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Nov. 11, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show

19:54

Ep. 208 - President-Elect Trump

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	You're about to hear words from me you've never heard before.
	I was dead wrong.
	I was dead wrong about this election.
	I was dead wrong that Donald Trump would not win in the primaries.
	I was dead wrong that Donald Trump would not beat Hillary Clinton in the general election.
	I was wrong that the poll data was reliable.
	It was not.
	I was wrong the experts knew what the hell they were talking about with regard to ground game.
	They didn't.
	I was wrong that the movement of which Donald Trump bragged was just more Trumpian braggadocio rather than a real on-the-ground mass phenomenon.
	Now I pray fervently that Donald Trump proves me wrong again about him as a human being.
	I didn't vote for Trump yesterday.
	For all the reasons I expressed yesterday on this program, I do not think Donald Trump is a good man, let alone a great one.
	I'm deeply concerned he's not conservative.
	I'm deeply concerned he'll fail to fulfill his promises, that he'll focus on useless fights, That he'll engage in counterproductive ones, that he'll sell out the people who voted for him.
	I'm concerned that Republicans, justifiably intoxicated by victory over the Wicked Witch of the West Hillary Clinton, will grant a halo effect to Trump that will allow him to engage in anti-conservative policies that will damage the country and political foolishness that will damage the conservative movement with constituencies that conservatives are still going to have to recruit.
	I have said for months that Trump could prove me wrong.
	I did say that.
	He certainly has every opportunity to do so now.
	He enters office with the majority of Republicans in the Senate.
	He enters office with the majority of Republicans in the House.
	He enters with an open Supreme Court seat, a vast majority of GOP state legislatures, a vast majority of GOP governors.
	Now is the time for the vast change that we were promised and that Donald Trump promised to deliver.
	This will require Donald Trump to change as a human.
	That doesn't mean he should lose his fighting nature at all.
	Obviously, he should keep fighting the media.
	It's the best thing that he did the entire campaign.
	I've praised that part of him for years and consistently throughout this election cycle.
	It doesn't mean he should stop channeling the outrage of Americans.
	But bad people don't become better people when they become powerful people.
	And Donald Trump was just handed the keys to the car, the leadership of the most powerful country in the history of humanity, and the most powerful office in the most powerful country in the history of humanity.
	Will Trump feel freed from the boundaries set on him by the strictures of a presidential race?
	Will he feel unshackled to be sort of the bad Trump that we saw during the primaries and during the general?
	Or will Trump actually change as a human and be elevated by his office?
	Will he grow into the person that we all want him to be?
	I sincerely hope, really I hope, that I'm wrong about him and that it is the latter.
	I plan to hold him accountable if it's the former.
	As I have for the entirety of this election cycle and consistently throughout my career, I will praise Trump when he deserves it.
	I will criticize him when he does not deserve it.
	For the sake of America, for the sake of conservatism, I hope, I hope, I have nothing but praise for President-elect Donald Trump.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	Good or Trump?
	Bad or Trump?
	Which one will we get today?
	I think that's the big news from the election, by the way, is that that lives on for another four years, gang.
	So if you like good Trump, bad Trump, that sucker lives on.
	And we still continue not to pay royalties to Brandon Snipes, the creator of that particular ditty.
	So that's very exciting stuff.
	A lot to get to today.
	Did something happen last night?
	I missed it.
	Something?
	There's a basketball game, right?
	Somebody won?
	Somebody lost?
	I don't know.
	People were saying something big was happening.
	If I seem a little bit tired today, that's because we did an eight-hour broadcast yesterday.
	We did a live broadcast here at DailyWire.com, and on Facebook, me and Andrew Klavan and Jeremy Boring and Bill Whittle stopped by for more time than he should have, and some others stopped by, as well as Steven Crowder and Glenn Beck.
	It was a star-studded affair, but it was really great fun, and it was fun to watch the race shift over the course of the evening from Donald Trump is going to lose to Donald Trump is now going to defeat Hillary Clinton and watching just the lifeblood drain out of the faces of the people who love Hillary Clinton watching as the universe leached all meaning from their lives was was really quite astounding and in many ways we'll get to all of that in a second but first
	If you were looking at the stock market today, and the stock market was down a lot today, and you're thinking, hey, maybe I should invest in precious metals.
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	Ask all your questions, get all your answers, and then work with the folks at birchgoldgroup.com.
	Here's the deal.
	Here's the deal.
	And there's so much to talk about surrounding this election.
	Who are sort of the winners and who are the losers and what do conservatives do from here?
	Because, you know, Donald Trump, I have hopes that Donald Trump with a conservative majority is going to actually do some very conservative things.
	I do have hope for that.
	That's going to require Mitch McConnell to have a spine.
	And that is going to that's always a dicey proposition, especially when there are apparently 51 senators.
	So that means that he really has to hold his caucus in check.
	If you want Donald Trump to get things done, Mitch McConnell must hold kind of weak knee Republicans like like Susan Collins from Maine has to hold them in in check for sure. - Yeah.
	That's a very important thing.
	But I want to talk about first the biggest losers last night.
	So there are a lot of people, just to get this kind of elephant out of the room, who said that never Trump was the big loser last night.
	Not really, because I knew one of these two people was going to be elected, and I didn't want it to be Hillary, and I didn't want it to be Trump.
	So I lost this election a long time ago.
	And last night, if you watched the broadcast, I said I was feeling pretty ambivalent.
	I felt a little bit manic-depressive.
	Every time we talked about Hillary Clinton not being president, a smile crossed my face.
	The hilarity of Hillary Clinton spending her entire life using whatever was left of her soul in order to become president of the United States, only to lose to Donald Trump, a reality TV star.
	After spending her entire life standing next to a guy who sexually abuses women.
	After using every element of government to corrupt effect.
	After perverting justice.
	After escaping justice.
	After running 1,000 times for the presidency to win the popular vote, but lose heavily in the electoral vote.
	Again, to Donald Trump, a person that she and her husband told to run.
	It's like, that's wonderful.
	Every time I thought of that, I just thought, somewhere Hillary Clinton is just tying Huma Abedin to a bed and beating Ortha Cain, but not in the usual way.
	So that's, you know, that, the imagery there is pretty phenomenal and pretty hilarious.
	And then I thought, President Trump.
	And I thought, yeah, so that happened.
	That's a thing.
	You know my views of Trump.
	I have not been shy about my views of Trump in the past.
	As I said in the opener here, Donald Trump has to change as a man in order for him to earn my support as president of the United States.
	He didn't earn my vote because the evidence that I saw did not suggest he was a man worthy of my vote.
	Now he has the opportunity to earn my support by doing all the things that he promised that he would do and avoiding all the things that he promised he would do also.
	And actually being a good president.
	So we'll see how that turns out.
	Also, I'd like to see him ascend to the character that is necessary for a Republican president of the United States.
	I still care about character in a Republican president.
	And I'd like to see Donald Trump become that.
	I'd like to see Donald Trump change as a human being.
	Whether he does or not is up to him.
	And I will make my judgments of that based on whether he does or not.
	But I don't think never Trump was the big loser last night in the sense that I didn't vote for Hillary.
	I didn't want Hillary to win.
	And my agenda has been always the same, which was hold whoever is in power to the fire when it comes to conservative principles.
	So here are the real losers last night.
	Number one, Hillary.
	Wow!
	Wow!
	Okay, so the big untold story of this election.
	There are a lot of lies that are being passed around already about this election.
	A lot of bad lessons that are being learned.
	For example, the idea that Donald Trump drove out a mass movement.
	Donald Trump just Absolutely drove out this brand new vast mass movement that existed never before in human history.
	Donald Trump won less, in terms of, won fewer popular votes in the general election than Mitt Romney did in 2012.
	Mitt Romney won about 61 million votes.
	Donald Trump won somewhere between 59 and 60 million popular votes.
	And he actually under-polled, in terms of absolute votes, he under-polled Mitt Romney even in states like Wisconsin.
	So Romney won something like 1.4 million votes in Wisconsin in 2012.
	And Trump won 1.3 million.
	What that means is that the real story of this election, just in terms of how this happened, the real story of this election is that Hillary Clinton failed to drive out nearly 7 million Barack Obama voters.
	Nearly 7 million Barack Obama voters did not show up for Hillary Clinton, and that's off his high in 2008.
	Remember, he lost something like, I think it was 3 to 4 million voters from 2008 to 2012.
	2008 to 2012.
	So from 2008 to 2016, Hillary Clinton dropped somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 million Democrat voters.
	That's how unpopular she is.
	She has been officially named by the Guinness Book of World Records the worst politician in the history of humanity, actually.
	So congratulations to Hillary on that prize.
	She lost to Obama in 2008, of course.
	Everyone thought she was going to win.
	She lost.
	Then she nearly lost in the primaries to a septuagenarian asylum escapee.
	And then finally, she loses to a reality TV star who, four weeks before the election, was hit with a tape in which he said that he wanted to grab women by the bleep.
	She lost to that.
	She is the worst politician in American history and no one more richly deserves that title.
	Okay, second big loser last night, Barack Obama.
	His agenda is toast.
	His agenda is in serious trouble.
	Obamacare will be repealed if Republicans invoke the nuclear option and can hold their caucus together.
	Obamacare will be repealed and it will be replaced, which is a great thing.
	There could be a conservative justice.
	Again, if Mitch McConnell does his job, always a dicey proposition, we could see a tax decrease.
	We could see some significant slashes to regulation.
	Barack Obama's executive orders will likely be walked back.
	Barack Obama remains popular personally, but he's popular in the same way that many celebrities, it turns out, are popular.
	He's popular as a celebrity.
	No one likes his policies.
	He doesn't get to appoint his next of kin.
	He doesn't get to appoint Hillary to his third term.
	His agenda is essentially tossed out on its ass.
	And he's not going to be a And more than that, Barack Obama continued to make the case throughout his presidency that America was a deeply racist, terrible place filled by white people who are terribly, deeply racist and awful, and America was a negative force in the world.
	The best thing about the Trump campaign and the Trump movement, the thing that I think is actually worthwhile, is that people were standing up and proudly saying, Bill Little did say this yesterday and I think he's right.
	What was on the hat?
	That making America great again was something that was worthwhile.
	That America is great.
	The people here are not racist.
	We are not bad people.
	We don't deserve the ire of elites like Barack Obama scorning us, looking down on us, and pretending that they are on a higher plane while they call us racist and then pander to a racial base.
	It totally backfired on Obama.
	It totally backfired on Hillary.
	And Obama's legacy is now on the table.
	The only legacy he's going to have after the first hundred days of a Trump administration, if Trump does his job, The only legacy Barack Obama will have is that he preceded Donald Trump and that Barack Obama was unable to win a third term, which means his real only legacy will be that he was the first black president, which of course is the only reason the media loved him in the first place.
	Okay, then the biggest losers in all of this, bigger than Hillary, bigger than Obama, the biggest losers in all of this, obviously the media.
	Obviously the media.
	The media just gets schlonged in this election cycle.
	And I will say this.
	People say that it was Trump that ruined the media.
	I don't think that's right.
	I think the media ruined the media.
	I think the media ruined the media in 2012 when they took a fundamentally decent man, Mitt Romney, and called him a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe.
	And then in 2016, they said the same things about Trump, and it just didn't wash.
	People said, you called Mitt Romney that, and we don't believe you.
	We think that that was a lie.
	You have no credibility whatsoever.
	Bill Maher said this.
	We played it on tape the other day.
	And the media had no credibility.
	All of their talk about racist, sexist, bigotry, homophobia, all of it just fell apart.
	It fell apart in their faces.
	They'd called Wolf too many times.
	Nobody believes anything they have to say.
	There was a poll yesterday, an exit poll, showed 76% of the people who voted thought the media were more interested in making money than they were in telling the truth.
	When that's the case, the media have lost all power in our elections.
	And that is a grand and glorious thing.
	And I do have to thank Donald Trump for consistently ripping on the media.
	Now, sometimes he was ripping on them even when they were telling the truth.
	But the fact that people don't trust the media...
	Overall is a good thing considering the leftist bias inherent in the media and that was so obviously on display.
	Final big losers of the night, Senate Democrats.
	Senate Democrats have serious troubles now.
	So the idea here was that Senate Democrats were going to gain a majority and they'd be able to stymie a President Trump.
	They don't.
	The only seats that Republicans end up losing are Mark Kirk in Illinois and maybe Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire.
	That one is still a little bit too close to call.
	They end up retaining their Senate majority.
	That's horrible news for the Democrats, because in 2018, there are five, count them, five vulnerable Democrat seats in the Senate.
	If Republicans win anywhere near that number, they suddenly have a dominant majority in the Senate, and Chuck Schumer doesn't have a lot of power.
	Now, I will say, Chuck Schumer is a very smart political operator.
	Chuck Schumer is going to create a consolidated force against the Republican majority.
	Republican majorities have a nasty habit of splintering, because they're always gangs of eight, and people who want to run for president, who want to stake out their own ground.
	But, if McConnell can hold fast, ha ha ha, if McConnell can hold fast, then you're looking at just a devastating night for Senate Democrats.
	So, here's the deal.
	Donald Trump has no excuse not to deliver on all the promises that he's made.
	None.
	All the promises are on the table.
	He should be delivering on all the promises.
	I want to see Obamacare appealed.
	I want to see the conservative justice.
	Prove me wrong.
	Prove me wrong.
	I said during the primaries and during the general, I did not trust Donald Trump to do these things.
	And I want to see him prove me wrong.
	And I will be the happiest man on earth.
	I will really be happy.
	When I say I want to see him prove me wrong, I don't mean that facetiously.
	I would love nothing better than for Donald Trump to turn out to shock me and shock the world again and end up being the second coming of Ronald Reagan, being a wonderful conservative president and making the country better for everybody.
	I think that would be a wonderful, wonderful thing for the country, wonderful for the Republican Party.
	I do think that we're going to have to, you know, take a little bit of care in the lessons that we learn from this election cycle because we have a habit of jumping to the wrong lessons in various election cycles.
	In this one, it's a single data point, right?
	And we're going to learn a lot from that single data point.
	Already some of the bad lessons that I'm hearing are things like, polls are stupid.
	No.
	The polls in Wisconsin were off.
	The polls in Michigan were off.
	The polls in Pennsylvania were off.
	The polls were right on in Ohio.
	They were right on in Florida.
	They were right on in North Carolina.
	They were right on in New Hampshire.
	They were right on in most of the country.
	They were off in a lot of these places because they assumed that Hillary would not have the massive voter drop-off that she had.
	The electorate in this election cycle is D plus four.
	For a four year election cycle, for a presidential election cycle, that is unheard of.
	Normally it's a D plus eight.
	Normally it's a real, but the national polling was right on the money.
	The polling average had it at about 3% split with a 3% margin of error.
	Hillary ends up winning the popular vote by somewhere around 1%.
	So what that means is that all of this talk about suddenly Bill Mitchell is a poll expert because he called that Trump was going to win.
	No, sometimes the broken clock is right.
	And Bill Mitchell is certainly a broken clock.
	He was right.
	That does not mean that all poles should be thrown out.
	It sort of reminds me of in baseball.
	In baseball, for baseball fans, there's something called sabermetrics, and that's the idea that you study statistics when you pick the players on your team.
	When you get to the playoffs, sometimes there are teams that win that are not sabermetrically built.
	They're not mathematically built, and the idea is that the sample size is just too small for us to tell.
	Presidential elections only happen once every four years, so the idea that stats don't matter because we had a black swan election, that seems like the wrong lesson to learn and a dangerous lesson to learn.
	The lesson is that you don't need a ground game.
	Is a stupid lesson, especially because number one, the RNC clearly did have a ground game, and number two, because you're going to need a ground game when you have a candidate who doesn't have 100% name recognition and billions of dollars in free media coverage.
	Other things that people are learning from this, you can focus solely and completely on the white vote, that's a mistake.
	Trump has an absolutely wonderful opportunity now to reach out to new constituencies.
	He's the president.
	That means he can reach out in a really significant way.
	He should continue to reach out to black communities.
	He won 8% of the black vote, which was more than Mitt Romney's 5% of the black vote.
	He won 29% of the Hispanic vote, which was more than Mitt Romney's share of the Hispanic vote, which is absolutely shocking and demonstrates the wild unpopularity of Hillary Clinton.
	He has to reach out to those constituencies.
	He has to reach out to young people.
	Young people voted heavily for Hillary Clinton.
	The reason I say this is because, not to take away from Trump's victory, but to note that this is not going to be the last election ever, and demographics are continuing to shift away from older white voters, even if older white voters represented the outsized share of Trump voters that drove him over the top on all of this.
	So, those are my basic thoughts on the election cycle, but I want to go through some of the details before we get to all of that.
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	Alrighty.
	Donald Trump wins last night in what is easily the biggest election shocker in the history of the nation.
	It is by far the biggest election shocker in the history of the nation.
	This would make the fifth time in American presidential history somebody loses the popular vote but wins the Electoral College.
	It happened in 1824.
	It happened in 1876.
	It happened in 1888.
	And it happened in 2000 with George W. Bush.
	It happened in 1888, and it happened in 2000 with George W. Bush, and then it happened again last night.
	It is interesting.
	Not a lot of discussion about the popular vote versus the Electoral College because Hillary was so widely expected to win and underperformed.
	Trump got up and he gave a victory speech.
	And I think that there are a few things that we're going to analyze as we continue on the show in just a minute.
	We're going to analyze some of the lessons from this, whether the lessons are right or wrong, as I say.
	What kind of president is Trump actually going to be?
	We're going to try and read some tea leaves on that because we're going to have to see which support base he decides to cater to.
	We're going to talk about the absolutely delicious media reaction because the media just oh my goodness gracious they lost their ever-loving minds and it was quite beautiful and we'll talk about also some stuff I like and stuff I hate but in order to get all that you have to go over to dailywired.com and subscribe, $8 a month will bring you to dailywire.com.
	Then you can be part of the – first of all, you get our site free of ads if you get the subscription at dailywire.com.
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	Plus, you get to be part of the mailbag in a couple days.
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	We're adding new goodies all the time at dailywire.com.
	So go ahead and check that out.

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