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Dec. 8, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show
29:44
Ep. 222 - Trump Does Something Brilliant
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On Monday, a North Carolina jury deadlocked over the question of Officer Michael Slater's guilt in the shooting of an unarmed black man, Walter Scott, in the back.
The media, of course, went insane.
They claimed that this demonstrated that cops could never be convicted.
They suggested the missed trial was a result of deep-seated American racism.
The only reason that Slater wasn't convicted in this trial was one holdout juror.
Eleven other jurors were ready to convict.
For murder.
The prosecutor in this case immediately declared her intention to retry the case, as well as she should.
Video shows the officer shooting Scott in the back, then sauntering over to Scott's prone body, handcuffing him and dropping an object near the body.
That was a taser.
The prosecutor argued, quote, his first instinct after the shots were fired and he cuffs a dead Walter Scott was to stage, was to stage the scene.
Slager then lied to the cops about the circumstances surrounding the shooting.
He claimed that Scott had charged him and he killed Scott in defense of his own life.
Now, thanks to one juror, we're supposed to believe that all of America is systemically racist, even though the governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, issued a statement explaining, quote, it is my understanding that there will be, as quickly as possible, a new trial where the Scott family and all of South Carolina will hopefully receive the closure a verdict brings.
Instead of recognizing that the vast majority of Americans are disgusted with this mistrial, and that the justice system has yet to even come to a real conclusion on Slager, the media instead use the Slager case to show America's racist and the system's evil.
They point to the fact that virtually no officers are convicted for murder, which makes sense, since most officer-involved shootings occur in disputed circumstances with criminals, and it's difficult to prove a murder case against officers absent clear and convincing evidence.
Statistically speaking, 78 officers have been prosecuted for killings in the United States since 2005.
Just under 30 were, in fact, convicted of manslaughter.
One was convicted of murder.
But that just shows that Americans hate black folks.
According to the Huffington Post, they said, quote, black people have shown time and time again The system didn't disagree here.
One juror did.
or fleeing or completely innocent and a danger to no one, the people sworn to serve and protect can still kill them.
And even when almost everyone agrees the evidence shows the officer in the wrong, the system may end up disagreeing.
The system didn't disagree here.
One juror did.
The system allows for one juror to scuttle a death verdict.
That doesn't prove that the system is racist any more than the OJC.
Simpson trial's idiotic verdict proved the system was racist against white people.
But the media are still searching for a narrative that shows white Americans attempting to clamp down on black Americans.
They really couldn't be happier about this verdict, which they believe justifies their suspicions.
But most of America is rightly outraged.
And slavery will face trial 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.
I have to read you.
This is the greatest column in the history of mankind coming up in just a second.
It really is pretty spectacular.
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Okay, so I need to start today with a column that is just the greatest column in the history of humanity.
It's just spectacular.
And don't worry, we'll get to Donald Trump in Boeing, we'll get to Donald Trump and more on Carrier.
There's a lot of information that's now coming out.
We'll get to Donald Trump in the Cabinet.
Tons of news, but this column deserves all of the attention that I can lavish upon it.
And so does Stephanie Land, the delightful human being who penned this thing.
So the title of the column is from the Washington Post, is Trump's election stole my desire to look for a partner.
Well, first of all, if you ever are going on a date with a woman who wrote something like this, know that this date is going to go extraordinarily poorly.
It doesn't matter your political perspective.
If your dating life is ruined by the politics of the federal government, then I would suggest that you need new priorities.
And this is speaking of someone who immerses himself in politics every single day.
Here's the column.
In August, I went on six dates in one week.
I had decided that I was ready to look for a partner.
Enough of this dating unavailable men a half decade younger than me.
Okay, first, quick note.
Washington Post.
Get some editors.
A half decade younger than I. They'd never seriously consider a relationship with me, the column continues, my two children and our needy dog.
No, I wanted to find an equal.
A man who wouldn't feel the need to step in and rescue me.
I didn't need rescuing, but I knew deep down that was only partially true.
I often felt the sort of loneliness that settled in my stomach starting from a chaotic afternoon with my children lasting well into the night when I pulled the covers tight around my chin.
I can't imagine why this woman was having trouble finding Mr. Right.
As Andrew Klavan is fond of putting it, if you're so confident it's time to find Mr. Right, perhaps you're not Mrs. Right.
Maybe you actually need to fix yourself first.
I've been on my own with my kids for most of the past decade.
I have no idea what a supportive partner would even look like in my house.
I imagined it as some sort of potluck.
We'd both bring the things we have to offer and place them on the table.
My ability to multitask and keep everyone's schedule on track would sit next to his ability to fix cars, cook, or read books in silly voices.
Then we'd feast.
Of the six first dates I had in August, two men seemed promising.
One of them met me at a brewery.
We chatted happily through two beers.
Finally, I was out of a job interview mode I'd fallen into while sitting across from strangers.
I relaxed.
I laughed.
And it wasn't the laugh I did just because.
It was real.
This is romantic stuff.
Deep, deep soul-searching stuff.
We dated for a few weeks before he admitted he wasn't ready for something serious.
Wouldn't you have wanted to... I'm gonna give a little bit of dating strategy for folks.
On the first date, you should find out whether something is serious or not.
Like, on the very first date.
My wife and I knew on the first date that we were both looking for marriage.
You know what that did?
It saved us both a lot of headache.
Here, the column continues.
Two days later, the other of those good dates called me out of the blue.
We talked for a while, and I asked him to dinner.
Things were falling into place.
A feast was laid on the table, and it looked delicious.
But!
But!
Here's where it gets really good, guys.
It's really awesome.
It's awesome.
Okay.
But!
Two weeks later, the election happened.
Dun, dun, dun, dun!
Oh my god!
Once it was clear that Donald Trump would be president instead of Hillary Clinton, I felt sick to my stomach.
I wanted to gather my children in bed with me and cling to them like we would if thunder and lightning were raging outside with winds high enough that the power might go out.
And then we'd sing, and then we would sing the song from Sound of Music about kittens and noodles and such.
The world felt that precarious to me.
First of all, if Donald Trump being elected made your world feel that precarious, you have no faith in the American governmental system.
And also, I would recommend that you take a look in the mirror.
Hillary Clinton wasn't going to make any great shakes.
My oldest came out of her room the next morning to show me the money the Tooth Fairy had left her.
She unexpectedly had to have a tooth pulled, and so bravely went through with it.
And I said, just think.
You'll always remember the day you got a tooth pulled with the day we elected our first female president.
You can't even let your kid have the memory of the tooth-pulling without you, without, I mean, I do think that those two things, by the way, are related.
That if we had had Hillary Clinton as president and a tooth-pulling on the same day, there is a certain amount of some sense there.
When I told her Trump had won, she protested, but mom, you said Hillary was going to win.
A lot of people thought the same thing.
I said, I hugged her, a little scared to send her to school, out into the big sky country of the red state where we live.
What?
You think people are just going to go out and start murdering people who are Democrats in red states?
Sorry, it turns out that the murder rates are largely in this country confined to blue areas, even in red states.
So, I mean, if you're worried about the safety of your kid, maybe you shouldn't live in a blue area.
20 minutes later, at a stoplight on the way to drop off my two-year-old at daycare, steam started creeping out from under the hood of my car.
It was Trump!
Trump did it!
He somehow went under the hood of her car and made the steam emanate.
My God, the man can do anything.
Fortunately, my mechanic's shop was nearby.
My radiator was cracked in two places right at the top.
I really wouldn't feel comfortable with you driving it, one of the mechanics said.
Luckily, a new radiator could easily be obtained and installed that day.
I thanked them.
I didn't start crying until I crossed the street to walk home.
We had a few miles to go, so I carried my daughter.
I didn't mind carrying her.
I still had that urge to cling to her and keep her close.
It was cold that morning, but the sun started to warm us enough to remove our hats.
It was though God was smiling upon us in spite of Trump Satan.
Halfway home, my tears stopped, and my despair grew to appreciation.
I have the means to fix our car.
I, on my own, can support my family.
I not only have the strength to keep it together mentally and emotionally, well that's questionable, but I also have the strength to carry my daughter home.
I have the strength to carry all of us.
Really?
How much can you keep dead left?
Can you carry me?
Because I'm tired right now.
That urge to cling to my family while keeping our foundation strong didn't mesh well with continuing to date the man I'd be seeing.
He also has a daughter.
He too had been feeling a lot of the same emotions I was experiencing.
Hopelessness, fear, uncertainty about the future, panic over having to talk to my nine-year-old about anything that might come up at school or what to do in the instance of sexual assault.
Hold on, hold on.
So you weren't going to talk to your daughter about sexual assault if the first gentleman actually raped people, but you're definitely going to have to talk about it now because Trump or something.
But I couldn't reach out to him anymore, this new guy.
He was too new, too unfamiliar.
Yeah, you sound like a pillar of strength, lady.
And my focus had to be on my community of friends that are my family.
I need to fiercely love the people close to me instead of learning to love someone new.
To reach out to others could weaken the bonds that hold my family together.
I can't.
I told him I just can't.
I've lost the desire to attempt the courtship phase.
The future is uncertain.
I'm not the optimistic person I was on the morning of November 8th wearing a t-shirt with Nasty Woman written inside a red heart.
Yeah, who would want to date this?
Like, seriously, what's wrong with that nutty guy who wants to date this?
Goodness gracious, if I went on a date and some woman showed up wearing a political slogan that said Nasty Woman on it, I'd be like, oh my god, get me the hell out of here as fast as possible.
It makes me want to cry thinking of that, of seeing my oldest in the shirt I bought her in Washington, D.C.
that says Future President.
I don't understand.
She can't be president anymore because Hillary wasn't?
We didn't elect the crazy old crone lady who was corrupt in every conceivable way so your daughter can't be president now?
I mean, really, if you put... This idolatrous worship of politics.
I mean, it sucks on both sides and it's really bad on the left.
Wow.
There is no room for dating in this place of grief.
Dating means hope.
I've lost that hope in seeing the words, President-elect Trump.
All hope is lost.
Cling to your loved ones.
Trump comes for thee.
Okay, like, there are people like me.
We're not real big on the Trumpster, okay?
Like, as you may have noticed, I think Trump does a lot of stupid things.
I think he does some smart things.
I think that Trump does a lot of bad things.
I think he does some good things.
I think he's a mixed bag.
But, goodness gracious, I mean, like, you can't take care of your kid because you're so upset about Trump.
You can't, you have to cling to your loved ones.
Hide beneath the blankets.
Trump is coming!
And then you see the windows rattling.
Oh my god!
Windows are rattling.
You look outside.
Boom!
There's his crazy face with the hair and all.
Oh boy, I think the left is a little melodramatic about their politics.
Just a little bit over the top.
Just a little bit.
Oh, goodness gracious, goodness gracious.
You don't have to like the outcome of elections.
I mean, I was very upset when it turned out the two nominees from the parties were people I couldn't stand, but I somehow went on with my life.
Somehow my wife and I still had date night, somehow we still brought up our kids, somehow I didn't feel the need to tell my two-and-a-half-year-old that her life in America was over, the country was finished.
It's just amazing, amazing how over-the-top the folks on the left are.
Okay, so, sorry, I just had to share that with you because it's It's too wonderful in every conceivable way.
It is.
It's just, it's too glorious.
Okay, so next, on to Trump.
So Trump this morning did something that is very smart.
Now, I think that Republicans are about to run into a pretty significant conundrum, and it's a conundrum that I've been sort of loathe to cover because it's not clear yet if Trump's going to be popular or not.
But I think he's actually making some very, very smart political moves, moves that are To make him more popular than he is now.
He's a headline-generating president.
He's a president who cares almost solely about headlines, and that's a pretty good way to become popular, if you're just reactive to the headlines.
So there's a headline, and it says, Carrier's leaving.
So the first thing you do is you brandish a club, and you tell Carrier to get back into line, and then you get a good headline.
So there's a poll out today that shows 60% of Americans are more likely to like Trump after the Carrier deal.
There's also a headline today, worth noting, that Carrier is raising its prices.
That is not a coincidence.
When you force Carrier to absorb additional costs in the form of work in the United States, their prices will go up.
Presumably they will lose business, or presumably you'll have to pay more for an AC piece of machinery.
But in any case, the fact is that that made Trump popular.
Trump is now carrying that logic forward.
He's just gonna do a bunch of things that have no real ideological root to them, other than they make Trump popular, and he feels like doing what he wants.
And this is not something I'm a fan of.
I talked last week about this philosophy of pragmatism.
Pragmatism isn't a philosophy.
Pragmatism is the basic idea that you are independently, as President of the United States, capable of solving all problems, and therefore we should hand you ultimate power.
You can't be pragmatic unless you have power.
If you ask me to fix your window, You have to delegate me the power to fix your window.
You can't tell me that you want me to fix the window and then I have to go through a whole rigmarole in order to do it.
People who say they're for pragmatist presidents really mean they're for tyrannical presidents.
They want a president with the power to do anything they want the president to do.
That's sort of the mode from which Trump operates.
He thinks I alone can solve.
And that means that he's actually going to probably be kind of popular because he will solve some problems that are in the headlines while creating new problems that don't see the headlines.
The problem with the carrier deal, as I said, and the problem with some of the other actions Trump's about to take is that These are things that have some very good headlines because there's a clear beneficiary, in this case the people working at Carrier, but there are a lot of diffuse victims.
So all the people who have to pay additional taxes in order to pay the subsidy, all the other companies who didn't get the subsidy and now have to compete with Carrier, all the people who would be making money in other branches of United Technologies, and now the money has to be delegated to paying these people in Indiana.
There are all sorts of diffuse costs.
This is what the great economist Bastiat said when he talked about infrastructure projects.
His basic take was government always wants to build roads and infrastructure.
Every dollar that's spent on a road comes from somewhere else.
Every job that's created by government is a job taken away from somebody, and that's the reality.
But, but, that said, all of this stuff actually makes Trump more popular, not less.
So today's exercise in Trump's kind of brilliant populism comes courtesy of Boeing.
So Trump tweeted this today.
Here's Trump's tweet.
He tweeted about Boeing thusly.
He said, Boeing is building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion.
Cancel order!
So aside from the kind of hilarity of Donald Trump trying to cancel a federal contract on Twitter, it is a really, really smart political move.
It is a very smart political move because it looks like he's trying to cut waste and fraud, and it also looks like he's trying to do it even at his own expense.
See, I'm the president, and I'm giving up my fancy new plane in order to cut waste and fraud.
Never mind the trillion-dollar infrastructure package I'm pledging.
I'm trying to cut waste and fraud with regard to Air Force One.
Now, number one, a couple minor issues.
One, we don't actually know Where the waste and fraud is in this particular contract, or even if there is waste and fraud, Air Force One contains an enormous amount of new technology.
Every time they update it, Air Force One hasn't been updated in 30 years.
That's not to say this is the best contract or the most necessary contract.
It's just to point out that I'd like to see the contract that Trump signs to replace this one for the update of Air Force One.
But this is really smart stuff, and here's what Trump had to say when he was asked about it at Trump Tower today.
It's clip 17.
Well, the plane is totally out of control.
It's going to be over $4 billion.
It's for Air Force One program.
And I think it's ridiculous.
I think Boeing is doing a little bit of a number.
We want Boeing to make a lot of money, but not that much money.
Okay, thank you.
So, great politics, right?
Smart politics.
Because now it looks like he's just trying to get rid of bad contracts.
You know, the general idea that there are a lot of people who are protesting about what he said there, where he says, we want Boeing to make a lot of money, but not that much money.
There are some people saying, well, that's the equivalent of Obama saying that he doesn't want companies making too much money.
Not quite the same thing, because here you're talking about a federal contract under the purview of the Trump administration.
So if he said that broadly, if he said broadly, we don't want people making too much money, then you're in trouble.
I mean, that's what Obama said.
But if he's just saying, in this federal contract, we think that we're being charged too much, we want to renegotiate the contract, that's not the end of the world.
Very smart politics.
Worth noting, Boeing did take a significant hit in the stock market this morning.
They're down about 64 cents in their stock price just because Trump said this.
And again, I'd like to see if there's a better contract available.
Is there a better contract available?
So this is good if there's a better contract available.
It's smart politics even if there is no better contract available, because it looks like Trump is standing tall to the evil corporations.
And we're gonna save on waste and fraud.
This sort of headline-seeking stuff from Trump is very often smart politics.
Here's another example.
Yesterday, Donald Trump meets with Al Gore.
So the entire right is upset about this.
We think it's very silly.
Why is Al Gore this hoaxster with regard to climate change?
And he is, because his solutions, even if you believe, In man-made climate change, and there is some evidence to suggest that it's true, there's no proper solution to it.
And certainly the carbon credit scheme that Al Gore has gotten rich off of is a scam.
And all of the predictions that Al Gore has made about the climate over the past decade, in an inconvenient truth, all of those have turned out to be exaggerated or false.
Al Gore goes and he meets with Ivanka, and then he meets with Trump directly.
And here's the reality.
Donald Trump has spent his career telling a lot of different things to a lot of different people on policy.
In 2009, he signed a letter calling for a solution to climate change.
It was a full-page letter in the New York Times, very much left on climate change.
And then he swiveled on it, and now apparently he's sort of swiveling back.
Al Gore comes out, he says, that was a really great meeting.
Loved it.
Really terrific.
The bulk of the time was with President-elect Donald Trump.
I found it an extremely interesting conversation to be continued, and I'm just going to leave it at that.
Thank you.
So, here's the deal.
Al Gore goes to Trump Tower, and he comes out, and suddenly, Trump looks like he's willing to hear from the other side.
Now, people on the right are not particularly happy about this.
We think Al Gore is a fraudster.
But, does that really matter very much to Trump?
Not really.
He knows that everybody on the right is enmeshed in his halo effect, right?
Everybody is so excited that he won.
Everybody is so excited that Hillary lost, that they're willing to kind of brush this off, no big deal.
Now, to be fair, we wouldn't have done the same thing with Jeb Bush.
We wouldn't have done the same thing with Rubio or Cruz.
If any of them had said, you know what, I'm meeting with Al Gore, we'd have said, uh, no, you're not.
No, that's a bad thing.
Trump does it, and now it's okay.
And, again, it's popularity as a substitute for principle.
Donald Trump is doing a lot of things to make himself popular and more broadly appealing, which is smart for him, but I'm not sure that it's smart for Republicans, and it's certainly not smart Because Trump is doing all these things that are popular, it's very easy for people to get sucked into the game of mistaking popularity for truth, mistaking popularity for principle.
Kellyanne Conway tweeted out that poll that I mentioned earlier about the popularity of the carrier move.
And what I tweeted back was, I was unaware that popularity amounts to doing good, right?
When Barack Obama did things that were popular, but we didn't like them, we said, those are bad things to do.
People forget this, but in February 2009, when Obama first took office, he proposed the $800 billion stimulus package.
That thing had 60% approval.
60%, right?
The exact same number as the carrier deal.
60% approval for that, according to the Gallup poll taken in February 2009.
And then later it turned out to be a boondoggle.
Was it good policy because it was popular?
Of course not.
Popularity never means that something is automatically good.
Justin Bieber is popular.
Does that mean that Justin Bieber is a quality musician?
And Kim Kardashian is popular.
Does that mean that Kim Kardashian is some sort of whiz kid?
It's easy to get sucked into this in politics because, again, we tend to see politics as team sport.
Is our team winning or is our team losing?
So Rush Limbaugh sort of made this argument yesterday that Trump is winning.
He's winning bigly.
And because he's winning bigly, that means that we have to give him a green light on a lot of the stuff he's doing.
He says, we're on offense with Trump.
Here's Rush yesterday.
Trump is not on defense, folks.
We are on offense with Donald Trump.
And that's one of the big Invisible.
Unspoken reasons why he has such loyalty is because people who support him are just like a lot of you in this audience, fed up with being on defense and being on a team that never fought back, much less went on offense.
But these tweets and this erratic or unpredictable behavior keeps Trump's opponents on defense.
And believe me, it is a delight Okay, and so Rush loves the fact that, listen, I like the fact that if he were conservative, I'd love the fact that he was on offense too.
As you know, my basic strategy on politics is never be on defense, always be on offense.
So I agree with Rush's general tenor here.
My only question is, is he on offense in favor of good things, or is he not on offense in defense of good things?
Like the tactics, I can appreciate.
I'm saying right now, what he's doing right now tactically is actually quite brilliant.
He's picking issues off the tree, headlines off the tree, and then he's using those headlines in order to boost his own popularity, and then, five in the morning, he sets the agenda for the day with some tweet that drives the press totally insane.
It's actually quite brilliant what he's doing.
What he's doing is effective.
No question, it's out of attention.
Rush actually went ahead and praised the $1 trillion stimulus package Trump is apparently planning.
Trump actually follows through on this trillion dollars to modernize airports.
You're going to have conservative arguments against it, claiming this is not how it works.
This is still federal spending.
It's still budget busting.
It's still massively expanding the government.
However, there will be tangible results.
And if Trump does this, and if there are witnessable, demonstrable results of modernization at airports, you're going to be hard pressed to get people to find a problem with it.
Okay, but it's your job to explain why that's a problem, right?
As a conservative, it's Rush's job to then go on.
I don't think he's wrong about the political benefits of Trump doing it, but it's his job as a conservative to now explain it, not just as a third-party sort of observer.
Rush goes, well, you know, some conservatives will find problems with it.
Why will they find problems with it?
Explain.
Why is this bad?
Or are you just going to pretend that it's not that bad because Trump's doing it and it's popular?
Mike Pence is doing the same thing.
Mike Pence was asked repeatedly on MSNBC today about Donald Trump's proposal for a 35% tariff on any company that puts a job outside the United States, which, by the way, also encourages companies not to hire up.
It actually encourages companies to hire fewer people because the last thing you want to do is hire 100 people.
You have to fire 50 and outsource it.
Instead, what you'd prefer to do is start your business immediately by hiring a bunch of people outside the country.
Then you're not outsourcing.
Because you never fired anybody inside the country in order to place jobs out of the country.
Mike Pence is doing the same thing.
It's popular.
Trump won.
Therefore, that makes the policy okay.
Here's what Pence had to say.
Donald Trump tweeted about a 35% tariff on American companies who produce things and try to bring them back into the United States.
Those are not conservatives.
Do you really believe in those things?
Well, I believe very much that the American people voted on November 8th for change.
And change in our domestic policy and in many ways change in our economic relationships around the world.
I mean, the President-elect ran on a commitment to renegotiate NAFTA, to pull out of the TPP agreement and to deal with countries in the Asian Pacific Rim on an individual basis and negotiate trade agreements with American workers and American jobs.
Did you support T.P.?
You know, I did, but when I first sat down with President-elect, we talked about this.
He pointed to the fact that whether it's NAFTA or some of these other large agreements, when the United States enters into these agreements with multiple countries, accountability is very difficult and getting out of them is very difficult.
Okay, so this is so magical, right?
Now all of a sudden he's been converted to Trumpism.
Why?
Because Trump won, and I know that people have voted for Trump.
Again, this logic didn't hold with Obama, it shouldn't hold for Trump.
I understand what Trump is doing, and yes, it's brilliant politically, because all he's doing is doing what Democrats have done for 50 years.
Watch, I'm going to use a lot of infrastructure in order to pay off all my friends, and I'm going to build a giant dam, and then I'm going to put my name on it, and it's going to say FDR right on the side, and then I'm going to be super popular.
LBJ did the exact same thing.
Or Eisenhower's freeway system.
All these infrastructure projects are ways of gaining popularity.
And it's a way of gaining popularity when you leverage a company.
That's not to say it's bad.
I've never said it's bad politics.
It isn't bad politics.
It's smart politics.
But smart politics and doing the right thing are not equivalent.
They're not the same thing.
Barack Obama, a very smart politician, didn't do the right thing.
There is a danger here beyond the principle.
There is a danger here beyond the principle.
And this is a real question for a lot of conservatives.
It's a real question for a lot of conservatives.
And that question is, what happens if Donald Trump does his day-to-day pragmatism routine, he generates a lot of good headlines for himself, but his overall policy is not good?
This is what we call the Obama model, where Obama would do something, get a great headline out of it.
People would like him.
People would think he's great on Kimmel.
And then his overall policy is really unpopular, like Obamacare.
His big world-changing policies kind of suck.
So you do something where he's – look at Obama now.
He just went and he helped this poor family from Wichita.
And then he would go out and push a policy that affects all Americans, and we think it stinks.
We don't punish Obama because we like Obama because he's had all of these great headlines.
We punish the Democrats.
And so the Democratic Party ends up hollowed out from the inside.
Everybody else pays the price for Obama's bad economic policies.
Republicans could face the same conundrum here.
You got a very popular president in Trump, for example, because he's doing this kind of reactive politics.
See something on the news, do something about it.
See something on the news, do something about it.
But the broad policy strokes stink, right?
35% tariffs that raise prices on American goods, make consumers pay out through the nose.
Make American workers pay more because we use inputs from other countries.
Create an interest for American companies in outsourcing immediately instead of later and not hiring enough now because they don't want to be punished for firing people later.
What if the broad policy strokes end up with Republicans getting punished in Congress, Republicans getting punished on the state level, Republicans getting punished in gubernatorial offices, because let's say that these policies Trump is pushing, like these 35% tariffs, end up helping lead to a recession.
But Trump is doing fine, because all of his headlines are about what an activist he is, how he's on top of these things, how he's taking them one by one.
Republicans on a political level are going to have to actually consider whether that's worthwhile or not.
And now they're stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Because let's say that Trump is very popular and pushing a very unpopular policy, but he's pushing it so it's more popular.
But we know that when it goes into effect, it's going to stink.
Now what do Republicans do?
Trump will bash them over the head.
In fact, he's activating Kellyanne Conway, apparently, to create this outside government interest group that is going to just stomp for Trumpism.
That's all it's going to do.
It's going to help primary his opponents, and it's going to punish people who don't agree with him, and it's going to be sort of this large-scale, organizing-for-action-style Barack Obama campaign to continuing campaign organization.
This is a conundrum for Republicans.
It's a problem for Republicans and it's something they're going to have to consider.
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Okay, so the big question for Republicans is going to be, will they stand up to Trump, or should they politically stand up to Trump?
And this is a sort of strategic question, which is, how do you hope to get the best out of the Trump presidency?
Do you get the best out of the Trump presidency by calling him out when he makes a mistake, or do you assume he's going to do some bad stuff and some good stuff, and you push him to further power because you hope that the good is going to outweigh the bad?
That's a real tactical question.
All I can say is that trusting a politician too much has never ended well.
Trusting a politician to do the right things, because he's gonna do more good than bad, comes along with a lot of bad, and calling out politicians for doing the wrong things seems to be a more intellectually coherent and politically advantageous position.
Now, as we continue, we're gonna continue over at dailywire.com, so if you, uh, we have to let you go on Facebook and YouTube, but go over to dailywire.com right now to subscribe.
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