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March 1, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
20:45
Ep. 261 - Is Destroying Trump A Winning Strategy?
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In the latest evidence, the media have lost their minds over the election of President Trump.
Outlets all over the country went nuts over Trump's senior advisor Kellyanne Conway putting her feet on a couch in the Oval Office while taking a photo of Trump with top officers at historically black colleges.
This is what the picture looked like.
Here's BuzzFeed's deputy news director.
Shoes on the couch in the Oval Office.
Here is certified nut job Keith Olbermann.
Get your effing feet off the furniture, Kellyanne Pauls.
This isn't your home.
Here is a digital organizer for Hillary Clinton.
Conway with her shoes on the couch in Oval Office.
Consistent with general level of disrespect Trump team has shown.
Here are some of the headlines.
USA Today.
Kellyanne Conway puts feet on Oval Office couch.
Twitter freaks.
New York Daily News.
Kellyanne Conway photographed making herself comfortable on Oval Office couch.
Twitter calls out Trump advisor for disrespect.
Us Weekly.
Kellyanne Conway kneels on Oval Office couch.
Twitter freaks out.
New York Post.
Kellyanne Conway kneels on Oval Office couch.
Sparks debate.
The Telegraph from the UK.
Show some class.
Kellyanne Conway accused of lacking respect after putting feet up on Oval Office couch.
Oh no!
The horror!
Kellyanne Conway put her feet...
On the couch!
Like a human!
Even the Washington Post's Chris Chilesa got this one right.
He said, quote, This tempest in a teapot is, in a word, dumb.
In two words, incredibly dumb.
Of course, Chilesa then goes on to get one thing wrong.
He equates Conway's conduct with that of President Clinton in the Oval Office, which neglects a few facts.
First, Kellyanne Conway is not the president.
Second, Bill Clinton's intern performed oral sex on him in the Oval Office.
Kellyanne Conway kneeling on a couch isn't quite the same thing as Monica Lewinsky kneeling under the desk.
Or having sex on top of the Oval Office desk with Clinton, as Secret Service members reported.
As for the generalized outrage over feet on the furniture in the Oval Office, President Obama routinely put his feet on the resolute desk, a gift from Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1890, but so did George W. Bush and Gerald Ford.
In other words, everybody needs to calm down.
If the biggest problem the media have with Kellyanne Conway is where she puts her feet in the Oval Office, they are just awful at their jobs.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So, lots coming up.
We're going to talk about Donald Trump's address to Congress that's happening tonight.
He's proposed his new budget.
We'll go through that and talk about what's good and what's bad.
And it will also talk about whether the Democrats are smart to hitch their entire political future to bashing Donald Trump.
Whether that's a winning strategy or a losing strategy.
There are arguments both ways.
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Okay, so we begin today with the media.
The media...
Obviously are overreaching right now and the biggest advantage that Donald Trump has in the political debate is clearly the insanity of the media because he goes out there and he bashes the media and everybody who is on the right side of the aisle implicitly loves this.
We all love this because the media have it coming for 20 years, 20 long years, 30 years.
I mean going all the way back to Ronald Reagan.
Going back to Nixon, the media have been far to the left and they have unfairly targeted Republicans.
Some targeting is fair, some is not, but the fact that Trump is striking back at the media, it works well for him.
It works particularly well for him when the media continue to overreach and make themselves look insane.
The left and the media have decided the only way the left is going to regain power is simply by attacking Trump, attacking Trump, attacking Trump.
Now I think what's in their mind Because they think that they're going to do to Trump what they did to George W. Bush.
They think that if they can just polarize Bush enough to get Nancy Pelosi and Obama in, they can polarize Trump enough to get Cory Booker or Elizabeth Warren in in four years.
But this neglects a couple of facts.
First, George W. Bush actually had to do some pretty bad things as president in order to lose his approval rating and watch it plummet.
Presidents who have over a 40% approval rating have a legit shot at reelection.
If you're below 40 percent, basically you're toast.
Trump right now is anywhere from 44 to 50 percent.
According to Rasmussen, a little bit above 50 percent in terms of approval rating.
If he sticks in that range, he'll have a legit shot at re-election.
And in order for a president to really drop below that range, he has to do something really bad.
And usually that means some sort of economic recession or a war that is prosecuted poorly.
George H.W.
Bush.
George H.W.
Bush was riding really high.
He was in like the 80s after the Gulf War.
And then there was an economic recession.
He plummeted down into the 30s.
George W. was in the 50s for the vast majority of his first term.
After 9-11, he was in the 90s.
After the Iraq War, he was in the 60s.
He basically spent most of his first term hovering around 55-56% and then it was only after his re-election when the Iraq war really started to go south before the surge that his approval ratings dumped and tanked for the last time and then there was a recession so he had the double whammy and he ended up in the 20s.
Right now, Trump isn't involved in any long-standing war.
You know, Afghanistan is still going on, but that's really not considered his war.
He hasn't started a war that's going badly and the economy is doing pretty well.
So long as those two things hold true, attacking Trump isn't going to do a lot for the media, but that's not stopping them.
They think that if they just attack Trump, attack Trump, that will alleviate their responsibility to not suck at their jobs.
And if the left keeps attacking Trump, they won't have to run Democrats who aren't insane.
So, this is what you see from the media.
So, Mika Brzezinski over at MSNBC, she says that Trump is clearly trying to create a dictatorship.
Again, over the top.
Spicer defended the decision to limit the press.
I think that we have shown an abundance of accessibility.
We've brought more reporters into this process, and the idea that every time that every single person can't get their question answered or fit in a room, they're excluding people.
We've actually gone above and beyond with making ourselves, our team, and our briefing room more accessible than probably any prior administration.
So I think you can take that to the bank.
So there's a different Spicer that we have for you.
Back in December, here he is.
We have a respect for the press when it comes to the government, that that is something that you can't ban an entity from.
conservative, liberal, or otherwise, I think that's what makes a democracy a democracy versus a dictatorship.
- Just let that marinate.
- Yeah.
- I mean, so is that where we're at?
- Yeah.
Anybody want to participate?
I mean, he's just described himself.
70 days may be a long time in his mind.
That was 70 days ago.
Are they trying to create a dictatorship?
I mean, I'm not joking and I'm not angry.
Okay, I'm not joking.
I'm not angry.
Are they trying to create a dictatorship?
If they are, this is the worst dictatorship ever.
Okay, honestly, like, I think people are right to be afraid of authoritarian presidents, but so far, everybody seems pretty able to criticize him.
And dictatorships usually don't have Mika Brzezinski on there talking about how dictatorship is being created as a typical matter, and Brzezinski hasn't been banned from the air.
But again, the media have to overreach because they think that if they destroy Trump, Then they are going to destroy the Republican Party.
What they figure is that the Republican Party has seen a major upswing since 2010, thanks in large part to Barack Obama.
They're dominant across the country, in localities, in states.
They're dominant in the federal government.
But now they've tethered their wagon to Donald Trump.
So if they burn Donald Trump down, the wagon will burn too.
So they're going to focus all their fire on Donald Trump.
Chris Matthews is doing the same thing.
He says, I don't understand, why would anybody believe Trump after years of... Chris Matthews, he's a saint!
Get up, come out of the shoe, come in here, I'll wrinkle, don't even know what I'm doing, and then I just talk, I say things, and people watch it sometimes, but it's MSNBC, so not too many people.
Kathleen, what do you think?
Go!
News, early evening news analysis and opinion.
He doesn't go after lefties.
He doesn't go after center lefties.
He goes after people producing news on the front page.
Hard-working enterprise reporting.
That's who he's going after.
Have you noticed?
That's certainly the case here, but you know, To your point, it's sort of an element here of, you know, he's looking for an enemy.
This is somebody who spent his entire career in negotiations.
You can't have a negotiation with one party.
I mean, you can't have a superhero without a villain.
There's an element of like... Why would anybody believe Trump when Trump spent years saying that Barack Obama was an illegal alien?
His supporters believe him.
Why would they believe when they know he was wrong about the big thing he ran on for five years?
Why would they believe he's got some new truth coming out of him?
Well, the irony is that he has said- Except they hate Obama so much, they love to have him, you know, trashed by saying he's a snook in the country.
That's right, it's confirmation bias that people believe what they want to believe.
Okay, confirmation bias.
Are you listening lefties who are watching Chris Matthews over on MSNBC?
It's confirmation bias, do you understand?
That's right, you have a bias and everybody confirms the bias.
Like if I sit here and I say that Donald Trump is the worst thing that ever was and people think it's news, maybe that's because they already thought he was the worst thing that ever was.
That's confirmation bias, but it doesn't apply to me because I'm on the left.
Also, I come out of the show.
And I'd like to eat soup with a strainer.
I don't know why.
In any case, the media have decided they don't understand why it is that Trump has any credibility after all of this has happened.
Here's the funny thing.
There was a poll yesterday from Wall Street Journal NBC News and what it found is that 52% of Americans think the media have gone overboard on Trump.
Because they have.
Again, that Kellyanne Conway photo is a great example of this.
The fact that the media have lost their mind over this photo of Kellyanne Conway with her feet on the couch.
It's just absurd.
It's just absurd.
And it demonstrates how far they're willing to go.
There is a strategy to it.
Again, the strategy is, if you can polarize about Trump, maybe you take down the entire Republican Party because you figure that Trump is the figurehead for the Republican Party.
He's a really volatile figurehead.
And maybe he's the anchor that drags down the Republicans.
It's not just the media, obviously.
It's also the Democrats.
So Nancy Pelosi is out there to the Botox lady.
The Botox is now seeped into her neurological structures.
And she says that it's time to impeach Trump.
It's 40 days in.
It's time to impeach Trump.
But the administration was making this strong case with the American people.
And perhaps misrepresenting the American people could be cause for impeachment.
If so, there's plenty of grounds right now with the current president.
But it just, it just isn't the case.
That doesn't mean nobody's listening to cases that are being made in a very scientific, methodical way as to whether there are grounds for impeachment.
But the fact is, is that many of, we're trying to unite the country.
Many of the president's supporters are just not ready to accept the fact Oh yes, clearly Democrats are ready to unite the country around impeaching Trump.
This is the same thing, look, Nancy Pelosi only has one speed, and that speed is impeach Bush, impeach Trump, wouldn't have mattered, could have been Rubio, could have been Romney, would have been exactly the same case made by the Democrats.
Maxine Waters, another one of these radical Democrats from California, She says that Trump obviously colluded with Russia to steal the election.
By the way, this is the same lady who said the LA riots were an LA uprising.
So when people were burning down storefronts owned by Koreans in South Central Los Angeles, that was an uprising, according to Maxine Waters.
She also says that Trump colluded with Russia here.
Just say that my colleagues and the leadership would not like to hear me say the I word, but I say it over and over again, impeachment, impeachment, impeachment.
This president absolutely was in collusion with the Kremlin and Putin in Russia during the campaign.
I believe that.
And I believe that they undermined our democracy by interfering with our election.
And I think that meets the criteria for impeachment.
High crimes and miscommunity.
But in addition to that, the story that I'm trying to get out is the connection of all of those around him with Russia and with the Kremlin and the fact that they're going for the oil.
That's why you hear a lot about lifting the sanctions.
They're going for the oil?
What is she even talking about?
Is she an insane person?
Yeah, she's an insane person, actually.
The answer is yes, she is a crazy person.
Going for the oil.
Oil prices are at the lowest they've been in 20 years.
What is she saying?
Going for the oil.
Whenever Maxine Waters appears on a show like this, I'm just waiting for Jerry Springer to pop out and say, we're gonna take a paternity test here on this particular show, Maxine Waters.
In any case, The Democrats have decided that Donald Trump is impeachable, and again, this is part of a broader strategy.
Now, Chuck Schumer has a bit of a different strategy, and I'll get to Chuck Schumer's strategy in a little bit, but first we have to say thank you to our advertisers over at Birch Gold.
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Now here's the thing.
The Democrats are turning Trump into the enemy.
And this has been their strategy, not just with Trump or with Bush, but it's been going back for really the entirety of the time, pretty much the entire 20th century, the Democrats have made this case.
The case they've made is that Democrats are fighting the enemy, and the enemy are these evil Republicans who want to stand in the way of progress, and they're racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes, and they're people who don't, they don't agree with the greatness of American government, and they're John Lithgow and Footloose, and they want to stop Kevin Bacon from dancing, and all the rest of it.
This has always been the pitch.
Republicans are the enemy.
And Republicans for most of the 20th century made the case that the real enemy were the Soviets.
Right?
The communists.
The international communists were the greatest threat to American security.
And most of the time, Americans looked at the Soviet Union, and they said, right, that's a bigger threat than the Republicans.
And that's why you end up with President Eisenhower, and President Nixon, and President Reagan, because Americans generally believed the Republicans when they said, your enemy is the Russians, your enemy is the Soviets.
They didn't believe Democrats as much when the Democrats said, your enemy is the Republicans.
Then the Soviet Union falls.
And basically, Republicans don't win presidential elections.
They won two popular presidential elections since the fall of the Soviet Union in the popular vote.
They won one popular presidential election in 2004, and that was a re-elect.
Because Bush lost the popular vote in 2000, and Trump lost the popular vote in 2016.
Basically, the case that Democrats have made is still the same case.
Republicans are the enemies of the American people, and Republicans have sort of picked a variety of enemies.
It's been the radical Muslims, or it's been the Chinese, or it's been the Russians in the case of Mitt Romney.
They pick enemies and the American people go, well, are they really so scary?
Are they really so scary?
So the only time that worked was in 2004 when the answer was yes, they really are that scary.
Radical Islamic terrorism could actually kill Americans.
That was the only time that worked.
A lot of elections take place under the rubric of whose enemies do you most want to fight?
Whose enemies do you most want to fight?
So, do you most want to fight Republicans or do you most want to fight the Russians or the Chinese?
Now the thing about Trump, right now, is that the Democrats are saying that the great enemy is Trump.
Trump is the enemy.
Same case they've always made.
It's the Republicans and Trump.
They're the enemy.
Donald Trump has another series of enemies.
And those enemies are pretty popular.
People don't like those enemies very much.
Donald Trump, for example, he really hates the press.
It turns out Americans really don't like the press.
Attacking the press is a good enemy for Donald Trump.
Donald Trump has his own set of enemies, and they're pretty good.
So here's Donald Trump saying yesterday he doesn't want to do the White House Correspondents' Dinner because, hey, the media's terrible.
A lot of the stories are made up.
I believe a lot of the stories are pure fiction.
They just pull it out of air.
Now, with all of that being said, I just thought it would be better if I didn't do the dinner.
That doesn't mean I'm not going to do it next year, but I just thought it would be better if I didn't do the dinner.
Okay, so the media are his enemies.
The media are, you know, in the public view, the media are not our friends, right?
They are also our enemies in many ways, and this is why the media publicity, their sort of approval ratings are very low, actually much lower than President Trump's.
Donald Trump says your enemies are the Democrats.
The Democrats' approval ratings right now are far below those of President Trump.
Trump says Barack Obama is the enemy.
Americans' approval rating for Obamacare is really not very good.
Here's Donald Trump saying that Obama is behind the recent protests against a lot of the things he's trying to do.
We talk about President Obama.
You said you personally get along with him.
You guys were going at each other for three or four, maybe eight years.
It turns out his organization seems to be doing a lot of the organizing to some of the protests that a lot of these Republicans are seeing around the country and against you.
Do you believe President Obama is behind it?
And if he is, is that a violation of the so-called unsaid president's code?
No, I think he is behind it.
I also think it's politics.
That's the way it is.
Bush wasn't going after Clinton.
Clinton was going after Bush.
Well, you never know what's exactly happening behind the scenes.
You know, you're probably right or possibly right, but you never know.
No, I think that President Obama is behind it because his people are certainly behind it.
And some of the leaks possibly come from that group.
You know, some of the leaks, which are really very serious leaks because they're very bad in terms of national security.
Two, right, the enemy of Obama is still out there.
Yesterday he blamed Hollywood leftism for their flubs at the Oscars.
He said, you know, you were wasting so much time bashing me, you forgot to actually hand out the right envelopes at the Oscars.
Bashing Hollywood will actually, they're a good enemy.
They're an enemy that most Americans don't like.
He doesn't like China, right?
He doesn't like Mexico, right?
These are enemies that most Americans are pretty much okay with.
Americans are okay with Mexico, actually.
Americans, I think we have a 62% approval rating of Mexico, but on China, Americans aren't real fond of China.
In other words, Trump has his own series of enemies, and by attacking those enemies, he makes himself more popular.
If Democrats keep attacking Trump, there's no guarantee that makes them more popular, or that it makes Trump any less popular, because Trump is a known quantity.
The electorate is already so polarized.
In an area where the electorate's not polarized, attacking Bush Works when Bush had a 40% approval rating from Democrats going in and that goes down to zero.
But what happens when Trump's at 45% and his approval rating among Democrats is 3?
There's no room to move.
There's no way to actually move that crowd.
So I'm not sure that the actual best strategy for Democrats is attacking Trump as easy a target as he seems to be, and that's one of the secret strengths of Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, the paranoid style of politics that Trump engages in, the sort of everybody is my enemy routine, there's something to that in that if everybody is your enemy, there's very likely to be crossover with the American public on their enemies.
If you have lots of enemies, good shot that you and Donald Trump have some enemies in common, whether you're on the right or the left.
If you're on the left, then you also believe that the globalists, right, the globalists are in charge of the world economy.
Some of your enemies are Donald Trump's enemies.
If you're on the right, Donald Trump attacking the bureaucracy.
The bureaucracy is your enemy.
So Donald Trump, by having tons of enemies, it looks like a paranoid style of politics, but it's actually kind of smart.
So we'll talk more about that.
I also want to talk about Donald Trump on policy.
Because we're going to get his joint address to Congress tonight.
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