.
I think he's self-aggrandizing.
I think he has no interest in principle.
I think he has interest only in his personal power.
But I'm going to try and put that aside.
Is this a good pick for the Trump campaign?
If the last two days are an indicator of what Bannon can do, it's not just a good pick for Trump, it's actually a very good pick for Trump.
The last two days have been good, Trump.
The last two days are what people thought they were getting in the primaries with Donald Trump.
The last two days have been Trump speaking very, very well on ISIS, and then speaking very, very well on crime, and we'll get to all that in a minute.
It's also prevented Trump from making a lot of big boo-boos.
A lot of the big boo-boos that Trump usually makes—I mean, by this point, he usually has stuck his foot up his butt in some way or another.
He hasn't done that for 48 hours.
I know that our standards have lowered to the point where it's a big shock when a 70-year-old man doesn't step in a pile of crap for 48 hours, but that is where our standards are.
He hasn't for 48 hours, and he's given a couple of actually very good speeches.
He's actually done a couple of very good things.
Here's where Steve's skill set comes to bear with Trump.
So Steve is good at handling talent.
He's handled Sarah Palin before.
He's dealt with Michelle Bachman before.
He was friendly with Andrew Breitbart, of course.
What he does with talent is he tends to double them down.
He tries to tell talent that they need to be more them.
They need to be more authentically them.
With Trump, that's a better tactic than trying to reign him in and trying to turn him into Mitt Romney.
He's never going to be Mitt Romney, nor should he want to be Mitt Romney.
He's not capable of that.
So what Bannon will do is he'll double Trump down.
That has its good aspects, it also has its bad aspects.
The good aspects are, when Trump is on like he has been the last couple of days, it's quite good.
Even if I disagree with him on a lot of stuff.
The bad aspect is that Trump is, as I've said before, a Category 5 turd tornado.
Every so often, he's liable to just blow through town and wreck everything and leave dead people in his wake.
I mean, it's that bad.
I don't think that Steve is capable of stopping the turd tornado that is Trump.
But there are some ancillary points to be made here about conservative media and about the future of the conservative movement that I think are more important than Bannon's specific impact on the Trump campaign.
As I say, I think he could have maybe a beneficial impact on the Trump campaign.
So first, let me explain to you who Steve Bannon is and why I know Steve Bannon.
I've known Steve Bannon longer than I was actually at Breitbart, and Steve knows me longer than he was at Breitbart, actually.
So, Steve Bannon turned Breitbart News into Trump's personal Pravda.
To understand what this means, understand, I was friends with Andrew Breitbart since the time I was 17 years old.
I worked very, very closely with Andrew Breitbart on a number of different projects for many, many years before he hired me in 2012.
We were very friendly.
We used to IM and speak all the time.
He's been over at my parents' house for dinner.
I mean, Andrew and I, we're good friends.
Breitbart News was designed to be a fighting media site.
That's what it was designed to do.
It was designed to fight bullies.
And under the auspices of Steve Bannon, as he became more and more tied to Trump, it became simply a Trump-Pravda site.
You remember back in March, I quit Breitbart over the incident with Michelle Fields.
Now, a lot of people think that that incident was exaggerated, nothing really that bad happened, but that doesn't matter, okay?
The part of the story that actually matters is that Michelle Fields was indeed grabbed by Corey Lewandowski, And Breitbart basically gaslit her.
Breitbart decided that they were going to come out in favor of Trump and say not that nothing bad had happened, but that she'd never even been grabbed, that she was basically making it up, it never happened, Corey Lewandowski hadn't grabbed her, and then you spread that rumor everywhere.
Undercut your own reporter, smear your own reporter is basically crazy in order to get in closer with Trump.
I quit over that and here is the statement that I issued.
What I said was, Andrew Breitbart built his life and career on one mission, fight the bullies.
But Andrew's life mission has been betrayed.
Indeed, Breitbart News, under the chairmanship of Steve Bannon, has put a stake through the heart of Andrew's legacy.
In my opinion, Steve Bannon is a bully, and has sold out Andrew's mission in order to back another bully, Donald Trump.
He has shaped the company into Trump's personal Pravda.
The facts are undeniable.
Breitbart News has become precisely the reverse of what Andrew would have wanted.
Steve Bannon and those who follow his lead should be ashamed of themselves.
Okay, that looks pretty good today because that's exactly what it was.
He turned it into Trump's personal Pravda.
They denied this at the time.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
They ran a whole big piece about how I was a traitor to the cause for leaving and for pointing out that it's bad when publications don't back their own reporters out of personal loyalty to a political candidate.
That makes them a propaganda outlet, not a news outlet.
Trump is not a conservative.
Andrew knew Trump was not a conservative.
He never would have provided the worshipful coverage of Donald Trump's nationalist populist agenda that Breitbart did.
Andrew didn't like bullies.
Trump is a bully.
But obviously Bannon is too, so it doesn't really matter.
Okay, so that's number one that you need to know about Bannon.
Second, if you think Bannon is in this for Trump, he's not in it for Trump.
He's in it for Bannon, okay?
The way that Steve works, and just look at his political career, he became prominent when he did a really crappy documentary called Generation Zero.
And it is.
I mean, it's an egregiously bad documentary.
It's the kind of documentary made by an amateur where you have a bunch of Where you have a bunch of time-lapse photography to demonstrate drama, and you go black and white to demonstrate drama, and you have stock footage of clowns hitting each other.
Really, this is the kind of thing that was in his film.
He got some coverage for this.
He got on Fox News.
He was on Sean Hannity's Friends with Sean.
He began elevating his profile after he attached himself to Michelle Bachman with another documentary called Fire from the Heartland, and then he did another documentary after he insinuated himself in with Sarah Palin.
He made another crappy documentary called The Undefeated.
And again, it's a really, really crappy documentary.
But the point was, he was now associated with Sarah Palin.
And this was now his calling card.
Because Sarah Palin was a hot commodity in 2011, right?
She's fresh off of the 2008 race.
People were still big fans of Sarah Palin.
This is before she sort of became a parody of herself.
And Bannon attached himself to her and sort of rode her coattails and presumably kept telling her everything she was doing was wonderful until she became sort of the mockery that she's become.
And I don't think it's a coincidence that Palin was the first Tea Partier to really endorse Trump.
He began appearing on Fox News fairly regularly, and he met Andrew Breitbart.
He gave Andrew Breitbart some office space, and he lent Andrew Breitbart the office space, which Andrew was grateful for.
And then, after Andrew died, Larry Solove, who was Andrew Breitbart's partner, decided, okay, I'm gonna make Bannon the chairman of the company.
There were a lot of people inside the company who I think were not— I was one of them.
I was not happy that Bannon was made chairman of the company, because I'd had experiences with Bannon before.
But, in any case, he made him chairman of the company.
And things were fine for a while, because Steve was Steve's a very smart guy.
He's a bright guy.
When the Trump campaign began, that's when things began to go sideways, because at that point it became clear that Steve, who was the guiding force of Breitbart now, had decided that it was very important that Trump be stumped for under virtually all circumstances.
So it turned into Trump-Pravda.
He denied that it was turning into Trump-Pravda, or if he didn't personally, I mean, he essentially did, but the website definitely tried to maintain this veneer of, we're not Trump-Pravda.
And now, of course, it's clear.
They were Trump-Pravda.
In fact, half the staff is now moving over there.
There's a report today that Matthew Boyle, their lead Washington reporter, is going to be working for Trump.
Joel Pollack, who was the in-house counsel and former editor-in-chief, he had been trying to get a speechwriting job with Trump.
Okay, so they're always very close.
And it was all for Steve's personal self-aggrandizement.
I also have some information from other sources.
This is not from me.
The chief investors in Breitbart News are people called the Mercers.
Robert Mercer is a hedge fund manager, and they gave an enormous amount of money to Ted Cruz.
They started a super PAC for Ted Cruz, gave a lot of money to the Ted Cruz super PAC.
They're also the lead investors in Breitbart News.
Well, as the campaign went on, other people who were spending money on the Cruz campaign went to the Mercer family, whose spokesperson was Kellyanne Conway, the new campaign manager for Trump, and they said to Kellyanne Conway and the Mercers, guys, what are you doing?
You're spending like tens of millions of dollars on Cruz, and you also spent money on Breitbart.
Why is your right hand fighting with your left hand?
Why is Breitbart trying to take out Cruz and push Trump?
And the Mercer family was telling people, no, no, no, Bannon isn't anti-Trump.
They were telling people, no, Breitbart News isn't anti-Trump.
Now, anyone who's watching Breitbart News knew, I mean, or anti-Cruz, everybody who's watching Breitbart News knew that it was a pro-Trump outlet at that point, but presumably, I mean, I can't imagine any other way the Mercers got this impression, presumably Bannon was telling them all the way through, it's not that we're pro-Trump, we're not, we're just, we're treating everybody equally.
That's kind of bad stuff.
Breitbart staff, as I mentioned, lusts after Trump involvement, which is important.
Under Bannon's leadership, Breitbart also transferred into, in following Trump, they transferred into the sort of Milo Yiannopoulos, white supremacist, alt-right garbage version of the right wing that has nothing to do with constitutional conservatism.
And that, I think, is a betrayal of Andrew's memory.
Also, it's worth noting, and here's where we get into the serious stuff.
You know, I've speculated that this could be, for Steve, what's Steve's play?
Well, I mean, play number one could be Trump wins, and now he's the chief of staff and I have to go into hiding.
That's play number one.
Play number two is Trump loses, and at that point, Steve uses Trump and all of his newfound media connections, who have become very loyal to Trump, and builds a new network, and builds a new network.
And that's speculation, but Steve's a very smart guy, and I would imagine that he's thought along those lines, because he doesn't like to enter scenarios where it's a win-lose, where he can lose.
That's a no-lose scenario.
If he wins, then he's in the White House.
If he loses, then he gets to build this big new network and blame people like me for Trump losing, even though he was the one in charge of the failing Trump campaign.
Okay, so a couple of important points here.
And as I mentioned, I think that Bannon's a legitimately sinister figure.
But there are some more important points than just Trump hiring sinister figures.
He's hired sinister figures before.
For goodness sake, he's hired Paul Manafort, who may be on the Kremlin's payroll.
He's a very close relationship with Roger Stone, one of the sleaziest people in American politics.
This would be nothing new.
Here is where we get dicey.
Here is where we get dicey.
The place where we get dicey is the point that Trump tried to make the other day.
So here's Donald Trump talking about how he's sick of the media-donor political complex.
And he's talking about the left here.
Do we have this clip one?
Or some encrusted old politician says they oppose our campaign.
Or some big-time lobbyist says they oppose the campaign of Trump.
I wear their opposition as a badge of honor.
Because it means I'm fighting for real change, not just partisan change where everybody else gets rich but you.
A rigged, rigged system.
Remember it.
I said it first.
I'll probably be saying it for a long time.
But eventually, we're going to break that system.
Media donor political class, right?
He just hired the head of a major, major political website to run his campaign.
Breitbart has built itself on the back of Trump.
I mean, they went from like 30 million page views a month in 2012, 2013, to now 200 million page views, largely on the back of Trumpism.
Largely on the back of Trump.
And, you know, that's...
His prerogative, but it does give the lie to the idea that there's media corruption only on one side of the aisle.
Because the fact is this, the Trump campaign has been claiming that there's this whole vast swath of media on the left who refuse to acknowledge their own bias and then go out there and stump for Democrats.
That is 100% true.
That is also exactly what Breitbart is.
That's exactly what Breitbart has become.
Breitbart was a propaganda outlet for Donald Trump.
They refused to acknowledge it, and now they are part and parcel of the Trump campaign.
And it's really nasty.
It's really bad.
Andrew Breitbart wrote large segments in his book, Righteous Indignation, about the evils of what he called the Democrat media complex.
He said that was a really nasty thing to have these people working hand in glove.
The idea was not to build a Trump Media complex.
That was not the idea, but that's exactly what Bannon has created here.
And again, it demonstrates the corruption within conservatism, the lust for power that allows people to sell out their principles, and it really is quite ugly.
Again, that may not be a bad move for Trump.
So, now that we've put all of that information aside, now that's all on the table, and I've tried to be objective as I can, and I'm admittedly not objective about this.
Now that we've put that aside, now that we've said, you know, maybe Trump is capable of, maybe this is a good move for Trump, now I want to talk about good Trump.
But for that, you're going to have to subscribe to Daily Wire, because we're at the end of Facebook Live and YouTube.
So go over to dailywire.com, become a subscriber.
That allows you to see the rest of the show.
It allows you to email me and get in the mailbag, which I'm sure will be very busy this week.
Dailywire.com for all the rest of that information.
And you can obviously listen to the rest of the show on iTunes or SoundCloud a little bit later today.
We are the number one conservative podcast in America.
So check us out at dailywire.com.
All righty.
So now it's time for some good trumps.
So I've told you everything you need to know about the Trump campaign apparatus.
Again, I think that Bannon will be kind of a yes man.
I think that he's going to tell Trump what he wants to hear because his relationship with Trump is significantly more important to him than Trump actually winning.
I don't think that he's going to be able to boost Trump to victory.
I think that he's going to push whatever the Breitbart line is.
Now, he may bring some discipline to Trump.
He may bring some discipline to Trump.
And the reason I say this is because last night, Donald Trump gave what is, by any measure, the best speech that Donald Trump has ever given.
It was a really, really good speech.
It was a 9 out of 10 speech.
In some areas, it was a 10 out of 10 speech.
This is his speech on race.
So he gave a speech that's about 40 miles outside of Milwaukee, with these riots going on that we've been talking about the past few days.
And he gives a speech on law and order and crime.
And suddenly Donald Trump is who people wanted him to be.
Suddenly Donald Trump is saying politically incorrect things that must be said.
What he's about to say here, what you're about to hear Donald Trump say is very, very good stuff.
Here is Donald Trump talking about law and order in front of the media.
And again, this is what people wanted Trump to be.
This is good.
This is good Trump.
The violence, riots, and destruction that have taken place in Milwaukee is an assault on the right of all citizens to live in security and to live in peace.
Law and order must be restored.
It must be restored for the sake of all But most especially for the sake of those living in the affected communities, of which there are many.
The main victims of these riots are law-abiding African American citizens living in these neighborhoods.
It's their job, it's their homes, it's their schools and communities which will suffer the most as a result.
There's no compassion in tolerating lawless conduct for anyone.
Crime and violence is an attack on the poor and will never be accepted in a Trump administration.
Okay, so that's first rate.
That's first rate.
Crime and violence won't be accepted.
It's an attack on—exactly right.
Exactly right.
And then he goes on, and he says that Hillary Clinton's narrative is absolute nonsense and does damage to race relations in the country.
This is great stuff.
This is top-notch Trump stuff.
If the man had any sort of focus at all, if the man had any capacity to contain himself, this would be a very different race right now.
Maybe that's what Bannon will bring.
Maybe it will be.
And again, I'm trying to be as objective as I can be about a guy who I think, I was on CNN earlier today, and they asked me, you know, you're saying all these things about, about Bannon being vindictive and nasty and all this stuff.
Do you have any sour grapes?
And I said, well, sure.
I think he's a jerk.
But I'm trying to be objective about the impact on the Trump campaign, because I think that that matters more to people than the fact that Trump hires really nasty human beings around him, because I think we already know that.
So here is, here's Trump again, doing the right thing, going after Hillary Clinton.
The narrative has been pushed aggressively for years, and now, by our current administration, and pushed by my opponent, Hillary Clinton, you know, is a totally false one.
You know that.
The problem in our poorest communities is not that there are too many police.
The problem is that there are not enough police.
More law enforcement, more community engagement, more effective policing is what our country needs desperately.
Just like Hillary Clinton is against the minors, she is against the police.
Believe me.
You know it and I know it, and guess what?
She knows it.
Those peddling the narrative of cops as a racist force in our society, a narrative supported with a nod by my opponent, shared directly in the responsibility for the unrest in Milwaukee and many other places within our country.
They have fostered the dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America.
Again, 100% true.
This is exactly right.
Good for him for saying this.
Good on him for saying this.
This is disciplined Trump.
And by the way, his delivery here is much better.
His delivery here is significantly better than it has been.
Because I think that he actually believes this stuff.
So, you know, I think that this is really, really solid material from Donald Trump.
And then he continues along these lines.
Again, this is his best speech.
He says, the war on the cops has to stop.
Every time we rush to judgment with false facts and narratives, whether in Ferguson or in Baltimore, and foment further unrest, we do a direct disservice to poor African-American residents who are hurt by the high crime in their community.
A big, big unfair problem.
During the last 72 hours, while protesters have raged against the police here in Milwaukee, another nine were killed in Chicago, and another 46 were wounded.
More than 2,600 people have been shot in Chicago since the beginning of the year, and almost 4,000 people killed In President Obama's hometown area since his presidency began.
Not too good, that's for sure.
So how are we serving these American victims?
By attacking law enforcement officers.
The war on our police must end, and it must end now.
Thank you.
Come, come, come, come.
Thank you.
The war on police is a war on all peaceful citizens who want to be able to work and live and send their kids to school in safety.
Okay, this is exactly right.
It's exactly right.
I mean, I've been saying this stuff for months.
I've been saying that Republicans should campaign on the rising crime rate.
I've been saying we need more cops, not fewer cops.
He's saying everything that I've been saying, and he's saying it well.
This is really well stated.
This is really good stuff.
If this is what Bannon brings to the table, good for Bannon.
Good for Bannon.
I think Bannon's a terrible person, but that doesn't really matter, you know?
I mean, in the end, all that matters is, does he help Trump?
Does he make Trump better?
Does he make Trump worse?
We'll find out.
We'll find out.
But if last night was an indicator, then he's making Trump better, because this is exactly right.
And then he goes even further, and again, I thought this was just a great speech.
I really did.
I mean, I'm raving about the speech, because I think it was really terrific.
Here's Donald Trump talking about the black vote.
The Hillary Clinton agenda hurts poor people by far the most.
There is no compassion in allowing drug dealers, gang members, and felons to prey on innocent people.
It is the first duty of government to keep the innocent safe And when I'm president, I will fight for the safety of every American and especially those Americans who have not known safety for a very very long time I'm asking I will fight for the safety of every American and especially
I'm asking For the vote of every African-American citizen struggling in our country today who wants a different and much better future.
Good.
Honestly, this is good.
He should have been doing this weeks ago instead of attacking Gold Star families and making an ass of himself, but it's good that he's doing it now.
It's a little late.
We'll find out whether he's able to shift, whether the media will allow him to shift.
By the way, I do think that it was bad politicking to drop the Bannon news on the day after he gave such a good speech like this.
He could have just waited until the end of the week, done it Friday night, It's like the guy doesn't know how a Friday News dump works.
Just say that you made the move on Friday night.
Do it quietly.
There'll be a poop storm a little bit over the weekend, but nobody will pay attention.
And by Monday, you're still campaigning.
Instead, it looks like chaos, when it really may not be.
But this is really, really good stuff.
It's really good stuff.
And then he says what is true.
He says the Democratic Party has failed black people.
And this, of course, is exactly right.
The Democratic Party has failed and betrayed the African-American community.
Democratic crime policies, education policies, and economic policies have produced only more crime, more broken homes, and more poverty.
That's 100% true.
Okay, so, here's the deal.
All of this is good.
Are we now going to get more concerted Trump?
Are we going to get better Trump?
Maybe we are.
Because if the last two days are any indicator, Trump has been better.
Trump has been better.
And we'll find out whether he can be contained.
Whether Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway are capable of containing Donald Trump.
And it'll be interesting to find out.
I'm interested to find out, aren't you?
Now, as far as, you know, if I'm going to vote for the guy, you know, I have no plans right now to vote at the top of the ticket, as I've said, but that shifts on a day-to-day basis.
You know, I don't know where I'm going to be in three months.
If Trump is good for three months, if this becomes real Trump, if I become convinced that Trump isn't lying to me, if I become convinced that Trump actually believes the things that he said and he's not just being coached to say them, if I believe that Trump has an ounce of stability and an iota of decency, Then I could be convinced.
I mean, I've said this before.
Never Trump is a statement based on evidence that is available right now.
It is not a statement that if Donald Trump turns into a different candidate that things can't change, that things can't change.
But I thought that this speech was really first rate.
I do.
And I think that, you know, it's disturbing to me that some of the worst people I think in America are now surrounding Donald Trump.
That frightens me personally, because I know a lot of these people, and they're very vindictive, and I've spoken out against what I think is a vindictive, nasty ideology that they embrace, and that may have ramifications for me personally.
But that being said, that being said, I also understand that if it's a binary race between Trump and Hillary Clinton, and it comes down to, is Trump palatable, And you think that Trump is becoming more palatable, he's beginning to actually represent an ideology that's not terrible, he's beginning to move on from the alt-right white nationalism of Breitbart News' current iteration, and he just starts talking about things that are true and real, that changes the nature of the ballgame.
Now we'll have to see if that's true, because obviously he just imported half of Breitbart, and those people have imported a new brand of alt-right white nationalism to Breitbart that didn't used to exist there, which obviously was very troubling to me.
So, okay.
Now it's time to look at some of the media reactions.
The media obviously hate Trump.
And again, it undercuts his the media hate me argument when he actually takes in a major site and makes it part of his campaign.
That said, the media clearly hate Trump.
What he said here was true, right?
What he said here was true.
And that's not going to, that's not going to Carry any weight with the media because truth means nothing when it comes to the media.
There are a bunch of media outlets that immediately started tweeting that black folks don't believe anything that Trump is saying.
So here's a little bit of that.
So you have people saying Trump saw he was getting 1% from black people and said, too high!
Donald Trump is getting African American outreach wrong in the exact way the GOP has been getting it wrong my entire life.
Among other things, Trump has spoken all kinds of craziness about Obama.
Why would black folks vote for such a man?
We're 20 minutes into the speech in which Trump is making the pitch to African Americans and he hasn't said one thing that he'll do for them.
Trump went to Wisconsin to woo 1% of black voters that support him, which is weird because that 1% already works on his campaigns.
The media I've already jumped into, black people hate Trump.
They're not going to come behind him.
Now, I think that one of the reasons that he's had trouble with the black community is because of all of his various alliances with the alt-right.
I think that it didn't help him very much when he was going on national TV and refusing to denounce the KKK.
I think that sort of thing has play.
I think that that sort of thing doesn't work out well.
I don't think that it works out well for Donald Trump when he associates with the alt-right and uses terms, people who are closely associated with him use idiotic terms like cuck, which, for those who don't know, is an insult that means a man who likes to watch his wife have sex with black women, apparently.
I should know, I've been on enough, I've been on the receiving end of enough insults, cuck insults, to last me a lifetime during this campaign cycle.
But, that doesn't change the argument.
True is true.
True is true.
And I particularly like that tweet there that says, you know, Trump hasn't told black people what he'll do for them.
Yeah, he did.
He said, I'm gonna put more law enforcement in your community.
That's a big thing to do for black folks, because if the crime rate doesn't go down, there's gonna be no investment in those communities, no jobs in those communities, no decent schools in those communities.
If you don't get the crime rate down, you're not gonna have stable families, you're not gonna have stable jobs, you're not gonna have stable education.
But because he's not mirroring, I mean, what could he do other than go out there and mirror the left's welfare-first agenda?
Rip on the cops.
I mean, I'm sorry, but that doesn't wash.
I thought it was a great speech by Trump, and I think that that is what it is.
I think that that's a good move by Trump, and we'll see if he can put together a few days of this.
He's been 48 hours without a big boo-boo.
We'll see if that continues on.
Okay.
Now for some things I like and some things that I hate.
So, things I like.
So we've been doing true crime stories.
Good movie that came out, I think last year, with Steve Carell playing against type as DuPont, as this rich, this billionaire who wanted to coach wrestling and sponsor the Olympic wrestling team.
And he was responsible for the murder of this Olympic wrestler.
Here's the trailer for Foxcatcher.
Do you have any idea who I am?
Some rich guy calls you on the phone and wants to speak with you about what you hope to achieve.
What do you hope to achieve, Mark?
I want to be the best in the world.
Good. - There's a key for you.
Also, Big House is off limits.
Okay.
Coach DuPont has a vision.
He would like Foxcatcher to be the official training site for the national team.
What's he get out of all this?
What are you thinking?
This is it.
This is all that we've ever wanted.
Mark, you have been living in your brother's shadow your entire life.
It's your time now.
Promise you, I'll give you everything I have.
I am leading men.
And I am giving America hope.
I spent my lifetime looking for a father and I found one in John DuPont.
It doesn't matter.
The sport of wrestling is a low sport.
The movie itself is really good.
It's very gripping.
I liked it a lot.
I thought it was a very good movie.
Fox, Ketro, Steve Carell.
The best thing in it is Mark Ruffalo, who's a little bit mannered, but he plays the... He and Channing Tatum are both very good in it.
Very, very solid crime film.
Okay, other things that I like.
I have to admit, I laughed really hard when the left decided that they were going to go after Ellen DeGeneres.
So Ellen DeGeneres tweeted something out.
She thought it was going to be funny.
And it's a picture of her riding on Usain Bolt.
And it says, this is how I'm running errands from now on.
So it's a white woman gripping Usain Bolt's back as he runs.
Now, I don't see anything particularly racist about this.
Usain Bolt is the fastest man on earth.
That's obviously the joke.
It's not that he's a black man.
If he were a white man, presumably she'd do the same thing, right?
But the left loses their mind on her.
I mean, I'm talking about national political commentary.
Is it racist for her to tweet a photoshopped photo of herself riding Usain Bolt?
Is he her mule now?
I love it when the left eats the left.
I think it's hilarious.
Ellen DeGeneres is a beneficiary of politically correct standards when it comes to politics.
She's an enforcer of politically correct standards when it comes to politics.
Watching those standards turned against her, I just sort of like watching the left eat the left.
It's one of my favorite things.
Now, things that I hate.
Now, half the show today could have been called things that I hate, because, as I say, legitimately one of the worst people of whom I'm aware is now running the Trump campaign, and if he becomes chief of staff in the White House, then I'd best get my nail file ready, because I have a feeling that I will be behind bars.
But, here's some actual things I hate.
Rachel, one of the things that I hate, and this has been a problem for the Trump campaign, my biggest problem with the Trump campaign, is that they've made the arguments for the left themselves.
What I like about Trump's speech yesterday is that he actually made some good arguments.
What I dislike about the Trump campaign generally is they make the case for the left themselves.
So here is Rachel Maddow, last night on MSNBC, talking about the fact that Roger Ailes, who was just ousted from Fox News over dozens of allegations of sexual harassment, he's now going to be training Donald Trump for debate.
And here's Rachel Maddow.
He was just forced out of Fox News a few weeks ago because of multiple high-profile sexual harassment allegations from multiple female Fox News employees.
So it's a little odd, right, that the man at the center of the highest-profile sexual harassment scandal since Bill Cosby would be brought on board by a presidential campaign while that sexual harassment scandal was erupting.
That's the part of it that's odd, obviously.
Of course, what's expected about it is that, you know, if there's anybody who doesn't care about that kind of a scandal, it's probably Donald Trump.
Okay, so, you know, the problem here that you've got, the problem that you've got here is that it's true.
It's true.
He hires on Roger Ailes.
Roger Ailes, very famous political consultant, very good at what he does.
Roger Ailes is also under allegations, serious allegations of sexual harassment that span decades.
And Donald Trump hires him because obviously he doesn't care about the imagistics.
He doesn't care about how that plays out in the media.
It makes the left's argument so, so easy, and there's no reason to do that.
There's just no reason to do that.
But he did it anyway.
He did it anyway.
And there's no—again, he had the line of attack.
The line of attack is sexual assault and sexual harassment.
That's Bill Clinton.
Hillary justified it.
Now he's taking that line of attack away from himself by hiring Roger Ailes.
You see this kind of stuff with the Trump campaign all the time, just shooting themselves in the foot and destroying conservative arguments in the process, because everybody who's on the Trump train and thinks it's okay for him to hire Roger Ailes, now every time you say Hillary Clinton enables sexual assault and sexual harassment, they say, well, you enable sexual assault and sexual harassment because you back a guy who's willing to hire Roger Ailes to guide his campaign.
Sean Hannity did a bit of this same routine yesterday, and it's just, it's bad.
Here's Sean Hannity talking about CNN.
The media is so in the tank, so on board for Hillary, they're so abusively biased.
I literally watched this show on CNN over the weekend.
And you got this little pipsqueak named Brian Stelter, and he allowed this arrogant professor from the Kennedy School of Journalism to talk about Trump being a demagogue, and demagogues like Trump become dictators.
That's the type of coverage that CNN offers in this presidential race as they literally kiss Hillary Clinton's ass and Obama's ass every day.
Wait a minute.
Sean, I don't know if we're allowed to say that.
It's early.
Okay, so first of all, they literally kiss her ass.
No, they don't.
They figuratively kiss her ass.
But here's the problem.
Sean Hannity is right when he says that all of these outlets, they spin for Hillary unendingly and unceasingly.
That is 100% true.
It is 1000% true.
It could not be truer.
But Sean Hannity doesn't get to say that.
Okay, Sean Hannity doesn't get to talk about spinning for a candidate.
Sean Hannity has spent the last several months spinning for Donald Trump.
He's spinning so hard that he would make a dreidel look stagnant.
I mean, Donald Trump—there's a Jewish reference for you—for Donald Trump, For Sean Hannity to complain about bias in the media is just beyond ridiculous.
I mean, he's destroyed his own credibility.
And now that you have him doing this routine, it kills the argument.
And the argument is still valid.
It's still relevant.
It's still a good argument.
But there's no way that you can have Sean Hannity Making that argument.
Okay.
Final thing that I hate.
Roger Stone, another one of the world's worst human beings, is part of the Trump campaign.
And honestly, at this point, I think that Trump should just hire Alex Jones and be done with it.
He should just hire all of the people who love him ardently, but are unpalatable to mainstream conservatives.
Here's Roger Stone saying that Julian Assange has an October surprise planned.
I'm always wondering what's going on with Roger Stone.
Man leads an interesting life.
I mean, clearly he's doing this from, like, an old age home in Florida.
And here's Roger Stone talking to Dana Lash.
The left loved Julian Assange when he exposed the dark secrets of the Bushes.
And here he is exposing the dark secrets of the establishment.
I believe that Mr. Assange has all of the emails that Huma Abedin and Sheryl Mills, the two top Clinton aides, believe that they had destroyed.
So if that is true, And he releases him through this election as he released strategically the DNC documents that showed that Hillary basically had to cheat to screw Bernie out of the Democratic nomination.
Assange is going to be very influential in this election because he's going to be educating the American people about the Clintons.
That those who destroyed the email records made the political calculation that they would take less heat for having an unsecured, secret, illegal server and erasing the stuff they thought was problematic than they would take by their being read?
That means whatever is in them must be political dynamite.
Okay, so what I love about this is that he says basically a little birdie told him that Julian Assange is going to release information.
How much would you like to bet that the little birdie resides in the Kremlin?
Any bets on that?
There's a report from AP today that Paul Manafort may be under investigation for his ties to Vladimir Putin.
There may or may not be illegality.
Again, handing arguments to the left is just dumb.
If Julian Assange is going to do it, just let Julian Assange do it.
If there's going to be bad material about Hillary, he can just release it.
But having Trump surrogates out there, Trump allies out there on the campaign trail basically spinning for Julian Assange, who is a bad, bad dude, it's just dumb all the way around.
Okay, on Wednesdays, we do our Bible verse study.
We do our Bible study.
Every week, as I mentioned, we talk about the latest Bible portion.
So in the Jewish community, as I explain every week, we read a different portion of the Torah.
It's called the Torah portion, a parsha, and this week it is from Deuteronomy.
By the time we go through the whole year, we've gone through the entire five books of Moses.
This week it is from Deuteronomy 4.
So here are some Bible verses.
Verses Deuteronomy 4 says, And now, O Israel, hearken unto the statutes and unto the ordinances which I teach to you to do them, that you may live and go in and possess the land which the Lord, the God of your fathers, gives you.
You shall not add to the word unto which I command you, neither shall you diminish from it, that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you.
This is a really tough one for a lot of religious people.
And it's a tough one for people on the left, too, by the way.
It's very easy in life to think that you can discern the motives behind the universe, and then that you can pass a bunch of laws or regulations that make that motive clear.
The Torah is filled with commandments.
Jews have 613 commandments.
According to Judaism, non-Jews have seven commandments that they have to keep, the seven commandments of Noah.
But it's imperative.
I mean, it's a very important thing that a lot of religious people forget.
It's not just, don't take away the law.
Don't just abrogate the law.
It's also, you don't get to add laws on top of the other laws to create some sort of giant bulwark of laws that you claim are in God's name.
You don't really get to do that.
God is clear about what he wants in the Torah, and he doesn't need your help.
He doesn't need you adding commandments to what he's doing.
And the same thing is true when it comes to the realm of government.
The easiest thing in the world, and it's a way of viewing things that the left has made very popular, is when the left talks about, you know, why should you be allowed to do something?
Why should you be allowed to do something?
What they're talking about is a regime where the government has all the power and you're only allowed to do things.
Right?
It's just an allowance from the government for you to be able to earn.
It's an allowance from the government for you to be able to conduct your religious life as you see fit.
That's precisely the reverse of what a good system does.
A good system says, here are the minimal numbers of rules that you need in order to be a good person.
And in order to ensure that you don't hurt anyone else, which is sort of the baseline definition of being a decent person.
And then we don't add rules on top of that.
And then it's your job to be a good person outside of that.
You know, in religious communities, and I'm talking as somebody who's an Orthodox Jew who follows, you know, as many of the 613 as I possibly can.
When I look at the bulwark of laws that Judaism represents, one of the beauties of it is that it takes very seriously the idea of what does God want me to do on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment level.
One of the things that drives people away, however, is when people assume that extra regulations, that extra laws, that extra rules are going to make people closer to God or closer to loyalty to the government or closer to each other.
It's just not the case.
It's just not the case.
There are certain rules that we all have to follow, but as God says, you don't add to the word which he commands, because God knows human nature better than you do.
And adding to those words just because you think you know better than God, and because you think that even in the interest of preserving what you think God wants you to do, is a very, very dicey and dangerous business indeed.
Okay, finally, some corrections.
So, a couple of days ago, I was talking about Bowling Branch.
It's a great sponsor, BowlingBranch.com.
They have these great sheets that I've been sleeping on.
They're fantastic.
And you go to BowlingBranch.com, slash Ben, you type in promo code Ben.
And you get a 20% discount.
I talked about a $200 set of sheets, and like an idiot, I said 20% of $200 is $20.
It's not.
It's $40.
Thanks for the correction.
Other corrections.
I had said, I think on Monday, that the last Republican mayor of Milwaukee was 1960.
That was not true.
It was 1908.
I made the mistake of looking at the chart of various mayors from Milwaukee on Wikipedia, and I saw that the last red one Was 1960.
I neglected to look that red in this various, in this particular chart said Democratic Socialist because I forgot that that's not even a thing, right?
But it was a thing.
The last time they've had a Republican mayor was 1908.
Finally, I said that the Guinness Book of World Records, this is true, so it's not a mistake, the Guinness Book of World Records said the fastest a woman had ever thrown a baseball was 69 miles an hour.
I got a bunch of tweets from very, very angry, angry feminists saying that's not true.
The fastest a woman has ever thrown a baseball is about 80 miles an hour.
Which does not change my point in the slightest.
80 miles an hour will maybe allow you to get on the back end of the pitching staff on a junior varsity high school baseball team.
Okay, and that was my rip on Fox's new series pitch.
Okay, so we've come to the end of today's show.
There's going to be much more tomorrow.
I know Donald Trump has a town hall tonight.
We'll see how his new campaign shakeup plays out, and we'll have more Inside Scoop for you here on The Ben Shapiro Show.
▲
Export Selection