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Jan. 27, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
21:54
Ep. 243 - Trump Keeps His Biggest Promise
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Speaking with ABC News on Wednesday night, President Trump said that he would like to resume the use of waterboarding, stating that it works and that we have to fight fire with fire.
But he acknowledged that he would follow the lead of CIA Director Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary James Mattis, both of whom oppose the use of waterboarding.
Trump said, If they don't want to do, that's fine.
If they do want to do, then I will work toward that end.
I want to do everything within the bounds of what you're legally allowed to do.
But do I feel it works?
Absolutely, I feel it works.
Pompeo has already stated that he would absolutely not comply with an order to waterboard.
The media, predictably, have gone insane.
How could Trump say that torture works?
Well, first of all, it's actually unclear whether waterboarding is torture.
Some people find it to be self-evidently torture, but as Senator Ted Cruz said during the primaries, under the law, torture is excruciating pain that is equivalent to losing organs and systems.
This is enhanced interrogation.
It is vigorous interrogation that does not meet the generally recognized definition of torture.
I've actually watched my friend Steven Crowder get waterboarded.
It looked highly unpleasant, and Steven's an idiot and nuts for doing it, but he emerged not only unscathed, but he actually joked during the experience.
Waterboarding is used regularly to train Navy SEALs.
Then there's the second question.
Is Trump right?
Does waterboarding work?
James Mitchell, a former chief CIA interrogator, wrote in the Wall Street Journal last year, quote, It is understandable that General Mattis would say he never found waterboarding useful.
Because no one in the military has been authorized to waterboard a detainee.
Thousands of U.S.
military personnel have been waterboarded as part of their training, though the services eventually abandoned the practice after finding it too effective in getting even the most hardened warrior to reveal critical information.
Mitchell claims that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man behind the 9-11 attacks, a crucial source of American information about Al Qaeda, only broke because of waterboarding.
KSM was waterboarded 783 times.
Crowder, by the way, was waterboarded several times just during the session that I watched, by way of contrast.
Jose Rodriguez, who once headed the CIA National Clandestine Service, has claimed that terrorist mastermind Abu Zubaydah also gave up key intelligence after being waterboarded.
In the media's ardent desire to paint Donald Trump as a nutty dictator-in-waiting, they've actually made Trump more popular.
Again.
Trump isn't saying anything that Americans don't believe.
A poll from last March showed that almost two-thirds of Americans thought waterboarding was appropriate for use on suspected terrorists.
Only 15% of Americans thought waterboarding should be ruled out entirely.
Trump has his finger on the pulse of Americans when it comes to rhetoric about fighting terrorism.
The media's overstated outrage only makes it clear why Americans trust Trump to fight terrorism rather than the members of the press.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So, Trump has jumped in with alacrity.
He clearly wants to fulfill this promise.
Now, I actually thought that he would fulfill some of his promises on immigration.
I still am not sure that the deportations are going to look like what he said they were going to look like during the campaign.
But the executive order that he signed yesterday makes it look like he is actually going to be just as harsh on illegal immigration as he promised to be during the campaign.
So I want to go through this executive order and talk about what exactly was in it yesterday.
So first of all, it said that we're going to build the wall.
And Trump himself came out and he said this.
He was speaking at the Department of Homeland Security.
And he suggested that we're building the wall.
It's definitely going to happen.
When does construction begin?
As soon as we can.
As soon as we can physically do it.
Within months?
I would say in months, yeah.
I would say in months.
Certainly planning is starting immediately.
And so he says that we're going to pay for that with Mexican money.
That's more vague, how we're going to actually do that.
Honestly, I always thought that was a silly part of his promise.
I don't care how we pay for a barrier between the United States and Mexico.
It seems to me a perfectly, eminently rational thing to have some sort of touch fence Some sort of barrier that prevents people from simply walking over the border without any sort of detection mechanism in place at all.
Israel has a very effective border.
There's no reason why exactly the United States should not want to have one at the southern border either.
Also, I believe Mexico has some physical borders at its southern border because it doesn't like illegal immigration.
Again, I don't see why the United States should be the only country in the world that's not allowed to have one of these things.
I've said that.
Because people are surprised to hear that we do not need new laws.
and his rhetoric about enforcement with regard to illegal immigration, I think, is just first rate.
Here he is.
Because people are surprised to hear that we do not need new laws.
We will work within the existing system and framework.
And he said also that he's going to ask the members of DHS to enforce the laws to their fullest extent.
This is clip one.
I'm asking all of you to enforce the laws of the United States of America, They will be enforced and enforced strongly.
We are going to restore the rule of law in the United States.
A nation without borders is not a nation.
Beginning today, the United States of America gets back control of its borders, gets back its borders.
You guys are about to be very, very busy doing your job the way you want to do them.
Okay, and this is the kind of rhetoric that I think is actually useful with regard to border enforcement.
So, you know, good for Trump on all of this.
Now, there are a couple of questions about the executive orders themselves.
First question is why he's using executive orders and not just passing a law with Congress.
There is going to have to be some sort of congressional appropriation to build the wall.
It's going to cost something like $15 billion to build the wall.
The left, of course, is up in arms about all of this.
They're saying that they're very upset about the spending, which is ridiculous since the left has never been upset about spending on anything ever.
In fact, I'm old enough to remember when the left liked infrastructure spending.
This is an infrastructure spending bill.
It'd just be an infrastructure spending bill to build a physical barrier with Mexico.
Now, the physical barrier, by the way, is not just designed to keep out quote-unquote Mexicans, because the fact is that right now we're neutral in terms of the number of Mexicans coming in and leaving in the United States via illegal immigration.
We've actually had a net decline in the number of Mexican illegal immigrants over the past few years, but what Mexico really right now is a giant thoroughfare for people who are coming from South America and Central America in order to get to the United States.
It's not really about Mexicans crossing the border, even though Trump seems to get that wrong pretty routinely.
It's more about people who are coming from places like El Salvador and Honduras and various countries in South America and who are using Mexico as basically a giant road to get to the north.
Paul Ryan says Trump says that he's going to spend, that Trump says he's going to do this.
Well, we'll give him the money to do it.
Who's going to pay for it?
Well, first off, we're going to pay for it and front the money up.
But I do think that there are various ways.
As you know, I know your follow-up question is, is Mexico going to pay for the wall?
There are a lot of different ways of getting Mexico to contribute to doing this.
Now, I'm going to get to how Mexico contributes to doing this and why this is still a silly talking point.
It always was a silly talking point.
I'm going to get to that in a second.
First, I want to go through the actual content of the executive order.
By the way, the ACLU just demonstrates how crazy they are.
They say that the wall violates civil liberties.
They tweeted out No, it doesn't violate civil liberties.
That's plainly silly.
Why exactly would it violate civil liberties to build a wall on an internationally recognized border?
It's like saying it violates civil liberties to build a fence around your house.
Whose civil liberties?
The person who wants to break into my house?
No, that's not the way this works.
Now, as far as the executive order itself, this would be a perfectly legal executive order because it exists within the confines of laws that have already been passed by Congress.
In 2006, Congress said that they wanted to build a border fence.
And then they didn't fully fund it.
So, Trump is not doing anything that is outside the confines of legislation that he is now using the legislation in order to push the policy.
That's what an executive order is supposed to do.
The reason that I opposed Barack Obama's executive orders is because many of them just rewrote the law plainly, right?
He just went in and rewrote Obamacare, for example.
Or he went in and he rewrote immigration law with regard to DACA and DAPA.
That's not what Trump is doing here.
Trump is saying, and he said it, as you saw at DHS, at Homeland Security, he said clearly, This is the existing law, we're acting within the existing law, and that's exactly right.
So, what exactly is in this executive order?
So, in this executive order he talks about broadening enforcement priorities as well.
So it used to be that Barack Obama only wanted to police crimes that were committed other than crossing the border illegally.
Section 5C of this executive order now grants the Secretary of Homeland Security power to prioritize for removal those who have committed acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense.
You don't have to be convicted.
It's just if you cross the border illegally, and we have reason to believe you cross the border illegally, you've committed acts that constitute a chargeable offense, you cross the border illegally, we can now enforce the law against you.
This also takes priority to false use of a social security number.
We're taking public benefits illegally.
The order also grants the Secretary of Homeland Security the ability to hire 10,000 additional law enforcement officers.
That number really should be 20,000.
I believe that 20,000 was the number in that horrifying Gang of Eight bill, even.
So that number needs to be increased.
The executive order allows states to help police immigration.
So you remember, the Obama administration sued the state of Arizona because the state of Arizona had the temerity to try and enforce immigration law.
And Barack Obama then tried to sue them for that.
Trump is saying now that he wants states to be allowed to do that, that they should be allowed to help perform the functions of immigration officers in relation to investigation, apprehension, detention of aliens in the United States, so he's not banning states from actually helping enforce federal law.
This also kills funding to sanctuary cities.
That's a little bit of a complicated question, because the question is what strings you can attach to funding to particular cities or states.
It's actually a complex constitutional question, Can you just withdraw funding from every program in San Francisco because you don't like what they're doing with illegal immigrants?
Probably not.
You actually have to find the funding that is connected to immigration enforcement in San Francisco and then cut off that funding.
There has to be some sort of rational relation between the grants the federal government is giving to a city or a state and the acts that the city or state is doing constitutionally, just in terms of Supreme Court jurisprudence, But Trump is attempting to do this.
The executive order also creates a public shaming capacity for the feds so every week they're going to make a public list of criminal actions committed by illegal aliens and any jurisdiction that ignored or failed to otherwise honor federal law.
Fifth, this is going to restore the Secure Communities Program.
So originally the Obama administration had a program that allowed the feds to check immigration databases to see local offenders who were here illegally.
Then they walked that back.
They didn't want the feds to be able to check the local criminal databases for purposes of deporting people who are arrested locally.
Trump is returning to the original system, which is a great thing.
Also, He's saying that he wants to make foreign negotiations contingent on accepting repatriated illegal immigrants.
So, if Poland has an illegal immigrant and they don't want to accept that illegal immigrant back, Trump's saying, I'm not going to negotiate with Poland, I'm going to tell the Secretary of State not to hold negotiations with countries that don't accept back the illegal immigrants that are coming over here.
And finally, he wants to make data more transparent.
So right now, one of the big problems with illegal immigration Ben Coulter points this out in her book about illegal immigration, which is actually a very interesting book.
It's not in Trump We Trust, which is not a particularly interesting book.
I've interviewed her on C-SPAN.
We did it, actually.
Her book about illegal immigration, which is really interesting.
She points out that the data on illegal immigration and crime among illegal immigrants is really incredibly weak, and this would make that data more transparent now.
The Secretary of Homeland Security and Attorney General can collect data on immigration status of all aliens incarcerated in federal prisons as well as federal pretrial detainees and all convicted aliens in state and local prisons.
So, all of this stuff is good.
This is a very good executive order.
There's a lot here that's good.
There were rumors today that Trump was going to sign some sort of order Repealing DACA and DAPA, getting rid of President Obama's executive amnesty.
I'm not sure that you actually have to do that, but he hasn't done that yet.
Again, I want to see what this looks like in practice.
Is he going to go back to enforcing the law, or is this all cover for basically not doing particularly a lot?
That's not clear yet.
That'll only become clear in the enforcement, but the executive order itself is really first-rate.
There's a lot here that is really, really good.
Okay, so Putting that aside now, Donald Trump did an interview on ABC News that's getting all sorts of play as well.
And Donald Trump's interview with ABC News, there was some good and there was some bad.
So, you know, now's the perfect time.
We can play the good Trump, bad Trump.
Let's do it.
Okay, so we begin with some good Trump.
So Trump had a lot of good things to say during this particular interview with ABC News.
So he started off by talking about the media bias.
And when Trump hits the media and it's justifiable, I love it.
It's my favorite thing in the world.
I've been saying for literally years that Republicans ought to smack the media when the media does something wrong.
I don't like it when they smack the media when the media actually is telling the truth, and we'll get to that in a second, but I like when they smack the media for doing things that are wrong.
So, the media for years has ignored the March for Life in Washington, D.C.
The March for Life routinely means hundreds of thousands of people marching in the streets of Washington, D.C.
in the middle of dead winter in order to march in favor of legislation that would restrict abortions and the killing of the unborn.
And the media every year ignores it.
It always goes on page A12 of the New York Times.
Donald Trump is talking with David Muir, and he rightly, this is great, he smacks David Muir for not covering the March for Life.
We know there were more than a million people who turned out, and you are their president now, too.
That's true.
Could you hear them from the White House?
No, I couldn't hear them, but the crowds were large, but you're going to have a large crowd on Friday, too, which is mostly pro-life people.
You're going to have a lot of people coming on Friday.
And I will say this, and I didn't realize this, but I was told, you will have a very large crowd of people.
I don't know, as large or larger.
Some people said it's going to be larger.
Pro-life people.
And they say the press doesn't cover them.
I don't want to compare crowd sizes again.
No, you shouldn't.
But let me just say, what they do say is that the press doesn't cover them.
And that's 100% true.
He's totally right to smack David Muir on this.
The fact that the press covers this women's march up the wazoo, that happened one time.
The March for Life happens every single year, and every single year the media ignores it.
Good for Donald Trump.
That is Donald Trump at his finest.
Donald Trump also talked about torture.
We talked about this at the very beginning.
Here's what Donald Trump had to say about torture.
Are you at all concerned it's going to cause more... I will tell you I have spoken to others in intelligence.
And they are big believers in, as an example, waterboarding.
You did tell me... Because they say it does work.
It does work.
Now personally... Mr. President, you told me during one of the debates that you would bring back waterboarding, and a hell of a lot worse.
I would do what I would do.
I want to keep our country safe.
I want to keep our country safe.
I'm going with General Mattis.
I'm going with my secretary, because I think Pompeo is going to be phenomenal.
I'm going to go with what they say.
But I have spoken, as recently as...
24 hours ago, with people at the highest level of intelligence, and I asked them the question, does it work?
Does torture work?
And the answer was, yes, absolutely.
We're not playing on an even field.
I will say this, I will rely on Pompeo and Mattis and my group.
And if they don't want to do, that's fine.
If they do want to do, then I will work That end.
I want to do everything within the bounds of what you're allowed to do legally.
But do I feel it works?
Absolutely, I feel it works.
So you'd be okay with it as president?
No, I want to... I will rely on General Mattis.
And I'm going to rely on those two people.
And others.
And if they don't want to do it, it's 100% okay with me.
Do I think it works?
Absolutely.
Okay, so I have no problem with anything that Trump just said there.
In fact, as we spoke about a little bit earlier on the program, the fact is that there are a lot of people in the intelligence community who disagree with Mattis.
Mattis doesn't have a lot of experience with waterboarding since he was at Department of Defense.
He was not at CIA.
So, good for Donald Trump here.
I don't think there's any problem with anything that Donald Trump just said with regard to this.
Okay, now, We get to some bad Trump, unfortunately.
Unfortunately.
I wish that every day we're good Trump, nothing but good Trump.
And I will say that I think 75% of the stuff he's done is good, I think 25% of the stuff he's done is bad, I think 80% of the stuff he says is silly, and I think 20% is good.
So if you just pay attention to what he does, he's doing a lot of really good stuff.
If you pay attention to what he says... Okay, so.
So, on Twitter, he has decided that he can't just say, we're building the wall and I'm keeping my promise.
Instead, he feels the necessity to smack around Mexico a little bit more.
So, he tweets, the U.S.
has a $60 billion trade deficit with Mexico.
It has been a one-sided deal from the beginning of NAFTA with massive numbers of jobs and companies lost.
If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting.
So, in other words, he's now connecting NAFTA, which he hates, with the wall, and he's saying that if you're not going to pay for the wall, then I'm going to cave in and I'm going to destroy NAFTA.
Also, I hate NAFTA anyway.
NAFTA's terrible.
So, a few things to talk about here.
One, who cares whether Mexico quote-unquote pays for the wall?
Who really?
Like, really, why is that a big deal?
I understand there's this vindictive need to make Mexico pay for the wall and all of this, but It's not that much money.
It really isn't.
And I just want the thing built.
And Trump is getting himself into ancillary issues that don't matter because of all this, we have to make Mexico pay for the wall.
So Mexico, naturally, they came forward and they said, fine, we'll cancel the upcoming meeting.
We don't have to have a meeting.
You want to cancel NAFTA, you go right ahead and do it.
But we don't have to have that meeting.
When he talks about the trade deficits and all this, Couple quick points of information.
One, trade deficits don't matter.
Trade deficits do not matter.
You have a trade deficit with every store you buy from.
Does that mean you shouldn't buy from those stores?
Does it make you poor because you're buying from a place that you want to buy from?
Of course not.
We all have personal trade deficits with a bevy of players out there.
Does that mean that we are suddenly poor?
No, it doesn't mean that.
It means that you're engaged in voluntary trade.
The supposed trade deficit with Mexico just means that we're buying lots of product from Mexico and that a lot of the money that we're investing in Mexico is coming back to us in the form of capital surplus.
It's called capital account surplus.
You can't spend American dollars in Mexico, and so they're going to have to use those dollars someplace.
The big problem that we have with regard to trade deficits is not the trade deficit itself, it's that the government keeps raising debt and raising debt by selling bonds.
So what happens is that we end up selling bonds.
So what happens is that there's a trade deficit with Mexico.
Now they have a surplus of dollars.
Instead of taking that surplus of dollars and investing in American businesses, which is normally what happens, instead of doing that, they're taking those dollars and they're buying U.S.
debt.
So that's, you know, the big problem there is the government, as always.
The big problem is the government.
As far as the idea that NAFTA has made us poorer, that's absolute nonsense.
The fact is that NAFTA has made us significantly richer because all of the jobs that fled to Mexico, all of those and more would have fled to China.
The reason that there's this regional North American trade bloc in which people invest is because you can make a car partially in Mexico, Ship that same car up to Jackson Mississippi and then you can take that car and sell it at a warehouse in California.
The point is that we have a physically contiguous territory with Mexico.
We don't with China.
So, if you're a car manufacturer, you'd prefer to be able to find cheap labor on the continent.
It cuts down on shipping costs, it allows you to actually put factories that are slightly more expensive in the United States.
If they had to produce all this stuff in China, instead of building another factory in the United States and shipping it between Mexico and the United States, instead of doing that, they would build the stuff in China, ship it to Korea, and then maybe ship it out to the United States.
You actually create jobs because of all of this, even in the manufacturing sector that wouldn't otherwise exist.
It's actually really short-sighted economically to look at NAFTA this way.
There hasn't been this giant sucking sound taking jobs that would have stayed in America except for NAFTA.
Those jobs were leaving anyway because they were very expensive jobs.
They're just going to Mexico because Mexico is nearest to the United States.
Plus, if Donald Trump actually wants to cut down on illegal immigration, the worst way to cut down on illegal immigration, it turns out, is to destroy the economy of our southern neighbor.
If you want an unstable Mexico, like even more unstable than it is now, if you want Mexico completely unstable with a crappy economy, and you think that's going to have no impact on the number of people rushing to get through the border, you're out of your mind.
It'll take years to build this thing, by the way.
So, it's not like tomorrow the border is secure.
It's gonna take a while.
If you destroy the economy of Mexico, at the same time you're hurting the economy of the United States, that's really, really dumb.
So this is bad Trump.
It's very silly.
And again, there's no reason for doing this other than Trump has these misperceptions that become policy.
And this is one of the problems for Trump.
Sometimes he comes up with good policy based on bad ideas, based on bad rationales.
We'll talk about that more in a second.
Plus, we have the mailbag coming up.
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