Ep. 186 - It's Debate Night -- And Advantage: Trump
Hillary's running from behind, Trump's on the move, and the media have lost their minds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Hillary's running from behind, Trump's on the move, and the media have lost their minds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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In a move that surprised many Republicans but few political insiders, Senator Ted Cruz was expected to announce on Friday, and did, that he would support Donald Trump's bid for the presidency against Hillary Clinton. | |
For weeks, members of the Cruz team had been hinting at such an announcement. | |
Cruz himself had quietly hinted he was reconsidering his publicly non-committal stance on the candidate who labeled him, Lyin' Ted, suggested he was a serial adulterer, called his wife ugly, and said his father was a conspirator in the murder of JFK, A man Cruz himself had called a pathological liar and a non-conservative charlatan. | |
But on Friday, two days before the first debate, Politico broke the news that Cruz would endorse Trump. | |
It's a bad if understandable political move. | |
Here are the things you need to know. | |
First, Cruz has experienced more pressure than anyone else in America over Trump. | |
Except for maybe me. | |
Cruz has been hammered by former allies in the media and the Republican Party for not openly embracing Trump and bowing before his great god king. | |
That criticism existed before the RNC. | |
It escalated dramatically in the days afterward. | |
More on that in a second. | |
Cruz's donors shied away from him. | |
Some of his biggest boosters in talk radio began ripping him regularly. | |
The RNC chairman Reince Priebus, or Prince Regis as a friend calls him, openly threatened his future presidential prospects. | |
Trump and his allies suggested primarying Cruz in the Texas Senate race, which put Cruz in a rough spot politically. | |
With a few words, he thought he could end all the pressure. | |
The calculation was that simple. | |
And I guess it deserves at least a little bit of sympathy. | |
He is a politician. | |
Second point, this is a pretty bad political move. | |
And when I say pretty bad, I mean this is Hindenburg-level disaster bad. | |
It's fully understandable to say you'll vote for Trump, but continue to acknowledge he's a disaster area for conservatives. | |
This is what Mark Levin does. | |
That doesn't appear to be what Cruz is doing. | |
Cruz is now announcing he's been surprised by Trump's new message discipline. | |
Even as Trump embraces Vladimir Putin, government-sponsored maternity leave, a plan to cram down tuition price controls, and an expansion of Medicaid. | |
This puts him less in the hold-your-nose-and-vote-Trump category than the Trump-trained category. | |
And it's partially due to timing. | |
The timing undercuts Cruz's entire image as a man of principle in a world of dirty politics. | |
He used Trump's announcement of Senator Mike Lee as a potential Supreme Court pick as a fig leave for the move, but everyone can see that it's a fig leave. | |
The move appears transparently political, not principled. | |
Principled support for Trump, it could have come before the convention, or at the convention, Or just after the convention. | |
To jump on board two days before the debates, at a time when Trump is obviously ratcheting up pressure on never-Trumpers to jump aboard. | |
Manipulative. | |
It seems even more manipulative given Cruz's early warmth towards Trump, when he thought he could ride Trump's coattails in the nomination, and then he broke with Trump, which seemed more principled, and now he re-embraces Trump just in time for the election. | |
It's worth noting here that Cruz is taking a real risk by endorsing Trump. | |
Cruz's Trump endorsement is risky not just because he risks fracturing his base, hoping presumably they'll forget about his endorsement if Trump loses, and acknowledging his correctness if Trump wins, but because Trump could actually destroy him. | |
Trump's done that before. | |
As I reported at the time back in the RNC, Cruz's speech at the RNC was designed to be an overture to Trump. | |
It was actually a quasi-endorsement. | |
That didn't explicitly provide support for Trump, but obviously paved the way for that kind of support. | |
Cruz negotiated that language in advance with Trump. | |
Trump knew about it. | |
And then Trump used the vagueness of the speech as an opportunity to cast Cruz publicly as a traitor, sending his minions to the convention floor to whip up booze before popping into the convention himself like a WWE hero to Cruz's villain. | |
It's worth noting that on Friday, it's possible that Trump could have done the same thing to Cruz again. | |
Cruz could have been putting his head on the chopping block, Ned Stark style, only for Trump to go full Joffrey and behead him. | |
Trump said after the RNC he wouldn't accept Cruz's endorsement, but it appears that Kellyanne Conway was successful in prying Trump's phone from his fingers in the moments after Cruz submitted, and now he says he's glad to have Cruz's endorsement. | |
So, what's the outcome likely to be? | |
Well, Cruz isn't going to move a lot of voters over to Trump. | |
Most Cruz voters who haven't moved over to Trump supported Cruz out of principle, not out of personal loyalty to him, and they're not going to be persuaded to move to Trump now. | |
This morning, Glenn Beck just crushed Cruz on the air. | |
They'll feel their guy capitulated because the establishment forced him to kneel before Zod. | |
Cruz will have undercut his own image, and Trump probably won't be able to help a gloating in the days to come. | |
Here's Cruz's best bet. | |
If Trump wins, he'll have been on the winning team. | |
If Trump loses, he won't be blamed for the loss. | |
That's true, as far as it goes. | |
But because of how Cruz played his hand here, he's going to be seen less as a reluctant man pushing Trump to victory than a guy who chose expedience over principle. | |
Which is actually kind of tragic, since Cruz probably is a man of principle, victimized by both a system that crushes principle and a belief he can still manipulate that system to his own ends. | |
He can't. | |
He'd be better off acknowledging that simple fact and standing with the principles he supposedly believed. | |
I'm Ben Shapiro. | |
This is The Ben Shapiro Show. | |
All righty, so, lots to talk about today. | |
Today, the big debate is coming, and I'm gonna give you my preview. | |
I'm gonna give you what I think the headlines tomorrow will be. | |
I'm gonna tell you why I woke up this morning and I thought to myself, what the F did you people do? | |
What did you do? | |
Like, now, it finally comes down to it. | |
We're at the debate. | |
You know, it sort of hit, there's some truths in life that sort of hit you randomly. | |
Like, I've heard from people when they lose a close relative that they'll be okay for a while, and then they'll just think about the relative, and they'll think, that's really awful. | |
Well, every so often in this election cycle, you just look around and you go, okay, tonight, the debate is going to be between the Wicked Witch of the West and Biff Tannen. | |
Like, it's actually going to be between—it's going to be between Lenny from Of Mice and Men and the most corrupt woman in the history of American politics. | |
And you think to yourself, oh God, one of these people is going to be leader of the free world. | |
What did you do? | |
Even if you prefer Trump. | |
Even if you're excited about Trump. | |
I don't know how you can be excited about Trump as opposed to just excited about Hillary losing. | |
That I understand. | |
Being excited about Hillary losing? | |
Totally on board. | |
Watching her weep tears of salty, salty anguish over losing to Donald Trump would be just the most fitting capstone to her ridiculous political career. | |
And the media, weeping into their beer, would also be particularly rich. | |
That would be enjoyable, watching all these people crying. | |
But then, Trump would also be president, and that's not going to be awesome, just saying. | |
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Okay. | |
So, going into the big debate tonight, there are going to be like 100 million people who watch this thing. | |
It's going to be like the Super Bowl. | |
Everybody's going to watch it. | |
I don't know who's making their mind up based on this debate. | |
I mean, honestly, I made a couple of miscalculations in this election cycle, I'll just be honest with you. | |
My predictions in this election cycle have not been up to their normal par, but partially that's because I thought that Americans wanted a president who wasn't a complete moron, and partially I thought that's because Americans didn't want a president who was a complete corrupt handbag of lunacy. | |
I was wrong, so I apologize for that. | |
My opinion of American voters was apparently too high, and so we end up with a debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton for the leadership of the free world, which is It's America, the reality show, 2016. | |
Harambee, where are you when we needed you? | |
It's just tragic. | |
But Trump has all the advantages going into this debate. | |
So I'm going to put aside my own personal rage over this election cycle and put aside the fact that I think everyone is stupid and everything is stupid. | |
I'm going to drink heavily during this debate. | |
I have to be at an event in Simi Valley later today covering this thing. | |
I'll cover it live on dailywire.com. | |
I'll be covering it on Twitter, so make sure that you pay attention there. | |
Um, but we'll get back to my issues of rage in just a minute. | |
The fact that the lesser of two evils has led us to a place where everything stinks, where the debate tonight is going to go something like this. | |
Hillary Clinton. | |
Donald, you're stupid. | |
Donald Trump. | |
You're so crooky. | |
Crooked Hillary. | |
Hillary. | |
Donald. | |
You're also crooked. | |
Trump. | |
You're crooked and ugly. | |
Hillary. | |
Sexist. | |
Trump. | |
Your husband raped people. | |
Hillary. | |
Meh. | |
Congratulations, America. | |
One of these two people will be your president. | |
Okay, so, don't worry, we'll get back to more hot rage spewing from me henceforth, but Trump has all the advantages going in. | |
So, there's some major advantages that Trump has going in tonight, and he should win the debate. | |
He should. | |
I'm predicting it now. | |
Trump should win the debate if he can hold himself in check. | |
Right now, Hillary's entire campaign, her entire campaign, Is it possible, is it possible that she can win just by convincing the American public that Trump is a nut? | |
Trump's entire campaign is, don't look like a nut. | |
So, it's easier for a nut to look not like a nut for 90 minutes. | |
If you've ever met somebody who's completely insane in your life, they actually play normal people pretty well most of the time. | |
It's only every so often you realize they think that the curtains are talking to them. | |
But, most of the time, crazy people act kind of not crazy, which is why it's sort of hard to deal with people who legitimately have a screw loose. | |
Assuming Trump is crazy, he may not be, he may just be stupid, but assuming Trump is crazy, he can play not crazy for 90 minutes, which is more of an advantage. | |
Hillary's main fault here in the polls is people think she's dishonest. | |
If you're a liar, if you're a dishonest person, if people think you're dishonest, then five seconds of you is enough to convince them that you're just as dishonest as everyone ever thought you were. | |
If, however, you're crazy, it's actually not that hard to make it seem as though you're not. | |
Here are some of the advantages. | |
First, it is now a dead heat. | |
This race is a dead heat. | |
And that is less a testament to Trump being great at this, and more a testament to the fact that Hillary is the worst political candidate in the history of humankind. | |
I mean, like, there are cave dwellers, Neanderthal cave dwellers, back before the rise of human language, who are worse politicians than Hillary—that she's worse than. | |
Hillary Clinton. | |
It's very possible. | |
She could have lost to, like, Og, the caveman, in an election. | |
Like, now, today, if you brought Og the caveman, who can't speak English, and just grunts at people, Og the caveman could probably beat Hillary in a national election because she's just this bad at this. | |
You know, last week we played that tape of her screaming, why aren't I up by 50 points? | |
Because of tape like that, Hillary. | |
So, the numbers are really bad. | |
The new polls show dead heat. | |
Dead heat between Trump and Clinton. | |
Bloomberg today has Trump up over Clinton in a four-way race, 43 to 41. | |
So, as I've said before, this is not Trump doing unbelievably well. | |
He still can't break 43 percent in a national poll four-way, but he can do—but he can beat her if enough people go third party. | |
And this is what's amazing. | |
A lot of focus being put on the never-Trumpers now, because everybody's got to get on the Trump train. | |
There are more Republicans on the Trump train than Democrats on the Hillary train. | |
According to an ABC poll yesterday, 87% of Republicans are going to vote for Trump. | |
84% of Democrats are going to vote for Hillary. | |
45% of Republicans, something like that, are enthusiastic about voting Trump. | |
Only 34% of Democrats are enthusiastic about voting Hillary. | |
The new CNN-ORC poll shows Trump up one in a four-way race. | |
CNN/RC has Trump up one in Colorado, which means he wins the election, down one in Pennsylvania. | |
Hillary had this firewall. | |
The firewall is gone. | |
What's more, Trump is up 59 points among white, non-college educated men, and 47 percent of Americans think Trump is going—that Trump's going to lose the debate tonight. | |
47 percent think Hillary will win. | |
Only 33% think Trump will win. | |
That means Trump is at a massive advantage. | |
Expectations, that's the name of the game. | |
All Trump has to do is not almost literally diarrhea himself on stage or eat a Mexican baby and he wins the race tonight. | |
He wins and he wins the debate tonight. | |
Hillary Clinton has to prove that she's likable. | |
She has to prove that she's human. | |
She has to prove she's not dead. | |
All of these are uphill battles for a walking corpse. | |
So, Excuse me. | |
Nate Silver writes this morning, quote, the latest polling is consistent with a Clinton lead of only 1% nationally. | |
State firewall breaking up. | |
Trend lines awful. | |
Are you ready for this? | |
Lefties, it's panic time, okay? | |
I mean, I think everyone, it's panic time for either of these two candidates winning, but left, people who are Hillary allies, panic, panic, panic galore. | |
Okay, right now, here's the panic. | |
If the election were held today, according to Nate Silver, Hillary would lose. | |
If the election were held today, there is a 55% shot that Trump wins. | |
Woo! | |
And the reason for that, the reason for that is that Hillary is legitimately awful at this in every way. | |
So Robby Mook is her campaign spokesperson. | |
fitting name. | |
Robbie Mook was on Jake Tapper on CNN. | |
And Jake Tapper asks Robbie Mook about new emails revealed on Friday showing that one of the IT people actually talked about Hillary's cover up operation, direct quote, Hillary's cover up operation in the emails. | |
And Robbie Mook looks like he wants to actually slice off his own ears in the middle of this particular interview. | |
An IT contractor managing Hillary Clinton's private email server made reference to the, quote, Hillary cover up operation in a work ticket. | |
He used those words after a senior Clinton aide asked him to automatically delete emails after 60 days. | |
This IT worker certainly sounded like he thought he was covering something up, no? | |
Look, Jake, first of all, I'm actually glad you asked this question, because a lot of this stuff is swirling around there in the ether. | |
It's important to pull back and look at the facts here. | |
The FBI did a comprehensive and deep investigation into this, and at the conclusion of that, FBI Director Comey came out and said to the world that there was no case here, that they did not have evidence of wrongdoing on Hillary's part. | |
So what's the Hillary cover-up operation? | |
So, and Tapper asks, what's Hillary's cover-up operation? | |
And Mook has no answer for that because Hillary's cover-up operation can be translated in English as Hillary's cover-up operation because she's covering things up. | |
And it's amazing. | |
I mean, Mook is also asked, he specifically asked about Hillary's staffers. | |
And he says, don't worry, we're brutally honest to her. | |
Does Secretary Clinton have anyone in her orbit Who can be brutally honest and frank with her? | |
I ask that because it seems like, based on a lot of the information we've gotten about her emails and the like, that she might not have people like that. | |
And in debate prep, it would be very important for somebody to really be able to go after her, to prepare her for a debate. | |
And I don't know that she has anybody like that in her orbit. | |
Well, she absolutely does, Jake. | |
Anybody who's worked for Secretary Clinton, first of all, knows that she surrounds herself with experts on every matter that she looks into. | |
She just did a call earlier this week after. - She surrounds herself with experts like Robbie Mook. | |
Yeah, I'm sure that everybody takes this seriously. | |
So, number one, the numbers don't favor Hillary. | |
Number two, there are different standards for these particular candidates. | |
There are different standards. | |
I'm gonna discuss that in just one second. | |
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Okay, so I want to make a quick note before we have to pause right here. | |
First of all, it sounds like I'm dying. | |
It's because I'm still... I've still been infected by the Hillary Plague. | |
I watched a YouTube video of her collapsing and it was so contagious that I'm still dying weeks later. | |
But in any case... | |
The standards here, Trump has a lower standard. | |
People know Trump's ignorant. | |
They're not expecting him to be fully baked on policy. | |
They know he's colorful, which is to say he says crazy things. | |
They know that he'll say offensive stuff. | |
They know that he kind of lies out of habit, but they think that that's just a facet of his truth-telling. | |
He just, he says things that are honest but not honest. | |
Hillary, they know she's dishonest. | |
They hate her. | |
There's a far better shot. | |
Trump is able to survive 90 minutes. | |
without looking like a complete nutcase, and that Hillary's able to look honest over the course of 90 minutes. | |
So, Trump has advantages. | |
If you want to talk more about those advantages, go over to dailywire.com and subscribe right now. | |
Eight bucks a month, and that gets you access, and that allows you to continue watching us live. | |
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Go to dailywire.com right now and subscribe. | |
eight bucks a month. | |
So, as I suffer from the black lung, we continue, and let's talk a little bit about the continued rollout of Hillary's failures. | |
So, Hillary's campaign is—as they continue to be a disaster, even her erstwhile allies, people who don't like Trump, realize that Hillary has no big answers here. | |
Bill Maher came out over the weekend. | |
He said, Hillary has no answers here. | |
We don't trust Hillary. | |
Why would we trust Hillary on, for example, terrorism? | |
I've been saying for a very long time that I worry about the Democrats on the terrorism issue. | |
I mean, Trump obviously is giving paranoid lunacy aimed at dumbasses. | |
I don't agree with his prescriptions. | |
But Hillary says things like, the kinds of rhetoric and language Mr. Trump used is giving aid and comfort to our adversaries. | |
That's what she said. | |
But that doesn't really tell you how he's going to stop the attacks. | |
She just seems to lecture us on how to be a better person. | |
And this is exactly right. | |
This is exactly right. | |
And so Trump has an issue advantage, which we'll get to in a moment. | |
Now, Hillary's people are panicking. | |
They're absolutely panicking, and they should be. | |
The polls demonstrate she's got nothing. | |
No thang. | |
She is falling apart. | |
Bernie Sanders is out there. | |
He's back now. | |
He's trying to convince all of his old supporters, you must go out there and vote for Hillary Clinton. | |
You must do it. | |
Otherwise, I will never be able to eat this pudding cup. | |
She has promised me a fruit cup and a pudding cup. | |
And if you do not vote for her, I will not have a pudding cup or a fruit cup. | |
All I will have is this piece of small cheese from Vermont. | |
Please vote Hillary. | |
I think what the focus has got to be on now is understanding that this moment in history for a presidential election is not the time for a protest vote. | |
It is a time to look at which candidate is going to work best for the middle class and working families. | |
Okay, so he's trying to convince them not to vote third party. | |
That's because the polls show that all of Gary Johnson's support, or a large measure of it, is coming not from Trump, but from Hillary. | |
In all of these polls, third party candidates are drawing 10-12% of the vote. | |
Probably 7-8% of that goes to Hillary. | |
She wins the election. | |
So now they're trying to cut down on that third party vote. | |
They're dragging out Elizabeth Warren now. | |
Elizabeth Warren is going out there saying that we need to vote for Hillary Clinton. | |
There are a lot of progressives out there who are very suspicious Of Hillary and Bill Clinton, who think that the Bill Clinton years were bad for the middle class, who think that the trade deals were bad for them. | |
These are people who supported Bernie Sanders, who support you. | |
Why should they support Hillary Clinton, who's been part of the system, and you've criticized her for a bankruptcy bill and for other things. | |
Why should they support her over somebody who they think might shake up the system like a Look, Hillary Clinton has laid out a progressive agenda. | |
She laid it out during the primaries and she has stuck with it in the general. | |
She has said this is what I'm running on. | |
The way I see it, it is the job of progressives To help her get elected on a progressive agenda, and then work our rear ends off to help get that progressive agenda enacted. | |
Okay, I mean this is weak tea. | |
So they're all dragging out, you know, you've got Warren, you've got Sanders, they're trying desperately, get out for Hillary, get out for Hillary, because the enthusiasm level for Hillary is so unbelievably low. | |
Now, there are two advantages. | |
So we've talked about two advantages for Trump. | |
The standards and the numbers. | |
The numbers are now moving in his favor. | |
The standards are also great for him. | |
All he has to do is surpass a baseline level of being a human. | |
And Hillary has a higher level that she actually has to pass in order to do well in tonight's debate. | |
For example, I want to show you, this is 17 and 18, I want to show you even the left media. | |
The left media have laid out what they think has to happen in order for these various candidates to win. | |
So they say about Hillary, her tasks tonight, one, sell her presidency, what she would do and how she would do it. | |
Two, be the Clinton who shines in a smaller crowd. | |
If she signed in a smaller crowd, her husband wouldn't be shdupping everything inside. | |
Finally, get those jokes off, adding levity. | |
So MSNBC is basically, you know, they're shilling for Hillary, but notice what they're saying. | |
She has to sell her presidency, that she's actually going to be good at this. | |
She has to be a different Clinton than one we've seen, and she has to show that she has a sense of humor. | |
Good luck, gang. | |
Here's what Trump has to do. | |
They say stop lying, show humility, and fill in the gaps in his policy proposals. | |
So, number one, no, there's no media bias. | |
There's no media bias. | |
Hillary doesn't have to stop lying, only Trump has to stop lying. | |
You know, she doesn't have to fill in the gaps in her policy proposals, he has to fill in his gaps. | |
I mean, that's silly. | |
And you take out the bias for a second. | |
What MSNBC is actually saying is all Trump has to do, he doesn't have to stop lying because he's not going to. | |
He doesn't have to stop filling in the gaps in his policy proposals because he's not capable of that. | |
He's not going to get out there and recite Mitt Romney's 57 point tax plan. | |
All he has to do is not be nuts. | |
Right? | |
When you take out the media bias, even MSNBC is saying, all he has to do is not be a nut. | |
What does Hillary have to do? | |
She has to be presidential. | |
She has to be likable. | |
She has to be winning. | |
Oh boy, she has an uphill battle because she is none of those things. | |
She is zero of those things. | |
Speaking of the media, Trump is just manipulating the media. | |
He's doing a great job of manipulating the media. | |
So, Hillary Clinton says she's going to bring Mark Cuban to the debate. | |
So, if Hillary's entire task is throw Is throw Trump off his game. | |
Then all you have to do to throw Trump off his game, she thinks, is talk about his wealth. | |
So she's bringing Mark Cuban to the debate, this billionaire. | |
She's going to put him in the front row, and then she's going to say probably something like, you're not turning over your IRS records because, as Mark Cuban has said, you're not worth $10 billion. | |
You're lying to the American people, and you could turn it over, but you're lying, and you're not worth that much money, and she's going to hope he loses his mind, and that's why she's bringing Cuban. | |
Trump fires back over the weekend, puts up a tweet, and he says, maybe I'll bring Jennifer Flowers. | |
Right, the woman that Bill Clinton had an affair with back in, and was reported back in 1992. | |
I don't know why not Juanita Broderick, but okay, Jennifer Flowers. | |
And the media lose their mind. | |
Instead of covering the Mark Cuban thing like Hillary wanted, now they're covering the Jennifer Flowers thing because it's so outrageous. | |
So here's Mike Pence, now on national TV, talking about Jennifer Flowers. | |
I don't wanna ask you, will Jennifer Flowers be there? | |
Jennifer Plowers will not be attending the debate tomorrow night. | |
Donald Trump was using the tweet yesterday really to mock an effort by Hillary Clinton and her campaign to really distract attention from where the American people are going to be focused tomorrow night, which is on the issues, on the choice that we face. | |
So he's saying, you know, it was just all Trump trolling. | |
And it was Trump trolling. | |
And it's typical. | |
This means that the standards for Trump are so low now that all he has to do is say things that are headline worthy, and he gets the media coverage. | |
And he does get away with a lot more than Hillary gets away with, in one sense. | |
I mean, Hillary gets away with everything because she's a Democrat, but she's not getting away with Americans feeling like she's honest. | |
Americans know she's dishonest. | |
Trump says things just casually that are not true, and then people just sort of write them off because it's just Trump shooting from the hip. | |
Hey, he's a guy who shoots from the hip. | |
For example, Donald Trump last week said Lester Holt of NBC is a Democrat. | |
Lester Holt is a registered Republican. | |
Kellyanne Conway, his campaign manager, is asked about it, and here's what she says. | |
He said Lester Holt was a Democrat. | |
Lester Holt is a Republican. | |
How could he say such a thing that's just black and white factually incorrect? | |
I don't know that he knew what Lester Holt's voter registration was. | |
Without knowing then, he asserted he was a Democrat. | |
And I said yesterday, on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, that I think Lester Holt's a great selection for a moderator. | |
But here's the thing, what we don't like is the following. | |
What we don't like is the following. | |
First of all, if you're going to tell me that the media are not overly populated with Democrats, that's just empirically false. | |
I'm going to ask you about a very specific thing. | |
He made a factual claim. | |
I think it's a terrible and irrelevant example, respectfully, and here's why. | |
We were appalled at the treatment of NBC News' Matt Lauer after the Commander-in-Chief forum. | |
THEIR OWNERS. | |
THEIR OWNERS ARE NOT GOING TO BE ABLE TO BE ABLE TO BE ABLE TO THE PUBLIC STATING THINGS WITH NO BASIS. | |
I THINK IT'S A TERRIBLE AND IRRELEVANT EXAMPLE RESPECTFULLY AND HERE'S WHY. | |
WE WERE APPALLED AT THE TREATMENT Watch how Conway—she shifts away from it, right? | |
So Trump said something that's casually not true. | |
Okay, well, you know, big deal. | |
That's just Trump being Trump. | |
And it just shows the bigger issue is that there's media bias. | |
Are you denying there's bigger media bias, right? | |
So he doesn't have to be exact in his details, but we all get the broader point. | |
This is why people write off Trump's casual dishonesty, because they think that his larger honesties are more important than those casual dishonesties. | |
Here's another example. | |
Trump was asked about his foundation. | |
I want to hit on a couple of personal controversies for you. | |
New York's Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who's already suing you over Trump University, which he's called a bait-and-switch fraud, now says he's opened an inquiry into the Trump Foundation. | |
Are you confident that the Trump Foundation has followed all charitable rules and laws? | |
Well, I hope so. | |
I mean, my lawyers do it. | |
We give away money. | |
I don't make anything. | |
I take no salaries. | |
I take no—any costs. | |
I have zero costs. | |
And a lot of money goes through the Trump Foundation into charities. | |
It goes to charities. | |
It doesn't go to me. | |
It goes to charities. | |
I love that. | |
I love that. | |
I love what he says there. | |
I hope so. | |
Not yes. | |
I hope so. | |
Well, it's your foundation, dude. | |
I mean, you should know the answer to that. | |
If somebody said to Hillary, have you complied with all available laws, and she said, I hope so, we'd be all over her, wouldn't we? | |
But again, it's Trump, so we just sort of write it off. | |
And the media don't know what to do with him. | |
They don't know They don't know what to do with him, because they've never dealt with anything like this. | |
Because he'll just say things, and then if he's called on it, he'll just back off of it and he'll move on to the next thing. | |
He's moving too fast for them. | |
And it's not out of genius. | |
It's because when people lie as much as Trump lies—and both these candidates are liars—when people lie as much as Trump lies, it's almost impossible to peg them down to the lie that you want to talk about, because they've already moved on. | |
Or they've said, "Let's not talk about that. | |
Let's talk about the bigger issue." This is my general problem, and it really hit me over the weekend a lot. | |
And I talked about it some last week. | |
The lesser of two evils logic, the idea that no matter what Trump does, it can't be as bad as Hillary Clinton, it may be true. | |
It may be true. | |
Then again, if you pose as your opposite, Satan, you can pretty much get away with anything. | |
If the alternatives are Satan versus X, X will always be better than Satan. | |
It doesn't matter what Satan did. | |
So, you know, my principle here is not that you shouldn't vote for Trump. | |
You want to vote for Trump, vote for Trump. | |
The point that I'm making is, let's not overlook this stuff. | |
But the media don't know how to deal with it. | |
So Trump has an advantage with the media, too. | |
We'll show you the advantage. | |
The debate commissioner She comes out and she says, I don't think it's a good idea for moderators to fact-check candidates. | |
So, the Democrats have been very forthright on the notion they want a fact-check. | |
They want Hillary Clinton to have the moderators fact-checking Donald Trump, so that if Trump says something that's not true, the moderator immediately jumps in and says, Donald, that's not true. | |
Now, I don't believe that's something the moderator should be doing. | |
Candy Crowley did it last time and she got it wrong and she screwed up the entire campaign because of it. | |
It's really Hillary's job to do that. | |
If Hillary wants to call Trump on something dishonest, she can call him on something dishonest and that's the way that it'll go. | |
In fact, I think Hillary's strongest tactic tonight She has two strong tactics. | |
One is going to be to try and trigger him. | |
The other is going to be asking him basic factual questions and then trying to make him look stupid when he doesn't know the answers. | |
I think she'll do a lot of that. | |
I think Trump's tactic will be if she does that and he doesn't know the answers, he'll misdirect to something else, but do so in a calm way. | |
That would be the smart way to handle that. | |
But the debate commissioners, they say, we don't know how to handle Trump. | |
We don't know how to handle this. | |
We just, we have no clue. | |
So what do we do with moderators and fact-checking? | |
Here's the debate, Commissioner. | |
Commission asks independent smart journalists to be the moderators and we let them decide how they're going to do this. | |
But I have to say, in our history, the moderators have found it appropriate to let the candidates be the ones that talk about the accuracy or the fairness of what the other candidate or candidates might have said. | |
I think personally, if you start getting into fact-checking, I'm not sure what is a big fact, what's a little fact, and if you and I have different sources of information, does your source about the unemployment rate agree with my source? | |
I don't think it's a good idea to get the moderator into essentially serving as the Encyclopedia Britannica, and I think it's better for that person to facilitate and to depend on the candidates to basically correct Well, I mean, if Hillary doesn't have the moderator helping her out, she's got a problem there, too. | |
And if the moderator intervenes, then everybody understands that the media is being biased, and that helps Trump, too. | |
So Trump has an advantage with the numbers. | |
He has an advantage with the standards. | |
He has an advantage with the media, because he's better at the media game than she is, which is why she's been so awful at it all the way through. | |
And he has one final advantage, and that is the news cycle. | |
The news cycle for Hillary is just brutal. | |
It's just brutal. | |
And it should be. | |
It's her horrible president's administration that has really trashed America in racial terms. | |
It's her horrible president who's made terrorist attacks, apparently, an every-weekend occurrence now. | |
There's a shooting up in Washington state that's been totally undercover by the media. | |
The guy who was the perpetrator was somebody who posted warmly, apparently, about ISIS on his Tumblr page. | |
He was a Turkish immigrant. | |
So that helps Trump, because Trump's whole We have the two least popular, least liked candidates in modern political history. | |
us as bill maher says she's lecturing us about the morality of why we should let more of these people in mark thiesen who's a commentator who's on fox news and he says president obama's america's spinning out of control right before this debate we have the two least popular least liked candidates in modern political history and so people are really trying to decide is can i vote for hillary clinton who do i hate who do i hate less and it's an unprecedented question going into a debate is who do i hate less rather than who's will my candidate do well | |
so i think donald trump has to tomorrow night he has to go out and be presidential you've got the the all the dynamics are working in his favor there's violence there's chaos it seems like obama's america is spinning out of control and donald trump is the candidate of law and order he's He's also approached these things. | |
Remember when he went to Wisconsin and gave that speech after the riots in Milwaukee? | |
He gave a very temperament statement after the Charlotte riots saying that he's gonna make America safe for African Americans and we all have to come together. | |
If he takes that approach tomorrow night and looks presidential, with all the dynamics happening in the country right now, I think he's got a good chance of winning. | |
That's right, that's right. | |
So Hillary Clinton, what's happening in Charlotte right now is a perfect example. | |
Hillary Clinton's on the side of the Black Lives Matter people. | |
She's on the side of the rioters. | |
She's out there saying that the shoot that happened in Charlotte, which by the way now looks like a completely justified shoot. | |
They've released a picture of the gun. | |
It did not look like a book. | |
It looked like a gun. | |
Because it was a gun. | |
And not a book. | |
So, that looks like a good shoot by the cops. | |
Doesn't matter. | |
Hillary sides with the bad guys anyway. | |
You know, President Obama's out there ripping into white officers. | |
This news cycle is terrible for Hillary. | |
Here's President Obama ripping into white police officers. | |
Perhaps it can help a white visitor understand the pain and anger of demonstrators in places like Ferguson and Charlotte. | |
But it can also help black visitors appreciate | |
The fact that not only is this younger generation carrying on traditions of the past, but within the white communities across the nation, we see the sincerity of law enforcement officers and officials who, in fits and starts, are struggling to understand and are trying to do the right thing. | |
Okay, and this is—this is not going to help Hillary in any way. | |
Nobody's worried about the white officers, okay? | |
People are breaking and looting things. | |
They're burning things. | |
They're killing people. | |
And here's Obama lecturing white people. | |
Like, all of this—none of this benefits Hillary Clinton in any way. | |
So Hillary has some real systemic disadvantages tonight. | |
All the indicators are Trump should win tonight. | |
Trump should win tonight. | |
Now, he does have one real disadvantage. | |
He doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. | |
That's a disadvantage, I'll admit. | |
That's a bit of a disadvantage. | |
He doesn't know what he's talking about. | |
But, his not knowing what he's talking about is a lot less of a problem when he does know the central principle of there are race riots going on, side with the cops, there are terrorist attacks, don't let more terrorists in. | |
He doesn't have to know that much to out-debate Hillary. | |
on these points. | |
And again, the standards for him are not that he says anything coherent and intelligent. | |
The standards for him tonight are, they could ask him to spell "cat" and spot him the "C" and the "T." And if he gets it wrong, that'll be okay, so long as he does not actively hit Mark Cuban with the podium and hand a box of tampons to Hillary Clinton. | |
Because the standards for Trump are he just has to act somewhat normal. | |
And suddenly he's the winner. | |
And for Hillary, she's got a much bigger climb. | |
She's got serious trouble, folks. | |
She's in serious trouble. | |
And that I do find amusing, because, I mean, she deserves every bit of the trouble she's created for herself. | |
I'm sad for the country that one of these two people will be president. | |
I think it's a tragic, tragic occurrence. | |
I think that we're watching the devolution of America into a backlash society instead of a society that actually cares about constitutional principles. | |
But all that I've been lamenting for months. | |
The only thing that matters is the spectacle of it, and I think, honestly, that's what these debates are. | |
If anybody's watching tonight, because they're looking for real nuanced policy discussion between Donald Trump, who couldn't give nuanced policy discussion about healthcare, let alone Taco Bowls, and if they're looking for Hillary to suddenly be honest about her emails, like, it's just not going to happen. | |
This is spectacle, which is why it's going to get 100 million people watching it. | |
And this is why, next time we have these debates, I would really prefer that they take place on the Wipeout set. | |
And then we can actually watch these two people get punched by giant boxing gloves into bodies of water and such. | |
I think that'd be much more amusing. | |
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things I hate. | |
So, things I like. | |
Last night I saw hell or high water. | |
Which is a... I thought it was a really, really good movie. | |
The premise of the film is that there are these two brothers, and they're trying basically to pay off the reverse mortgage on Ma's farm. | |
And they have no money, and they have no skill set, and so they are robbing banks. | |
And that's sort of the setup. | |
And where it goes is... | |
Interesting, it's a great portrait of the economic discontent and downtrodden poor white areas. | |
And if you wonder where a lot of the rage is coming from that's backing the Trump vote, Trump is up 59 points among non-college educated white males. | |
That's what this movie is. | |
It's a really, really fascinating film. | |
The bank loan. | |
Just enough to keep your mama poor. | |
Thought they could swipe her land. | |
It's a big bank. | |
It's too big. | |
That's what she said. | |
Now they can foreclose on Friday. | |
So come hell or high water, get the money to the bank on Thursday. | |
and then you are free and clear. | |
Hello, brother. | |
Go get that money. | |
Good morning, folks! | |
Open the drawers! | |
You got a gun on you, old man? | |
You're damn right I got a gun on me. | |
Y'all gonna steal my gun, too? | |
When I steal from you, I steal from the bank. | |
You hear about these bank robberies? | |
You may get to have some fun before they send you off to the rocking chair yet. | |
I may have one hunt left in me. | |
Mama, it been a while? | |
Three months. | |
Bank breathing down her neck. | |
Okay, so the film is really good. | |
The performance that's the one that you're going to watch is Ben Foster's performance. | |
He plays sort of the crazier brother. | |
Chris Pine is great, though, very understated. | |
Chris Pine is kind of a leading movie man, right? | |
He's a big movie star because he's in the Star Trek films. | |
He's a good-looking guy. | |
He's actually a good actor, which is shocking, because usually when these guys are good-looking, like Chris Evans, the Captain America guy, they're usually wooden and awful. | |
And Chris Evans is a terrible actor, as well as a bad political commentator, but check my pinned tweet if you don't understand what I'm referring to there. | |
But Chris Pine's actually a really good actor. | |
Jeff Bridges is good in this movie, although he does his rooster-cog routine again, where he just acts like people from Texas, for some odd reason, have a speech impediment. | |
Okay, so, the movie Hell or High Water, really good film. | |
Okay, time for some stuff I hate. | |
They just kind of muttered a lot, which is troubling to me because my business partner here at The Daily Wire is a guy from West Texas. | |
And if it's true that people from West Texas at a certain point in life begin muttering like Jeff Bridges, I'm really going to need to ask him to enunciate better. | |
Because otherwise business around the offices here could get very complicated very quickly. | |
I'm not going to know what he's saying. | |
OK, so the movie Hell or High Water, really good film. | |
OK, time for some stuff I hate. | |
Let's do it. | |
So Arnold Palmer, the famous golfer, he died over the weekend and I Obviously, Arnold Palmer is a big name. | |
People know him. | |
He was the competition for Jack Nicklaus. | |
Very famous guy who helped revitalize popular golfing. | |
Golfing is a popular pastime. | |
The drink, the Arnold Palmer Iced Tea and Lemonade, is named after him. | |
So, he dies. | |
Barack Obama is just the worst. | |
He's just the worst. | |
The only consolation about this presidential cycle is he'll be gone at the end of it. | |
Barack Obama tweets out his condolences. | |
Here's what he tweets. | |
Here is to the king who was as extraordinary on the links as he was generous to others. | |
Thanks for the memories, Arnold. | |
Okay. | |
So, you may notice from this photo, if you're watching on dailywire.com, is it a picture of Arnold Palmer when Arnold Palmer was in his prime? | |
Which is normally what you do, right? | |
If you do an in memoriam at the Oscars, you don't show somebody two days before they're dead on their deathbed. | |
You show them back when they're in their prime. | |
No, this is a picture of Arnold Palmer when he's really old in the Oval Office with Barack Obama, and Barack Obama is the one golfing. | |
Okay, he's like a tourist president. | |
He's like a tourist president. | |
He's like one of these people who goes and photoshops himself into pictures with the Great Wall of China. | |
Arnold Palmer dies. | |
Who's the centerpiece of this photo? | |
Barack Obama. | |
When Nelson Mandela died, do you remember he tweeted out a picture of himself in Nelson Mandela's cell? | |
Like, this is what he does. | |
People die, but the real subject is Barack Obama. | |
Like, during the Super Bowl, he tweets out a picture of himself throwing a football, because all of life revolves around Barack Obama. | |
All of humanity revolves around the genius of Barack Obama. | |
So Arnold Palmer dies, and it's all about Obama, because it's always been all about Obama, which is just why Obama's so interminably awful. | |
He's just awful, awful, awful. | |
Okay. | |
So that's one thing that I hate. | |
Another thing that I hate today, We could have had a Libertarian candidate in this race. | |
That would have been nice. | |
The biggest problem with the Libertarians is not Libertarian philosophy. | |
It's that Libertarian philosophy sounds well and good until you actually meet Libertarians. | |
Most Libertarians are not like Gary Johnson, but they decide that it's important to nominate people like Gary Johnson. | |
Now, Gary Johnson over the weekend, he did an interview where he was talking about Medicaid, and for some odd reason, he decided that he would do the interview with his tongue out of his mouth. | |
Really, we'll grab that tape for tomorrow. | |
But he starts doing the entire interview like that, with his tongue out of his mouth. | |
Which, to say the least, is odd. | |
That wasn't his only odd moment. | |
He also was asked about global warming. | |
Here was his answer to what to do about global warming. | |
My view is that in billions of years, the sun is going to actually grow and encompass the earth, right? | |
So global warming is in our future. | |
So does that mean we don't do anything about it now? | |
No, George, come on. | |
Can't we have a little humor once in a while? | |
And that is long-term. | |
I mean, plate tectonics. | |
At one point, Africa and South America separated, and I am talking now about the Earth and the fact that We have existed for billions of years and will going forward. | |
Look, what it points to also is the fact that we do have to inhabit other planets. | |
The future of the human race is space exploration. | |
No, that we should be prudent with the environment. | |
We care about the environment. | |
Look, clean air, clean water. | |
I think the EPA exists to protect us against individuals, groups, corporations that would do us harm. | |
Pollution is harm. | |
Governor Johnson, thanks. | |
Governor Johnson, thanks for being the craziest person in this race, and this race includes Jill Stein. | |
Wow. | |
Going for that new Gingrich vote. | |
So, his allusion to global warming is, we must inhabit other planets. | |
Apparently, he's already gotten a head start. | |
So, so glad the Libertarians can really show so strong in this election cycle. | |
My God. | |
Honestly, it's like we, it's like we went to an asylum and we opened four cells and just took the four people who walked out and said, one of these people will be president. | |
Okay, in other news, apparently, Apparently Walmart has decided that they are not—Walmart's now apologizing. | |
A police officer wanted to have a retirement cake last week, and the cop's daughter came in, and she wanted a thin blue line cake, right? | |
It was a thin blue line cake design. | |
She asked for a cake with the American flag in black and white with a blue stripe added in. | |
This is a routine that they do where they say thin blue lines separating America from chaos, right? | |
And so the Walmart said they would not do it. | |
They told the woman the design could be perceived as racist and nobody feels comfortable decorating the cake. | |
When she asked for a simpler cake with just one blue line on a chocolate background, the employee said she still didn't feel comfortable with that design. | |
She said, is there something wrong with cops? | |
The employee refused to make the cake. | |
Taylor Wilkes, a Georgia police officer, originally posted about the cake, criticized the store for their appalling behavior, and now Walmart has apologized, and they met with the daughter to apologize. | |
So I do love the fact, I do love the fact that the left thinks that a religious baker should be forced to participate in a same-sex wedding by baking all the baked goods, but they're all happy-dappy-do when it comes to a police officer saying, I would just like a cake that honors police officers. | |
Yeah, clearly these are people who are tolerant, and all they're really looking for is tolerance. | |
They just think you should have to make whatever cake is brought before you. | |
It just shows the double standard of the left. | |
Okay, final thing I hate today. | |
So, the president of Northwestern University, his name is Morton Shapiro. | |
No relation, his name has a C in it for coward. | |
And university president Morton Shapiro blasted people who were criticizing safe spaces and trigger warnings. | |
He said, The people who describe safe spaces do it from their segregating housing places, from their jobs without diversity. | |
They do it from their country clubs. | |
It just drives me nuts. | |
Right, we're all racists. | |
We're criticizing safe spaces because they're racist. | |
Except for the fact that a lot of safe spaces are racially segregated. | |
Except for the fact that at the University of Missouri, the students requested that no white people be allowed into their safe spaces. | |
At Cal State LA, they're now putting together segregated black housing. | |
Yeah, you're right, it's us. | |
We're the racists. | |
In his convocation speech, He said that people need a space where they can let their guard down, a musical group, a religious center, or the Black House. | |
So, I love that. | |
He says, we're segregated, but it's okay for black people to be segregated. | |
Love it. | |
He also says that calling—he said, if you deny the existence of microaggressions, you are an idiot. | |
He says he remembers every microaggression he has experienced. | |
Here's a macroaggression, Mr. Shapiro. | |
You are adult. | |
You know nothing about how the real world works because you've been living in an ivory tower, apparently, for much of your life. | |
He says microaggressions cut you to the core and aren't easily forgotten. | |
How about this? | |
Grow a thicker skin. | |
You're a big boy. | |
I'm sure you're making a big salary over at Northwestern University. | |
You're getting paid, even though I'm calling you stupid. | |
That's not a microaggression. | |
That's just me saying you're a moron. | |
But it is amazing how these people are insistent that the more they coddle students, the better off the students are, as though the rest of the world is going to coddle them the minute that they exit. | |
It ain't gonna happen. | |
But this is the way that this works. | |
The left is interested in creating safe spaces that involve shutting down everybody who disagrees. | |
Okay, tonight, the big debate. | |
If you want to follow it live, go to dailywire.com. | |
I will be live blogging the entire VAPID experience. | |
I will also be doing it on Twitter, so check my Twitter account. | |
And we'll be back tomorrow to recap all of the lows as well as the other lows. | |
It'll be spectacular. | |
I'm Ben Shapiro. |