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Dec. 8, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show
23:28
Ep. 221 - When Trump Sins, Will Anyone Mention It?
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On Friday, Donald Trump made the supposedly crucial error of holding a phone call with the president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen.
Since 1979, the United States has held a policy of steady neutrality with regard to the question of Taiwanese independence.
We've sort of agreed in principle with the one-China rhetoric that the Commie Chinese espoused, but we fiercely prevented China from aggressive action against Taiwan.
Trump's phone call with Taiwan was supposedly, therefore, a breach of both the quorum And policy expertise, which is truly frightening, supposedly.
Well, all of that's idiotic, okay?
Barack Obama spent his presidency overthrowing well-calibrated foreign policy on behalf of concessions to evil regimes.
From handing Iran hundreds of billions of dollars to continue promoting terrorism, to handing Russian dictator Vlad Putin control of Crimea in Syria, from reinforcing the crumbling Castro regime in Cuba, to weakening America's military, and thus opening the doorway to Chinese aggression in the South China Sea, Obama's foreign policy has been basically a near-endless procedures Obama's foreign policy has been basically a near-endless procedures of...
Placing our enemies in a beneficial position.
Trump making a phone call to Taiwan?
That's kind of the opposite.
As I wrote last week, Trump either knows what he's doing with Tehran, or he really doesn't.
If he does, if his goal is to demonstrate to the Chinese that detente is ending thanks to their aggression, that's not the worst thing in the world.
That's actually a pretty good thing.
China's been building a regional sphere of influence that is only set to expand as Trump pulls out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Well, if Trump's goal is to use Taiwan as leverage against China in economic warfare, however, that is a foolish thing.
making clear the security threats to American allies in the region will not be tolerated, that would be a real positive.
Well, if Trump's goal is to use Taiwan as leverage against China in economic warfare, however, that is a foolish thing.
Taiwan deserves our support against China not to be sold out in order to thwart supposed Chinese trade manipulation.
What about if Trump has no goal?
If, as he seems to state on Twitter, he's just winging it?
Well, then we'll find out.
Either he'll back down, or he won't.
And that will be the policy.
But the sheer panic over the Taiwan phone call is overblown.
We don't know yet what the call pre-stage is.
If it's just amateur hour, sure, we should be worried.
But even if it is amateur hour, Obama, the supposed professional, blew it worse than Trump did, purposefully, with nefarious intent, over and over again.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro show.
All righty.
So much to get to today here on the Ben Shapiro show.
There'll be some good Trump, bad Trump, we'll get to that in just a second.
That'll basically be the theme of today's show, as well as of the next four years, and a lot to get to about sort of the perversion of conservatism and the soul-sucking of the Republican Party.
We'll talk about a lot of that, plus the Democrats continue to be completely in disarray.
But first, we have to say hello to one of our friends, Brett.
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Okay, tons to get into today here on the Ben Shapiro Show.
We begin, you know, why don't we just play the Good Trump, Bad Trump theme up front?
Because that's basically the theme of the program, so we may as well just have fun with it.
Good Trump, Bad Trump, which one will begin today?
Yay!
Good Trump, bad Trump.
Woo!
Okay, so we start with good Trump.
So, good Trump is really sort of mediocre Trump, and that is Donald Trump and the whole Taiwanese debacle.
So the media are really overplaying their hand here.
The media are making a huge deal out of the fact that Donald Trump picked up the phone when the president of Taiwan called.
As I say, there are really only three ways to break this down.
Way number one, he's adult and he just picked up the phone not knowing who's on the other end.
Unlikely, possible.
Possibility number two, he has a cohesive, thought-out policy.
He's trying to tick off the Chinese.
He's trying to tell them that he will not be stopped by their aggression.
That'd be really good.
Way number three is that he's actually saying all these tough things about Taiwan because he wants to broker a better trade deal with China.
Still not my favorite thing because that would basically be using Taiwan as a chit in some sort of trading game.
Not my favorite thing, but we don't know the answer to any of this yet, so we can sort of hold off judgment.
Is it good?
Is it bad?
We don't know.
So this is sort of mediocre Trump.
Mike Pence hits it right on the head, the Vice President-Elect hits it right on the head when he says, listen, all you people in the media, you're going nuts over this stuff, but the fact is that Barack Obama and what he did with Cuba, you were fine with.
It's a little mystifying to me that President Obama can reach out to a murdering dictator in Cuba in the last year and be hailed as a hero for doing it.
And President-elect Donald Trump takes a courtesy call from a democratically elected leader in Taiwan and it's become something of a controversy.
Okay, and that's exactly right.
The fact is that the media were head over heels when Barack Obama trotted out a literal fiction to them about the Iran deal.
They were just in love with Obama, even though the Bataclan attack was happening in France at the same time that Obama was visiting Cuba.
He went to a baseball game.
They were cool with that.
The media had been fine with every stupid thing that Obama's done his entire presidency, and so it seems a little bit hypocritical for them to get so upset now.
One of the things I'm going to say on the program today, and this is a consistent principle, I feel like we sort of have to, in the aftermath of Trump's victory, we sort of have to go back to first moral principles in order to determine how we're going to cover this, right?
Because the fact is, the way I see it, we don't root for politicians here on the Ben Shapiro Show.
We don't.
Because this isn't a sports game, okay?
I'm not interested in the personal victory or loss of Donald Trump.
I'm much more interested in the principles I espouse and whether he represents them.
Now that he's president-elect, I would like him to All of the good conservative things he promised and some good conservative things.
I would like to see him not do silly things.
So what I've said, and I said this on Twitter over the weekend, this is not baseball, right?
Don't root for the team, root for the principal.
That's number one.
Number two, a game that we should not get in the habit of playing is the game, well, I'll start worrying about Trump doing X when the Democrats stop doing X.
Right, so I'll stop worrying about Trump being an amateur when the Democrats stop being amateuresque.
Okay, this is pure illogic.
It's childish logic.
I should be worried about the president-elect of the United States doing things I don't like, whether or not the Democrats are doing things I don't like.
I assume the Democrats and the media will do things I don't like.
So when we get to bad Trump in just a second, I'm going to explain that this sort of silly logic, which doesn't make any sense, this notion that when Trump does something bad, it's okay because Democrats have also done that bad thing.
It just doesn't work.
I don't like that argument in any sense.
But Pence is right.
The media's treatment of – Pence is right in the sense that the media's treatment of Obama, their willingness to overlook all of his foreign policy sins and then call it crazy, just crazy when Trump picks up the phone with Taiwan.
That's totally out of their – they're out of their minds.
John Bolton, who's up for secretary of state, he visited, I guess, Trump's tower on Friday.
So he's sort of back in the mix.
They announced, by the way, there are a bunch of new people who are up for it.
Also, they said John Huntsman, former ambassador to China under President Obama, that he might be up for it.
He came out today and came out in favor of what Trump had done with Taiwan.
Rex Tillerson, who's the CEO of Exxon, very warm toward Vladimir Putin.
He's up for secretary of state, Dana Rohrabacher, who is a congressman from California.
Nice guy, very pro-Putin.
He's up for Secretary of State, apparently.
And so the field expands.
Now, I really think that we're going to end up with somebody who was in the original field.
I think this is sort of a Trumpian reality TV show moment, where he just expands the field in week five of the reality TV show, and then windows it back down to the person that he thought was going to win all along.
My guess is that in the end, this is going to come down again to John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani, The President of the United States should talk to whomever he wants if he thinks it's in the interest of the United States.
TV shows get good ratings because we don't know what's happening next.
Anyways, Bolton said that Beijing should not decide who we get to talk to.
And what Trump did is just fine.
The president of the United States should talk to whomever he wants if he thinks it's in the interest of the United States.
And nobody in Beijing gets to dictate who we talk to.
And Trump echoed that on Twitter.
And I think that's right.
Listen, if he picks Bolton for Secretary of State, I'm a happy camper.
Bolton at State, Mattis at Defense, that'd be terrific.
But then we start getting to bad Trump.
Then we start getting to bad Trump.
And bad Trump is the stuff that he's been doing about the economy.
So I mentioned last Thursday, we talked about the deal that he did with Carrier, where he basically wheedled, threatened, cajoled them into keeping 1,000 jobs in Indiana, and then everybody went, Yay, Donald, you did a great job keeping 1,000 jobs.
And I said, hold up a second.
We have to figure out how he kept the 1,000 jobs there.
And if he kept the 1,000 jobs there in a bad way, that is something that we should call out.
Because again, I'm not in the business of, it's OK when Democrats do it.
It's bad when Democrats do it, but it's OK when we do it.
That's not something I'm interested in.
Barack Obama regularly threatened companies, insurance companies, banks, the auto manufacturers.
He threatened them on a regular basis all the time.
And by threatening them, he would get them to do what he wanted.
And I would say that's economic fascism because that's what it is.
If you look back to Mussolini, if you look back to Hitler, if you look back to any of the – if you look to Franco, if you look at any of the fascist states of Europe, the way that they did business was through something called corporatism.
Corporatism was the idea that the government could leverage private businesses into doing what they wanted, and they could also bribe private businesses into doing what they wanted.
That's not something I'm for.
The government has no place picking winners and losers.
The government has no place threatening businesses for engaging in open market activity.
Open market activity, free market activity makes better products for cheapers for consumers.
The idea that Carrier just did – that something wonderful happened to Carrier because 1,000 jobs stayed in the United States, not because of lower tax rates, not because of broader, better economic climate, but just because Trump basically threatened them, that's a very nasty thing.
And Trump basically doubled down on that over the weekend.
So over the weekend, here are some of his tweets.
He tweeted, "Rex Nord of Indiana is moving to Mexico "and rather viciously firing all of its 300 workers.
"This is happening all over our country, no more." This is economic fascism.
They're not viciously firing their 300 workers.
Donald Trump has fired workers before too.
In fact, as I recall, his slogan on TV was, you're fired.
If you don't remember that, just look at an old tape from five years ago, three years ago, right?
It was you're fired.
Was he vicious?
It was vicious.
But according to Trump, it's vicious because he doesn't want them to do it.
This is the language of economic totalitarianism, the idea that you're viciously firing your workers.
Rex Nord is participating in a shift of jobs away from expensive unionized areas out of the country.
That, by the way, will keep some people employed at Rex Nord in the United States.
The alternative, presumably, is for them to continue to shell out large dollars for these unions, to shell out large dollars for these jobs.
Never to outsource, to go out of business, and everybody's unemployed anyway, and the American company no longer produces products for people that are good, and we no longer get any tax revenue.
So, those are the alternatives, okay?
The way that free market economics works, you're going to move your jobs.
Where are the jobs that are the cheapest and the best?
That's a good thing.
It means that people get to consume products at a better price.
It also means that those companies stay competitive in the global marketplace, which allows them to grow and thrive.
No company grows and thrives simply based on protectionism.
The minute that the tariffs are taken away, they collapse.
That's exactly what happened to the automakers in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s in the United States.
We used to be the world's dominant automakers.
In the 70s and the 60s, there was severe protectionism put in place for the auto industries, unionization took place, really, really bad union contracts were signed, and then when those protections were removed, then the auto industry basically collapsed with all the Toyotas flowing into the country.
That's what happened to the auto industry.
Corporatism, tariffs, All that does is build up these bloated, overweight industries that are shivved as soon as they have to enter into a global marketplace.
But here is Trump targeting Rexnord, saying they're viciously firing, like they're sitting around, like the bosses are sitting around, they're going, you know what?
It'd be cheaper to keep the jobs here in Indiana, but screw that!
Screw those workers!
We hate those guys!
Fire them all!
Let's go to Mexico!
Nobody does that, but this sort of language, this charged language, this populist nonsense, it really is kind of gross.
And then Trump continued.
Here's some more of his tweets.
He tweeted, And this was his policy tweets, and this is nonsense.
He says, the U.S.
is going to substantially reduce taxes and regulations on businesses, but any business that leaves our country for another country, fires its employees, builds a new factory or plant in the other country, and then thinks it will sell its product back into the U.S.
without retribution or consequence is wrong.
Okay, the language of punishment, again.
The federal government is going to punish you for engaging in free market activity.
I wonder if he's going to punish all the auto companies for moving jobs out of Detroit, even if they went bankrupt.
Says there will be a tax on our soon-to-be strong border of 35% for these companies wanting to sell their products, cars, AEC units, etc.
back across the border.
This tax will make leaving financially difficult, but these companies are able to move between all 50 states with no tax or tariff being charged.
Please be forewarned prior to making a very expensive mistake.
And then all caps, the United States is open for business.
I've said this is like building an economic Berlin Wall, and it is.
The idea is to keep the business inside the United States, even at the cost of bankrupting the business.
Right, because the only way that you're going to be able to make the businesses in the United States competitive, if you tell them they can't outsource their labor, is by increasing tariffs on foreign products, right?
Increasing the tax on foreign products, which means you and I, all the consumers, we have to spend lots and lots of money to keep these jobs in the United States.
Okay, which is stupid.
Because the jobs stay in the United States in different sectors.
That doesn't mean everybody's a winner in the global economy.
Of course, that's not true.
It doesn't mean every sector is a winner in the global economy.
Of course, that's not true.
At the beginning of the Republic, 90% of the people living in the United States were farming.
Today, it's 3%.
What happened to all the farmers?
Well, they paid in the global economy.
They did.
Well, what happened to all the people who manufactured the wagons that proceeded to cars?
Well, they all went out of business.
Does that mean that we ought to just put tariffs on cars and destroy the car industry to make sure that the wheel rights union still gets their pay?
Of course not.
That's silly.
And if we really want to make sure that quote-unquote jobs stay in the United States regardless of the quality of jobs or the quality of the product, what we really should do is ban technology.
Amazon Go just came out with these really amazing grocery stores where apparently you can walk in, your products off the shelf, stick them in a bag, and walk out.
You don't have to pay.
The computers are able to gauge what products you took and then just charge it to you directly.
So you never have to worry about a checkout line.
You don't have to worry about waiting in line or even self-scanning.
You don't have to do any of that stuff anymore, which is super cool.
Presumably Trump would want to ban that kind of stuff, or if not, he'd have to explain why this is different.
He'd want to ban that sort of stuff to make sure that the groceries still are able to hire lots of people.
The purpose of an economy is not to create jobs.
The purpose of an economy is to create the best products at the lowest possible price.
And that, in turn, creates jobs.
Because in order to create those products, in order to have people who buy those products, you need to have people who have jobs.
Right?
But the idea that...
You just want the only indicator of the health of an economy is the unemployment rate is absolute stupidity.
It's always been stupidity.
The Soviet Union had a 100% unemployment rate, a 0% unemployment rate, and everybody was impoverished.
Cuba has a 100% employment rate because it's a communist country, so they can just force everybody into labor or call them employees for sitting on a park bench and playing dominoes.
The point of an economy is not to create jobs, the point of an economy is to create products and services that you and I want to trade with each other to make both our lives better.
An economy that only seeks to create jobs is not worried about making everybody's life better, it's worried about making some people's life better.
An economy that worries about creating better products and services, that's an economy that is a voluntaristic economy where you and I can engage in trade and barter and come up with the best possible solutions for ourselves.
That's a free market economy.
Trump apparently is not super in favor of that.
This thing he says at the very end where he says, the United States is open for business.
Let me tell you something.
If I have an open for business sign on my door, usually there's not an asterisk and then below that it's written, and if you don't come in here and do business, then we'll threaten you.
Or if you come in here, decide the product is too expensive and then you leave, we'll threaten you.
Trump wants this big, beautiful Berlin Wall of the economy.
And what's amazing about this is that so many people are falling into this.
So Mike Pence, who I'm really disappointed in so far.
I mean, he was supposed to be the guy who we voted for, essentially, right?
He was the one who was going to make sure that conservatism won the day in the end.
That was the idea.
Pence is now fully embracing the Trumpian economics, which are bad economics.
Again, they have nothing to do with reality.
He apparently said to the New York Times last week, quote, the free market has been sorting it out and America has been losing.
And then Trump said, every time, every time.
Nonsense.
Absolute nonsense.
America is the most powerful country in human history, not because it's protectionist, okay?
Protectionist countries do not thrive.
They don't.
I got into an argument with a guy from Market Watch about this over the weekend.
I said, name the countries that have become wealthy based on tariffs and building infrastructure.
They said China, and I said that's absolutely false.
They had tariffs and they were building infrastructure back during Mao's day.
The difference is they actually took some market liberalizing steps.
They privatized a bunch of property, they privatized a bunch of businesses, and they still have significant debt problems, and they've had two stock market crashes in the last year.
The idea that China is an economic rival to the United States, not on a per capita basis, they sure as hell aren't, and they enslaved a billion people in order to do it.
In the Wall Street Journal, apparently, Penn said, quote, A Trump White House would eschew many of the free market principles that have guided prior Republican administrations, including injecting itself into the personnel and long-term operating decisions of individual companies.
That's economic fascism.
It's no different from what Obama has done.
It's no different from what Hillary would have done.
It's no different from what fascists of the past have done.
I mean, seriously.
Injecting the government into personnel and long-term operating decisions of individual companies?
Of individual companies?
And then on Sunday, here's what Mike Pence had to say about Donald Trump's economics.
Think what you're going to see.
And the president-elect will make those decisions on a day-by-day basis in the course of the transition, in the course of the administration.
Manufacturing comes back to life.
So he's going to make these decisions on a day-by-day basis.
Isn't that picking winners and losers?
I mean, Sarah Palin calls it crony capitalism.
No, I don't think it's picking winners and losers at all.
What the president-elect did with Carrier was simply reach out one American to another and just ask them to reconsider.
He told them, we're going to do exactly what we said we would do in this campaign.
We're going to make the American economy more competitive.
We're going to get tougher and smarter on trade deals.
And that was changed circumstances from when they made their decision.
I don't think it's picking winners and losers.
He just reached out one American to another.
Really?
Divide called-up carriers.
Guys, can you not shift those jobs down south?
What I'd like for you to do is instead take a $65 million loss and maybe get like $7 million in tax benefits from the state of India, but basically lose $58 million as one American to another.
I'm just asking you.
No, it turns out that that's not what happened.
What happened here is that Donald Trump called up carrier and he threatened them.
That's what happened.
And what's amazing is how many people are okay with this.
It's all fine because Trump's a big victory guy.
Trump's the big victory guy.
Principles out the window.
We have to root for Trump personally.
Not for principals who want to see espoused.
We have to root for him personally, on a personal level.
We have to sit here, and we have to pray for him to succeed.
Not for his policies to succeed, but for him personally to succeed.
So Glenn Reynolds, who I usually love.
Glenn Reynolds is a libertarian, instapundent.
Here's what he wrote, celebrating the Carrier deal.
Quote.
Trump went ahead and delivered.
A conspicuously kept campaign promise that benefits the little guy sends a signal of caring that talk of macroeconomics does not.
FDR knew this.
His New Deal economic policies were mostly snake oil.
According to a study by UCLA economists, they actually prolonged the Great Depression by seven years.
But FDR made people feel like he cared, even though he was a rich man from New York who had never been poor himself.
Now another rich man from New York seems to be repeating the formula.
FDR gave the Democrats two decades of political dominance.
Today's Democrats should be worrying.
Trump could do the same for the Republican Party.
I have a question.
Shouldn't Republicans be worrying that FDR is back in the White House, except he's calling himself a Republican?
I mean, come on!
I mean, here he is, here is a libertarian, Glenn Reynolds, openly saying Trump is engaging in FDR New Deal-style snake oil, right?
I mean, he calls it snake oil, but that's okay, because at least it pisses off the Democrats.
Okay, I don't care about pissing off Democrats.
I care about doing the right thing.
If that pisses off Democrats, that's their problem.
But this is really dangerous stuff.
Here's the editorial board for Investor Business Daily.
Quote, it is about the carrier deal.
It means an end to eight years in which President Obama, instead of supporting U.S.
companies, arrogantly scolded business leaders and treated business as either piggy banks to be raided or as enemies to be brought to heel through regulations and mandates.
Wait, wait, the carrier deal did that?
That's what, Trump just did that.
He just scolded a business leader and then treated a business as a piggy bank to be raided or as an enemy to be brought to heel.
He just tweeted one second ago, Rex Nord of Indiana is moving to Mexico and viciously firing its 300 workers.
Does that sound like a guy who's trafficking in the free market?
Does that sound like that to you?
Now again, I hope and I pray that Donald Trump reverses himself on this.
But in order for him to achieve that, if you want him to have a successful presidency, you need no snake oil.
You need an economic policy that favors free trade.
You need an economic policy that doesn't favor the sort of garbage that he's been selling people.
I understand that he was lying to people during the campaign.
You should too.
He was when he was going into blue collar areas and saying, I'm going to bring back all your jobs at no cost.
We're just going to tariff it up to wazoo and everything will be hunky dory.
That's not how economics works.
And maybe that snake oil sells.
Doesn't mean it's not snake oil.
And I'm in the business of trying to tell the truth, and I believe that the American people, when they hear the truth, will understand the truth.
Because if we don't believe the truth means anything, if we don't believe that the truth can win out, then what the hell are we doing in this business?
Why not just be Democrats?
Why not just lie to everybody all the time?
Why not sell them a bill of goods that's never going to come due?
And then, I guess we'll win a lot.
And yay, we'll have 20 years of dominance.
But this is just such silliness.
By the way, speaking of silliness, apparently Ivanka Trump, who's, remember, Donald Trump said he was going to put his businesses in a blind trust to be run by his children?
All three of his kids are now moving to DC, so it's going to make that blind trust kind of awkward.
And Ivanka Trump met with Al Gore today at Trump Tower, and so apparently, Did Donald Trump.
Apparently they had a long, extensive meeting about climate change.
So, this is all going beautifully.
Now, we're going to continue over at dailywired.com.
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