All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 23, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show
19:22
Ep. 226 - Trump Picks Pro-Putin Secretary of State. Does It Matter?
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Barack Obama has to find an excuse for Hillary Clinton losing a near-guaranteed presidential race.
And he has one!
It's Vlad Putin!
White House spokesman Josh Earnest explained, quote, you didn't need a security clearance to figure out who benefited from malicious Russian cyber activity.
The president-elect didn't call it into question.
He called on Russia to hack his opponent.
He called on Russia to hack Secretary Clinton.
So he certainly had a pretty good sense of whose side this cyber activity was coming down on.
The last several weeks of the election were focused on a discussion of e-mails that had been hacked and leaked by the Russians.
These were e-mails from the DNC and John Podesta, not from the RNC and Stephen Bannon.
It was the president-elect who, over the course of the campaign, indicated he thought President Putin was a strong leader.
The president-elect's team, his campaign, did not make any effort to obscure this, unquote.
Now, as I explained yesterday, Hillary didn't lose because of Vladimir Putin.
She lost because she was an awful, terrible, horrible candidate that no one likes and wishes would go away.
And because Barack Obama has devastated his party at every single level of government.
But Obama has to find an excuse, aside from his own arrogance and Hillary's own incompetence, for the destruction of his legacy.
And Putin is as good an excuse as any.
But that's not the only excuse Obama has trotted out.
He's trotted out fake news.
Pretending that a bunch of rubes reading false headlines on Facebook elevated Trump to the presidency.
If only they'd paid attention to the real fake news distributed by the White House and members of the mainstream media, all would have been well.
And of course, Obama thinks the legacy of racism is responsible for the backlash against his presidency.
He was appearing with the execrable Trevor Noah and he explained, quote, we have by no means overcome the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow and colonialism and racism.
Obama continued by stating he had handled the issue of race just beautifully.
I mean, ignore the race riots, and the DOJ targeting police departments, and Obama making stupid comments about black people being shot by the cops, but he's a genius, and not everybody had appreciated that.
He said, quote, I don't think that trying to appeal to the better angels of our nature, as Lincoln put it, is somehow compromised.
There are many reasons why Hillary Clinton lost, but Putin, fake news, and racism aren't among them.
Barack Obama most definitely is.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Alrighty, so here we are.
We have a lot to get to today, but first we have to say hello to our friends over at Birch Gold.
If you are interested in purchasing gold, if you're interested in purchasing precious metals, removing your 401k or your IRA into gold without the tax consequences, you need to talk to my friends at Birch Gold.
You can visit them at birchgold.com slash ben, A plus rating from the Better Business Bureau.
If you're concerned about where the economy is going, if you're concerned about uncertainty, Then it is imperative that you go and check out Birchgold.com slash Ben right now.
They have a 16-page free kit that gives you all the information you need to know about investing in precious metals.
And if you have questions, ask all your questions, and then put part of your portfolio into precious metals.
Not all of it, but some of it should be in precious metals as a hedge against inflation and uncertainty in the market.
And Birchgold, those are the people that you want to talk to when you're ready to invest.
Birchgold.com slash Ben.
Okay, so tons to get to today here on the Ben Shapiro Show.
First of all, It is imperative to note that Donald Trump made a major announcement today, a really major announcement today from Trump Tower.
And he met with someone just, this is an amazing story.
This is, you know, this is clip, I think this is clip three here.
He met with somebody who may be a member of his cabinet, may not be a member of his cabinet, but really an important meeting.
Here's footage from Trump Tower this morning.
Mr. Trump, hi, Nate.
What did you guys discuss in your meeting today?
Just friends.
Just friends.
And he's a good man.
Doing well.
Long time.
We've been friends for a long time.
Life.
We discussed it.
You talked about Tony in 2020.
Do you think that's something you still want to do in life this evening?
Yeah.
Connie, are you serious?
It's Connie West, by the way, for people who are watching, who are listening to this later.
I just want to take a picture right now.
And then I don't know what this was supposed to be, but it was weird.
So Kanye West shows up.
He wasn't the only one to show up, by the way.
Apparently, Ray Lewis showed up, also wearing his white suit.
Ray Lewis, the linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens.
He was wearing his white suit, which had Secret Service deeply concerned because last time Ray Lewis wore a white suit, somebody got stabbed.
He burned that white suit.
So this is a different white suit.
He was at Trump Tower also.
I'm not sure what the purpose of all this is.
I will say that I'm not saying that Kanye is a gold digger.
All I'm saying is that he's not meeting with any broke.
OK, so that's just that's just the point here.
As somebody who mocked President Obama incessantly for meeting with celebrities, I have to mock Donald Trump for doing exactly the same thing.
We have now entered the realm of the surreal.
Kanye West at Trump Tower with Donald Trump.
Of course, that's not...
The major news of the day, Kanye and Trump have a warm relationship.
They have for a while.
If you recall, Donald Trump, and this is going to be a running theme, Donald Trump tends to treat people who praise him and bow before him as friends and wonderful, sweet political lovers.
Kanye West had praised Trump before.
Here's his video of Kanye West praising Trump.
Just to put the audacity to put Anna Wintour right next to Donald Trump.
I mean, like, I put Ray J in it, bro.
Like...
This is fame, bro.
Like... I'm gonna let you finish, but I have no idea what you're talking about.
And then Trump praised Kanye, of course, because Kanye's a fan of Trump.
Kanye West, you know what?
I'll never say bad about him.
You know why?
Because he loves Trump.
He loves Trump.
He goes around saying, Trump is my all-time hero.
He says it to everybody.
So Kanye West, I love him.
Now maybe in a few years I'll have to run against him.
I don't know.
So I'll take that back.
But you know what?
He's been so nice to me.
I sort of, you people have sort of seen, because I've been a counterpuncher.
I only hit people when they hit me.
Only.
And Kanye West has been so great, I would never say bad about him because he says such nice things about me.
This is Kanye West, your new secretary of doing dope bleep.
He's gonna be doing some real dope bleep over at the White House.
It is amazing.
Speaking of people who he'll never say bad about because they say nice about him, Vladimir Putin, apparently, he's got nothing bad to say about that.
So Donald Trump has rolled out his new secretary of state nominee, the person he's picked, it's Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson.
He was so excited about it, about making America great again, that he actually In his announcement, he actually played the National Anthem.
them.
It was really exciting.
Come on.
That's not fair.
Okay, that's not fair.
That's not right.
By the way, I will say this about the Russian National Anthem.
It's pretty spectacular.
This was the original USSR National Anthem.
Actually, originally it was the Internationale.
Then it became this one, which is a great National Anthem.
And then they moved away from it.
They used one that was written by a guy named Glinka, a very famous classical composer.
And then Putin, because he's actually a Soviet KGB guy, reimposed the USSR national anthem.
But in any case, here's what we know about Mr. Tillerson, who is the new Secretary of State pick.
Well, we know that he does like Vladimir Putin.
He and Putin are on very friendly terms.
Here's just a few pictures from their honeymoon.
Here's them together, you know, just enjoying each other's company.
And there they are looking longingly into one another's eyes at an ExxonMobil event.
And here's them just shaking hands.
And then here is when Vladimir Putin gave Rex Tillerson an engagement ring.
It's actually just a medal.
The order of friendship.
Now, here's what I would like to say about Tillerson and Putin.
The issue here is not Tillerson, okay?
Tillerson was the head of ExxonMobil.
ExxonMobil had business relationships in Russia.
That's not, you know, super shocking.
ExxonMobil has business relationships with a lot of terrible people.
In 2011, they signed this very lucrative contract with Vladimir Putin.
And then that contract was killed by the sanctions imposed by the Obama administration.
So Tillerson has been very much against the Russian sanctions because it destroyed this contract that Exxon had with Vladimir Putin.
Important to mention here, Vladimir Putin is legitimately one of the worst people on planet Earth.
He's not somebody that you want to play with.
There are three separate presidents who have now tried to play footsie with Vladimir Putin, and three separate times Vladimir Putin has humiliated them by doing exactly what he wants to do, running roughshod into other countries, murdering people.
In Syria right now, people backed by Vladimir Putin are murdering women and children.
There are women who are committing suicide rather than be raped by Assad's forces in Aleppo.
It is Putin who's standing behind Assad's forces.
Putin's a very bad guy and all these people who think that you're going to be able to use Vladimir Putin to your advantage.
No, Vladimir Putin is not used by you and he's not used by Trump.
Vladimir Putin is a user.
He is not the usee.
It's not going to be Trump using Vladimir Putin to do his bidding.
It's going to be Vladimir Putin doing what he wants to do and Trump standing to the side letting him do it.
I'm not going to blame Rex Tillerson for being the head of Exxon.
I'm sure that a lot of heads of Exxon would have done exactly what Rex Tillerson did.
I don't think he's a uniquely bad human being.
I don't think he's a uniquely bad politician or anything.
I do think that Donald Trump's decision to massage Vladimir Putin's ass for literally the entirety of this election cycle And now continuing forward, that should be troublesome to a lot of Republicans.
Look, it should be troublesome that the Russians are so excited about this.
There's a Russian MP who tweeted this out earlier today.
His name is Alexey Pushkov, and he is a fellow who has said in the past that the Navy Yard shooting, if you remember in Washington, D.C.
a few years back, the Navy Yard shooting, he said that that was American exceptionalism, very anti-American guy.
He celebrated the appointment of Tillerson because he's considered Russian ally.
And so, you know, this is not good news for people who are hoping that Trump was going to moderate or not be Trump.
Trump was only consistent about a couple of things during this campaign.
One is he doesn't really like trade.
And one is he really does like Vladimir Putin.
You remember, we played a montage yesterday of him talking about Putin, all the way up to and including denying that Putin had ever killed journalists, which is not true.
He's not going to be a good one.
Him denying that Putin was a human rights violator.
America's violated human rights, too.
He's been very, very much in Putin's corner.
Obviously, his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was so much in Putin's corner that he was being investigated by the FBI.
So, this has not changed.
It's disquieting.
This isn't about Tillerson.
It's about Trump.
And it is not a good indicator.
Again, Vladimir Putin is one of the world's worst human beings.
Vladimir Putin murders dissidents.
Vladimir Putin runs a petro-oligarchy, where he and his friends own all the assets in Russia.
Vladimir Putin has now built a personal fortune somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 billion.
$40 billion.
He just built himself a giant $1 billion mansion.
He imprisons dissidents.
He has shut down freedom of the press.
Vladimir Putin is an absolute kleptocrat dictator, and he's an evil, evil fellow who's engaged in some of the worst human rights atrocities that we've seen in the past 10, 15 years.
He also has obviously invaded surrounding countries, Crimea.
He invaded Georgia when George W. Bush was president.
Now, a lot of people are pointing out that Condi Rice and Bob Gates and some kind of heavyweights have endorsed Tillerson.
Two things to note about that.
Bob Gates and Condi Rice run a consulting firm for which Tillerson is a client.
Dick Cheney has praised Tillerson.
He is not somebody who presumably has business interests directly with Tillerson.
James Baker, who actually works with Putin very closely, has praised Tillerson.
Again, I'm not saying Tillerson's a bad guy.
I'm not even saying that Tillerson is, you know, anti-American or has Putin's best interests at heart or any of that.
What I am saying is the only thing that Trump knows about him and the only thing anybody knows about him on foreign policy is that he's super tight with Putin, and that was the reason why Trump picked him in the first place.
And that is disturbing.
That should be disturbing to anybody who cares about this sort of stuff.
Again, Vladimir Putin's a very, very bad guy, and it is disturbing to me how many Republicans are willing to embrace this just because it's Trump doing it.
You can call hypocrisy on Democrats, and I'm happy to do that.
We'll talk about that in a second.
Democrats are hypocrites about Russia, but So are Republicans.
I mean, you really don't get to claim that you are anti-Putin if you're then going to sit around claiming that Donald Trump is doing wonders by siding with Putin.
We'll get to that in just a second.
By the way, Tillerson also has a pretty checkered record with regard to things like global warming, which does make a difference.
It was John Kerry negotiating global warming treaties while he was Secretary of State under Barack Obama.
Tillerson embraces the notion that man is creating global warming.
He's actually even embraced a carbon tax.
Here's what he had to say about it recently.
Clearly there's going to be an impact.
So I'm not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is going to have an impact.
It'll have a warming impact.
How large it is, is what is very hard for anyone to predict.
And depending on how large it is, then projects how dire the consequences are.
He's come out in favor of a carbon tax as well, a cap and trade, which is the Al Gore program.
So all these people who are very excited about Scott Pruitt understand that the Secretary of State does not agree with Scott Pruitt on global warming.
Or, it's possible to read it as, he was saying what he had to say because he was head of ExxonMobil, but we don't know the answer to that right now.
So we'll leave that one on the table.
Okay, so normally, If a major head of an oil company whose main foreign policy experience was being best friends with Vladimir Putin was nominated, you would think Republicans might oppose this.
Well, you'd be wrong.
Here's Paul Ryan's response.
Paul Ryan said, Mitch McConnell also praised Rex Tillerson.
He said, I look forward to supporting his nomination.
So forget about, you know, actually having the hearings and determining what his views are.
He looks forward to supporting his nomination.
And it is fascinating to watch as people do this.
Now, I think the motivation here is that there are a lot of people in Congress, Republicans in Congress, who think that if they are really, really nice to Donald Trump, if they give him everything that he wants, he'll be nice to them.
I don't know what Paul Ryan is... I think Paul Ryan is actually delusional at this point about Trump.
I think he thinks, if I'm really nice to Donald Trump, if I give him all the things he wants, then Donald Trump will do entitlement reform.
Has Paul Ryan learned nothing?
Not going to happen.
Donald Trump is going to do what Donald Trump wants to do.
Newt Gingrich, who's just become the pseudo-intellectual shill for Trumpism, he did a lecture at Heritage Foundation today that was called The Principles of Trumpism, which is a new one.
I wasn't aware there were any principles of Trumpism other than what Donald Trump feels like this morning.
The first principle of Trumpism, according to Newt Gingrich, is Praise Trump to the skies and then up your speaker's fee based on that.
But he gave a speech about principles of Trumpism and he called Trump a grizzly bear who basically, if you get his attention, is going to claw off your face.
He compared him to the grizzly bear from The Revenant.
I guess that we have yet to see whether there was some sort of rape that went on with Leonardo DiCaprio, a bear rape that went on with Leonardo DiCaprio, when DiCaprio visited Trump Tower.
The idea that you're gonna control Trump is just, this is such an illusion, and it's something that I think McConnell and Ryan are both engaging in.
This idea that if you're nice to him, he's going to give you what you want.
Not unless he already has a predilection toward you.
And this is the caveat, you know, he said earlier about Kanye West, Kanye's been nice to me, so I'll be nice to him.
Right, because he doesn't lose anything.
Putin is nice to him, so he's nice to Putin, right, because Donald Trump is the kind of guy who is attracted to power and thinks power is attractive, and so he likes the fact that Putin is strunk like bull.
So of course he's going to be okay with Vladimir Putin, but that doesn't mean he's going to start green-lighting entitlement reform, which he's opposed the entire way through.
He thinks entitlement reform is a political disaster.
He's not going to back Paul Ryan's play on that.
Republicans keep going along to get along, That's going to have consequences because all you're doing is convincing people that Trump is right where he's wrong, and then he's just going to screw you anyway.
As Mitt Romney found out, Mitt Romney put out a statement, and he's not Secretary of State obviously, and Mitt Romney put out this little statement about not being Secretary of State.
Here's what it said, this is 11.
It says, quote, it was an honor to have been considered for Secretary of State of our great country.
My discussions with presidents like Trump have been both enjoyable and enlightening.
I have very high hopes that the new administration will lead the nation to greater strength, prosperity, and peace.
I also hope that this administration will do all of those things.
Also, this was shortly after King Joffrey Baratheon Trump I beheaded Ned Stark.
Listen, I said it at the time, right?
We actually played a clip from Game of Thrones of this happening.
Romney's head now decorates the gates at King's Landing.
So, too bad for him.
Meanwhile, Reince Priebus is making overtures toward Trumpism on this, and his defenses of Trump and Russia are not particularly good.
Here's what he had to say.
Well, what he said was that the sanctions were ineffective, but the reason they were ineffective was that they weren't being enforced.
And so his point was, unless you're going to enforce these sanctions, they're not effective.
And people are looking at the first part of that statement and not the second.
Look, I know where Rex Tillerson is on this.
He believes that sanctions and the threat of sanctions are an important part of international strategy and diplomacy and so he's not against sanctions I just want to assure you of that but what he is against is setting up sanctions that aren't uh enforced.
Okay so that's not true Tillerson has said he was against the Russian sanctions.
It wasn't about the enforceability.
We'll see if they remove sanctions from Russia.
That would be pretty amazing if they remove sanctions from Russia.
Meanwhile, Priebus continued by saying, it's not bad to have good relationships with Vladimir Putin.
This language is exactly the language that Barack Obama used about Cuba.
It's the same language that Barack Obama has used about Putin in the past.
How's it bad?
To have good relationships with your enemies.
You only make peace with your enemies.
Here is Reince Priebus, the show for the Trump administration.
But the truth is, is that having relationships with people is not a bad thing.
I don't know how we got to the place where having an actual functional relationship with someone who might not be a person that we first think of to have that relationship with is suddenly a bad thing.
I mean, we have a lot of problems in this world, and we're not going to solve those problems by making believe that people don't exist.
And so, America first.
That's what President-Elect Trump lives by every day.
That's what's in his head every day.
Americans first.
America first.
We're going to be tough across the world.
And President-Elect Trump and Rex Tillerson and Vice President-Elect Pence are going to take every day with that mindset in place.
Okay, so I love that he doesn't have any real defense for this, so instead he just starts shouting, America first, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, AMERICA FIRST, NOT PAYING ATTENTION, NOT LISTENING, LA, LA, LA, LA, LA, MAGA!
Okay, yes, I understand MAGA.
Okay, this doesn't have anything to do with America First, the question is, how close are you supposed to be to one of the worst dictators on planet Earth?
Marco Rubio gets this right, here's Rubio's statement about Tillerson, he says, quote, while Rex Tillerson is a respected businessman, I have serious concerns about his nomination.
The next Secretary of State must be someone who views the world with moral clarity, is free of potential conflicts of interest, has a clear sense of America's interests, and will be a forceful advocate for America's foreign policy goals to the President within the administration and on the world stage.
I look forward to learning more about his records and his views.
I will do my part to ensure he receives a full and fair hearing, etc., etc.
That's basically the tactic that a lot of these people should be taking, but that is not the tactic that a lot of people are taking.
Everybody is just ignoring serious questions that ought to be asked about Russia and Vladimir Putin and what he's doing in favor of sort of partisan breakdowns.
And we'll get to more of that in just a bit.
Plus, Democrats overreacting because they can't help themselves.
It is amazing that just every landmine they have to jump on with both feet.
Every rake must be stepped on.
All of them.
Every rake in creation.
We'll get to all of that, but you have to subscribe at Daily Wire to see it.
You can listen, of course, later on iTunes or SoundCloud, but dailywire.com to subscribe.
Eight bucks a month.
▲
Export Selection