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Nov. 17, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show
19:24
Ep. 210 - Trump White House Takes Shape
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For those who thought media bias against Donald Trump would stop after his election to the presidency, Trump's interview with 60 Minutes conclusively demonstrated just how wrong that idea was.
CBS News' Leslie Stahl desperately attempted to blame Trump for violence breaking out across the country against Trump.
Here was what Leslie Stahl had to say.
She said, "It has been five full days since the election, and anti-Trump demonstrations, driven in part by Hillary Clinton's edge in the popular vote, have been significant.
When we interviewed him on Friday afternoon, Mr. Trump said he had not heard about some of the acts of violence that are propping up in his name or against his supporters, nor, he said, had he heard about reports of racial slurs and personal threats against African-Americans, Latinos, and gays by some of his supporters." Now, Trump, you see, is ignorant, and it's all his fault.
Meanwhile, we, in the real world, are all watching mass protests and rioting on our TV against Trump.
Yet, Stahl worked to make Trump the problem, not the solution.
Here's how their exchange went.
Trump said, I'm very surprised to hear that.
I hate to hear that.
I mean, I hate to hear that.
And Leslie Stahl said, but you do hear it.
And Trump said, I don't hear it.
I saw one or two instances.
Leslie Stahl.
On social media?
Trump.
But I think it's a very, very small amount.
Again, I think it's Leslie Stahl.
Do you want to say anything to those people?
Trump.
I wouldn't say don't do it.
I would say don't do it.
That's terrible.
Because I'm going to bring this country together.
Leslie Stahl.
They're harassing Latinos and Muslims.
Trump.
I am so saddened to hear that.
And I say stop it.
If it helps, I will say this.
And I will say right to the cameras.
Stop it.
Okay, so, we don't have Stahl's original question to Trump, but from the content of the exchange, it seems like she focused almost exclusively on supposed violence by Trump supporters, most of which appears to be unfounded.
This is asinine, and it's also disingenuous.
Stahl seems quite concerned about violence surrounding Trump's election, but CBS News held the tape of Trump condemning violence and telling people to cut it out for three days.
If they truly cared about tamping down violence, why not release that tape right away?
They released a bunch of other clips from the interview.
Well, that's because the media don't care about the violence.
They just care about blaming Trump for the violence.
It's why the media never put pressure on Obama to condemn riots in cities across the United States, even as Obama and his Department of Justice justified them.
It's why the media never cared about asking Hillary Clinton about violence against Trump supporters during this campaign.
Violence only matters if it can be blamed on those the left-wing media hates.
Otherwise, it's a tool for change.
Just ask media darling DeRay McKesson, who was feeded at the White House, or the members of Occupy Wall Street.
But if any Republican goes to a Tea Party rally, they're obviously the problem.
Don't expect the media to change, but if they don't want to destroy their own credibility permanently, they better start treating more honestly with the American people.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Okay, so much to get to.
Everybody's getting ready to launch the new Trump White House.
We will get to the staffing decisions at the Trump White House in all of their glory and shame in just a moment.
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particularly for me, since I have heard that Steve Bannon is coming.
In any case, we can jump right into, let's jump right into the news.
Okay, so, at the beginning, let's just say, it is fun to watch the left meltdown.
It is really a lot of fun to watch the left lose their minds.
And what makes it fun, for me, is the knowledge that the left would lose their minds the exact same way if Ted Cruz had won, or Marco Rubio had won, or hell, if John Kasich had won, They would still lose their minds and go crazy.
So there's a lot of talk about Trump being out of the box.
I agree.
There's a lot of talk about Trump being uniquely bad in some ways.
I agree.
But that's not why the left is protesting.
The left is protesting because they don't like the idea that conservatives even showed up to vote.
They don't like the idea that somebody who's not a Democrat, at least in name, actually is the President of the United States.
And so they're going nuts.
So here is a little bit of footage from some of these protests.
Take over the intersection!
This was the scene in downtown Los Angeles for the third straight night.
Angry Angelenos taking over the streets in protest of President-elect Donald Trump's victory in Tuesday's election.
We reject the President-elect!
More than 180 people were arrested in what became a dangerous situation for some officers.
We did have an officer who was injured when trying to take someone into custody.
That officer was transported to a local hospital and at this time he's in stable condition and he's expected to be released later today.
LAPD saying those they arrested had interfered with traffic and vandalized public property including buildings and patrol vehicles.
The group growing to several hundred in size.
We want our voices to be heard and we will not stand down.
There were even some reports of people throwing rocks and bottles at officers and demonstrators who according to police just wouldn't go home.
Oh my god, so we need to stop it there.
So these idiots take over the streets in L.A.
to which Trump says, I drink your salty bitter tears, they're delicious.
Like, Donald Trump is going to resign the presidency because a couple of whiny college students from L.A.
decided to take over a street in a city that Trump lost every vote in.
Like, all these riots, all these protests are taking place in areas where Trump lost, right?
It's not like there's any impact on Trump.
It's not like there's any impact on the administration.
I'm not even sure what they're protesting at this point.
Like, there's lots of stuff that Trump is going to do that's probably worthy of protest, but he hasn't done it yet.
He hasn't done it yet.
Like, maybe later tonight I'll lead a protest against Steve Bannon becoming the White House Chief Counsel or whatever he is, but, like, he hasn't done anything yet.
This is all silly talk.
So all these whiny crybabies who are very, very upset and they're walking walking around all mopey and oh my god the world is over because someone they don't like was elected president he hasn't done anything yet he's not even the president yet he's just some guy who's who's getting ready to be president once he's president then i think that it is fair if you disapprove a policy that he's pushing you go out and you can you can protest although never riot don't take over streets because this makes you a douche but if you're going to do this on the basis of i lost an election or
Well, maybe more of you young people should have shown up and actually voted in that election, and then maybe you wouldn't have lost.
I mean, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but you lost in a lot of these swing states because young people stayed home smoking weed.
So young people didn't show up for her.
Minorities didn't show up for her.
Who are the people who are actually rioting and protesting?
Largely young people and minorities.
So the whole thing is just ridiculous.
Naturally, Cory Booker, who thinks he's going to run for president in 2020 against Trump, he's trying to make inroads with these protesters, hoping to jazz them up.
I'm sitting here right now having this conversation with you because of the tradition of American protest.
I have my rights not because of Washington suddenly deciding, Strom Thurmond and others, hey let's give certain Americans equal rights, but because of the ardent, unyielding voice of protesters.
And so when you have a president That is, in his campaign, who ran saying things that not aren't just contrary to fact, but literally threatening to use presidential power in a way that would erode the rights and privileges and equality of large sections of Americans.
God bless the protesters.
But I will tell you this, I caution anyone who, in their protest, becomes the very thing that they're protesting against.
And then he says they keep saying love Trump's hate, and then they go and burn crap, and he's saying that's probably a bad idea.
Yeah, probably.
OK, so here – OK, so before we go any further, I think that it's important to get past the elephant in the room because I know there are a lot of people watching specifically because of the news that Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart CEO, is now going to be the Trump White House chief – he's not the chief of staff.
He's the chief strategist is what they're calling him, which means that he's basically Valerie Jarrett or Karl Rove.
It means he has a very heavy portion in the policy making and the direction of the administration.
So I've written columns about what I think of Steve.
I legitimately think that Steve Bannon is one of the worst people in America.
But that doesn't mean that this is the worst thing that's ever happened to the country, that he's the White House chief strategist.
I'll explain what's good about this and what's bad about this and what he's actually going to do.
And a lot of it is still up in the air.
Now, I will say the left are going too far in this.
So they're immediately saying that he is anti-Semitic.
They're saying that Steve is a white supremacist.
You have all these people who are saying that Steve is a white nationalist.
Okay, so there's Steve's personal views, and then there's who Steve associates with, and who he's willing to humor.
I have no evidence on a personal level, and I worked with Steve for years.
I have no evidence on a personal level that Steve's a racist or an anti-Semite.
Okay?
I've never heard those views come from him.
I've never felt anti-Semitism from Steve.
Okay.
That said, so the left is going too far.
When they say, like, there's a big headline at Huffington Post, white nationalist runs White House.
Okay, that's too much.
It's not true.
That said, there are some problems here.
There are some problems here.
And here are the problems.
So I have a few thoughts on Bannon as the White House chief strategist beyond the fact that I think that Bannon is a brutal, vindictive piece of crap.
Beyond that, I think that when it comes to Bannon, the number one question I've gotten in texts and questions all day is the anti-Semitic and racism.
As I said, I have no personal knowledge of him personally being anti-semitic and racist.
That said, he obviously has pandered to the anti-semitic racist alt-right.
The alt-right is a group of people, first of all, let me just say something about the alt-right.
Not everyone who says they're alt-right is actually alt-right.
There are a lot of people who don't know what it means, they don't know the founding philosophy and ideology of the alt-right.
They just think alt-right means that you like to put up peppy memes, or you like to tweet about Harambe.
Or whatever other stupid thing you're doing online and you don't like Paul Ryan and therefore you're alt-right.
That's not what alt-right means.
Alt-right is a philosophy that is exposited by people ranging from Vox State to Richard Spencer.
And that philosophy is that Western culture is inseparable from European ethnicity.
Okay, it is white nationalism.
Alt-right is white nationalism.
That's what the root of the philosophy is.
That doesn't mean that everybody identifying as alt-right believes that, because some of them are doing it wrong, but it does mean that that is the root of the philosophy.
And Bannon knows that.
He's not a stupid man, and he has pandered to those people.
He had Milo Yiannopoulos, who's an alt-right popularizer, write a long piece for Breitbart about how the alt-right was the kind of new legit new right in the United States.
And the actual white supremacists do love Bannon.
And they think that Bannon – I mean, Bannon bragged openly about turning Breitbart into an alt-right fan site essentially.
Richard Spencer, who's an actual white supremacist, he said, Breitbart has elective affinities with the alt-right, and the alt-right has clearly influenced Breitbart.
In this way, Breitbart has acted as a gateway to alt-right ideas and writers.
I don't think it has done this deliberately.
Again, it's a matter of elective infinities – affinities.
And I think that's exactly right.
I think that Spencer is correct.
Peter Brimelow, another one, he said that Bannon being appointed to the Trump campaign was great news.
Okay, so what does that mean?
What does that mean that Bannon has elective affinities with the alt-right and that he's warm toward a bunch of white supremacists and anti-semites?
And he is warm toward the philosophy of the intellectualized alt-right.
What does that mean?
Well, it depends on what you think Bannon's actually going to be doing at the White House.
So what does he want?
Well, Bannon always wants power.
Well, now he finally has.
He spent a decade accruing power.
He kept kind of leaping from politician to politician, riding their coattails.
He did it to Michelle Bachmann.
He made a documentary about her.
And then he hoped to kind of glom onto her success.
He did the same thing with Sarah Palin.
He did the same thing with Andrew Breitbart before he died, then took over his business.
And now he's done the same thing with Trump.
And he just picked two winners in a row, Breitbart and Trump.
And so he ends up in one of the most Powerful positions in American government.
So what will he do?
Well, first of all, he will actually target enemies.
Bannon is a deeply, deeply vindictive guy.
He's somebody who likes to destroy enemies.
It's something he takes pleasure in.
He likes to think of himself that way, so it wouldn't be a surprise for me to say this, even to him.
And so when I jokingly said earlier this year that if Trump wins, I expect my IRS audit, that was not really a joke.
I mean, I think that with Bannon in the White House, I think a lot of people who did not support Trump Sufficiently, and didn't support Bannon and think Bannon's a bad guy.
Those people will be targeted by Bannon, or at least there's a good shot they will be.
But more importantly, beyond sort of personal vendettas, Bannon's actual agenda is he does not like the Republican Party, which is okay, except that he doesn't like them for the wrong reasons.
Bannon is a European far-right populist.
That's what Bannon is.
He's somebody who believes first and foremost in the idea that we have to have tariffs and we have to assure the continuation of Western civilization by limiting immigration.
Not just immigration on the basis of philosophy, just immigration generally has to be limited.
He doesn't believe in small government per se.
That's not an important thing to him.
He's sort of in line with Marine Le Pen, the French National Party leader.
She calls for harsher penalties for criminals and significant restrictions on Muslim immigration and protectionism on trade, and a restoration of the franc as the national currency rather than the euro, and a big government in terms of health care.
That's pretty much Trump's platform, and Bannon is all in favor of that.
The European right is not the American right.
The American right traditionally, the conservative American right, traditionally has said constitutional principles like individual liberty and personal responsibility and limited government—the These are the core of Americanism and if you can accept those principles you can come from anywhere and be part of America.
That's not what the nationalist right believes.
The nationalist right believes close the borders now.
We have to stand up for our culture against all other cultures and people can't really integrate into the culture.
There can't be any integration.
There can't be any openness.
We really have to close ourselves off.
It's very close to sort of Pat Buchanan's idea of the universe.
And it's no shock that the Daily Beast reported that Bannon has already reached out to Marine Le Pen in France, as well as Nigel Farage of the UK Independent Party.
So the question is, what will Bannon actually do?
So at the same time they announced that Bannon was going to be the new White House chief strategist, They announced that Reince Priebus was going to be the White House Chief of Staff.
So there are a few ways to read that.
There's the optimistic way to read that, and then there's the pessimistic way to read that, and I'll let you choose.
And by the way, I'm trying to be as objective as I possibly can be, given the fact that I have personal distaste for a man that I believe is a destructive force inside the Republican Party, and in the conservative movement generally, and who's out for his own self-aggrandizement.
Here's the breakdown.
If you're optimistic, Bannon leads the war on the media.
He just fights the left media on behalf of Donald Trump, because that's sort of what he did at Breitbart.
And Reince handles all of the internal party squabbles and just helps Trump work with Reince, because Reince is very, very close with Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.
That's the most optimistic version.
That's sort of what Ed Morrissey thinks is happening here.
I don't think that's what's happening here.
There are other people who say that Bannon was just added as a SOP to the populist base.
Really, Reince Priebus is going to be doing the heavy lifting.
I don't think that's right either.
And the reason I don't think that's right either is because it seems to me that Reince is the weak leg of the stool.
Bannon is an alpha.
Reince is a beta.
Reince is the bag man and Bannon is whispering in Trump's ear.
This morning, Reince came out and he was praising Trump, praising Bannon, and here is what he had to say about Bannon.
A lot of people are concerned because they look at the website he ran, Breitbart News.
As one paper put it, it recently accused President Obama of, quote, importing more hating Muslims, called Bill Kristol a renegade Jew, advised female victims of online harassment to just log off and stop screwing up the internet for men.
I guess people are wondering, is this the worldview that Steve Bannon will bring to the White House?
Can you let them know anything about him that would be contrary to the website he ran?
Sure.
And that wasn't his writing.
I mean, that was some articles in Breitbart.
It wasn't him.
Okay, but he was the head of it.
The buck stops with him, right?
The guy I know is a guy that isn't any of those things.
I mean, the guy I know is the guy sitting in an office all day yesterday talking about hiring, talking about people.
And in the last few months, there's a guy that exhibited none of those qualities.
Here's a guy who is Harvard Business School.
He's a 10-year naval officer, London School of Economics, I believe.
He is a guy who is pretty – he's very, very smart, very temperate.
And together, we've been able to manage.
This is – to put it bluntly, this is a load of horse bleep.
Okay?
What he's saying right now is not true.
At Breitbart, the buck absolutely stopped with Bannon.
No major piece went up on the website without Bannon's go-ahead.
And that's been true for a long time.
People have been saying that for a long time.
It's true.
So the idea that Bannon had nothing to do with the transition toward Trumpsterism and the alt-right is absolutely untrue.
When he says that Bannon is temperate, that's just insane.
Like, I don't know a single person who knows Bannon, who would describe Bannon as temperate.
Bannon can be temperate.
He can be charming with people who he thinks he's conning, basically.
And Reince, since he spent this entire election cycle massaging Trump's buttocks and the people of those around him, it's not a surprise that Bannon was temperate with him.
Why wouldn't he be?
But Reince has to know he's lying.
I mean, I can't imagine that Reince has gone this entire election cycle without Bannon screaming at him at least once.
That's not, temperate is not the word.
It's just absurd all the way through.
And this is the problem, right?
So the left is wrong about Bannon, but the idea that Bannon's not going to have any say in this White House is really not true.
And when it comes to how that breaks down, the problem is, of course, that if Bannon wants to go to war with Reince, like literally an hour after they announced that Bannon would be working with Reince at the White House, Breitbart ran a story about how Ryan should be ousted as Speaker of the House.
So if you think that Bannon is just going to sit by while all the policy gets done, yeah, that's not happening.
And Kellyanne Conway, who really has turned out to be, I thought this during the campaign, but she's a very, very skilled liar, she talked up Bannon as well on Meet the Press.
It was a very small core senior team, probably less than 10 people all told, and I'm sure that everyone will be very important to the president moving forward.
I will say this, though.
I think having worked with him and known him, Steve Bannon in this particular campaign was the general, and he is much more the Goldman Sachs managing partner and much more the naval officer, I think, than people realize.
That's a big part of his background.
So what you're saying is he's not, he wouldn't come in to say, let's burn Washington down, proverbially?
I think that the president-elect is there to actually implement his first 100-day plan and those around him know that and will appreciate that whether it's within his inner circle on Capitol Hill.
We are very grateful in Trump world to both Bannon and Priebus.
And I think you'll see them work, continue to work together.
We all work very closely.
It's a very small.
Okay.
So look, people are not going to be in the mood to hear bad stuff about Trump right now, which is why I'm trying to be honest about what I think this means.
I'll wait to see how it shakes out.
But the idea that's being promulgated that Steve is some sort of temperate moderate moderating force in the, in the white house, that just is not true.
It's just not true.
And if you want lies, then I suggest that you listen to some other show or watch some other show.
But I'm not going to lie to you just because Trump won.
So we're going to do some serious good Trump, bad Trump in a minute.
Because Trump, it's not all bad.
I think that Ryan's pick is a good pick.
I think that this pick is a bad pick.
But we'll get to all that in just a second.
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