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March 21, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
21:05
Ep. 272 - Can Trump Actually Fulfill His Promises?
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On Saturday, socialist, septuagenarian loonbag Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Crazyland, took to Twitter to fire off a missive about how evil and terrible Americans are.
Here's what he tweeted, quote, We are living in a nation which worships wealth rather than caring for the poor.
I don't think that is the nation we should be living in.
Oh, he can move.
This isn't the first time Sanders has expressed this idea.
In January, Sanders said America was, quote, not a compassionate society, and stated, quote, Our record is worse than virtually any other country on Earth.
This is stupid.
First off, Sanders obviously worships government power rather than caring for the poor.
The notion that the socialist nations with which he sympathized throughout his youth cared more for the poor than the greatest prosperity-generating nation in the history of mankind is absurd on its face.
Sanders merely wishes he ran the world's wealth because he thinks he could allocate it better than billions of people in free exchange goods and services all around the planet.
In fact, he routinely stands against such free exchange.
Second, the American people actually don't worship wealth in the way Sanders does.
Marxists are materialists.
They think that all of human happiness amounts to material well-being.
The American people willingly give of themselves far more than residents of any other country.
The American almanac of philanthropy Found that Americans quote, out donate Britain and Canada 2 to 1 and nations like Italy and Germany 20 to 1.
What's more, more than half of every single income class except those earning less than 25 grand donate to charity.
Greedy evil 1 percenters, we give one third of all that charity and the wealthiest 1.4% of Americans are responsible for 86% of the charitable donations made at death.
America is by far the most religious country in the industrialized world.
The notion we sit around worshiping money is a leftist conceit that identifies good middle-class living built around church and family as babbitry.
But Sanders engages in just that sort of babbitry while ignoring community on his own.
He owns three homes.
And as for his claims that Americans are selfish, he donated about $8,300 to charity in 2014 on earnings of $205,000.
That is half the percentage of income given to charity that the Clintons handed over.
Not exactly the record of a man who proclaims that wealth means nothing and that the trappings of materialism must be shed in favor of redistribution.
The media constantly pay attention to President Trump's Twitter feed.
They should.
But Sanders' Twitter feed is far more idiotical, and ideologically, it's actually more dangerous.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So, tons to get to today.
Obviously, lots of breaking news from the Hill.
We'll talk about what's happening at the Comey hearing on the Hill with the House Intelligence Committee and Trump-Russia ties and Trump's accusations of Obama wiretapping.
We'll also talk briefly about the Gorsuch hearings.
We'll save some of that for tomorrow because they're happening contemporaneously with the show today.
We have lots to get to, even beyond that.
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Not a good hearing for President Trump on the Hill today.
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Okay, so lots happening on the Hill today, so we will start with that.
Not a good hearing for President Trump on the Hill today.
So, James Comey, the director of the FBI, and the National Security Administration head, who is Admiral Mike Rogers, they both basically came out and they said that Trump is full of crap when it comes to Obama wiretapping him.
No, Now, that doesn't mean that there were not Trump associates caught up in wiretaps of Russians.
It doesn't mean that Trump associates were not wiretapped themselves, although we have no evidence of that.
It does mean that Trump's accusation that President Obama wiretapped him, or that he wiretapped Trump Tower, Again, there is no evidence at all that this is true.
So, you know, the idea that Trump keeps promoting it and keeps doubling down on it, he's destroying his own public trust with this thing at this point.
So Comey came out and first Comey said there was no evidence at all.
He said, I have no information that supports these tweets.
We have looked fully within the FBI.
He said the DOJ had no information supporting President Trump's tweets either.
He said no president could order a wiretap anyway because all electronic surveillance works through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act courts.
Which is not a surprise, because top Democrats and Republicans in the House and the Senate have already said they have no evidence to substantiate Trump's tweet.
There were the accusations last week by Judge Napolitano on Fox News that British intelligence had been working with Obama to wiretap Trump.
The National Security Administration head, Mike Rogers, he said in open testimony that any allegations that the British did this were, quote, utterly ridiculous.
So there are all these reports from InfoWars that there were documents that were going to come out showing that Obama had wiretapped Trump.
That appears to be, at least according to this testimony, a bunch of crap, which is not surprising.
InfoWars tends to report things that are not true more often than other news sources.
And people buy into stuff because they feel like it confirms their pre-existing notions.
There is a significant amount of confirmation bias in how people view the news.
And so this is not good for Trump.
Does this mean that the intelligence community leaking about Trump is anything decent?
No, it doesn't.
And so you have dueling narratives now.
The narrative that you get from the left...
Is that Trump was full of crap about the Obama wiretaps, and the narrative that you have from the right, from people like, you know, people like me and people like the folks on Fox News, is that these leaks regarding, you know, the information about the Trump team and Russia and all of that, there's no reason that should be out in front.
And that's true.
There is something deeply awkward and wrong about having the FBI director going out there and discussing active investigations.
This is also true during the campaign.
Republicans don't have a huge leg to stand on here because they were perfectly happy to watch James Comey come out and reveal that there was an ongoing investigation into Hillary Clinton when there was actually no evidence that he ended up providing demonstrating additional proof of Hillary's guilt beyond that which we already knew in July when he basically exonerated her.
James Comey is a terrible FBI director.
I'm just going to put that out front.
James Comey, the FBI director, is awful at his job.
He can't shut his face.
He obviously wants to stick his foot into every public pie that is available.
So there are really two pieces of breaking news from the Comey hearings.
One, Trump's allegations about the wiretapping at Trump Tower.
No evidence of those whatsoever.
Is that going to stop people from believing it?
No.
And we'll get to that in a second.
Because that is a major problem, is the idea that if you're rooting for someone, the truth is secondary.
We've now been discussing this for well over a year.
It's true among conservatives.
It's true among leftists.
The idea that truth is secondary to victory...
is something that's being promulgated at the highest levels, including from President Trump.
It's also being promulgated on the left.
You have President Trump who says things like, if CNN runs a poll I don't like, that's only because CNN is a failing news outlet.
They're losers, basically.
Their ratings suck.
Equating success with truth.
And then on the left, you have people equating success with truth individually.
In other words, if they get away with saying that Trump is an illegitimate president, even if it's not true, then that makes it okay.
Right?
The ends justify the means has become not just an ancillary part of politics, but the core of politics on both sides, and it's a really, really nasty negative thing.
So that's piece of news number one.
Piece of news number two is that Comey confirmed that the FBI has been, since July, investigating the Trump-Russia connections.
Which is not great.
Not a great thing.
That means that both presidential candidates in the last election cycle, you want to ride in vote for either of them?
Both presidential candidates in the last election cycle were under active investigation by the FBI.
Both of them.
Or at least their people were, okay?
Hillary Clinton was under investigation because of her emails, and Donald Trump's team was under investigation apparently.
Here is what Comey said, quote, Now, we have to stop there for a second.
Comey at no point said that he had uncovered evidence of actual collusion between the Trump team and the Russians as far as affecting the election.
Now, Democrats have been out front saying that there is this deep collusion, it's obvious, it's open to anybody, and they're pointing at people like Paul Manafort and saying, look, Paul Manafort was Trump's campaign manager.
Paul Manafort actually worked for Vladimir Putin.
What more do you need than that?
Well, you do need more than that if you actually want to have criminal charges or if you want to claim that the election was actually impacted in a deep way by Manafort, who was out pretty early on in the election cycle and replaced by Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway.
So the idea that Manafort was the guy who was behind everything, that this was all some sort of big Russian plant, are there suspicious ties between Trump campaign officials and Russia?
Yes.
Does that mean that the ties extend to Trump?
No, it doesn't.
It's quite possible that Trump, who is admittedly an ignoramus about the political system, that he just hired somebody who is seen as sort of a black ops artist, which is what Manafort was seen as, he hired him, and then he found out that Manafort had ties to the Russians, and then he had to fire him.
That's actually quite plausible.
So the idea that this extends all the way up to Trump, and that there was active collusion between Trump's people and the Russians in order to affect the election on Trump's behalf.
Comey actually said in this hearing, there's no evidence that these shifts in the Republican National Committee platform, the shifts with regard to Ukraine and Russia, he said there's no evidence that that is tied in any way to Russian influence.
So, you know, a lot of this is speculation on the part of Democrats.
So what we've got on both sides now is speculation on behalf of scandals that really are not materializing.
We have speculation on behalf of scandals that are really not materializing on both sides.
On the one side, you have people on the right speculating that Trump was a victim of Obama-esque wiretapping and that this is the end of the world.
And they're just basically at this point speculating.
They're basically just throwing stuff out there without a lot of evidence to back it up.
And on the other side, you have the Democrats speculating that Trump is some sort of Russian plant without any evidence to back it up.
And so what you end up with is a bunch of innuendo.
And nobody trusts each other.
And nobody knows what the hell is going on.
And that is not a good state for government to be in at this point in time.
It's not that you should trust the government.
I don't think you should trust the government.
I'm in favor of limited government, and I wish that all of this massive distrust in government actually led to people saying, okay, well let's make the government that I don't trust less involved in my life.
Unfortunately, what it seems to be doing is the opposite in a lot of ways, which is, I don't trust the government.
Therefore, if we put in charge someone that I do trust, then everything will work out just fine.
And that's not right.
Okay?
That's not right.
Because just because you trust Trump doesn't mean he's telling you the truth.
Just because you trusted Obama didn't mean that he was telling you the truth.
They all have their own agenda, and the agenda at no point seems to cross paths even remotely with the truth.
So, you know, that's disastrous.
Just to give you some evidence that this is how people are thinking now, Adam Schiff, who is one of the people who is doing the questioning during this latest Comey hearing, here's Adam Schiff talking about the level of circumstantial evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Look, collusion is sort of what hasn't been proven here between whatever the Russians did and the Trump campaign.
In fact, the former acting director of the CIA, who was Mike Morrell, who was a supporter of Hillary Clinton, He essentially reminded people, took Director Clapper at his word on this show, who said there has been no evidence that has been found of collusion.
Are we at the point of, at what point do you start to wonder if there is a fire to all the smoke?
Well, first of all, I was surprised to see Director Clapper say that because I don't think you can make that claim categorically as he did.
I would characterize it this way at the outset of the investigation.
There is circumstantial evidence of collusion.
There is direct evidence, I think, of deception.
And that's where we begin the investigation.
I don't want to prejudge where we ultimately end up, and of course there's one thing to say there's evidence, there's another thing to say we can prove this, or prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, or there's enough evidence to bring to a grand jury for purposes of a criminal indictment.
But there is certainly enough for us to conduct an investigation.
The American people have a right to know, and in order to defend ourselves, we need to know whether the circumstantial evidence of collusion and direct evidence I assume that the direct evidence of deception he's talking about is Mike Flynn admitting that he talked to the Russians when he said he hadn't talked to the Russians.
But again, this is just paper thin.
It's just a tissue.
It's just a tissue.
And then you have Comey out there substantiating the tissue with nothing to back it.
And so this is just going to lead to more speculation.
This is why the intelligence community needs to stop talking.
The intelligence community should not be out front discussing active investigations.
This is Comey's fault.
It is also the fault of a very, very leaky intelligence community that hates Donald Trump.
So that is a third scandal and maybe the biggest one and maybe the biggest problem because the more information comes out that is unsubstantiated and there's no way to substantiate it.
The more people are not going to trust either side, and they're going to go back to their respective corners, and the Republicans will talk to Trump and trust him, and the Democrats will talk to Schumer and trust him, and nobody in the center will actually have any place to go, and nobody will know what the truth is.
Because the people who are supposed to be investigating the truth keep dripping out little pieces of information that are not helpful in any way, and that is James Comey's fault.
That is James Comey's problem.
And so I don't think the Republicans are wrong when they say that all of these leaks are a disaster.
Eric Trump, you know, he was saying that leaking Trump's taxes is a problem.
He's right.
Leaking Trump's taxes is a problem.
You know, it's really sad that we're in an environment where, you know, tax returns are leaked by you know, to whoever it may be.
I mean, just think about it.
I mean, just think about how dangerous that is, how third world that is of a practice that happened, when personal information is being put out by people for political agendas, and it's, um, as a civilian, it's actually scary to me.
Okay, and it should be scary, and I think that Eric Trump is right here.
Rand Paul says the same thing.
He says that there should be some investigation into the leakers regarding Michael Flynn and his calls with Russia.
The intelligence community should not be leaking information on active investigations.
I think that we know one thing for sure that the Obama administration did spy on Flynn.
Now whether it was direct or indirect, somebody was reading and taking a transcript of his phone calls and then they released it.
It is very, very important that whoever released that go to jail because you cannot have members of the intelligence community listening to the most private and highly classified information and then releasing that to the New York Times.
There can only be one that is true as well.
So, again, just to recap, there are three scandals, okay?
There's one that's real, and two that really are not so real.
The one that's real is the leaking scandal, because it is obvious.
Members of the intelligence community should not be leaking information that is against the law.
It is against the law, and it is a problem.
It was a problem during the campaign.
It was a problem for Hillary Clinton.
It's a problem now, okay?
All of it is a problem, and James Comey does not make that any better.
I think Comey has to go.
Then, on the other hand, you have two other scandals, both of which seem to be paper-thin and falling apart.
One is Trump saying that Obama wiretapped him, paper-thin, but Republicans believe it anyway.
And the other is Trump and Russia were colluding, paper-thin, but Democrats believe it anyway.
None of this is good for our politics.
And then there's something else that's really bad for our politics that I'll discuss in just a second.
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Okay, so There is something else really nasty happening in politics and that is we're undermining trust from both sides because we've barricaded ourselves in our own narrative without actually looking at the evidence.
Is there evidence that Trump colluded with Russia?
Not so much.
Is there evidence that Obama wiretapped Trump?
Not so much.
And so we barricade ourselves in our sides and we just look for confirming information and that's exacerbated by all the social media which have algorithms that benefit Sites that are like the ones you look at.
So if you tend to look at sites on the right, you're going to be promoted to more sites on the right, and that means that you are further ensconced in this bubble.
But the biggest problem, I think, is that our politicians just keep lying to us.
They just keep lying for their own political benefit, and then the promises they make never materialize, which undermines trust on a grand scale.
Roland Martin was talking about the fact that Trumpcare is now going to be up for a vote.
And Trumpcare should be up for a vote, I guess, this Thursday in the House.
Trump has been promising for a long time.
Nobody is going to lose their health insurance.
Health insurance is going to be available for everyone.
He's been using Democrat language to talk about Trumpcare for a very long time, about health insurance for a very long time.
And he made a bunch of promises that this bill is just not going to guarantee because Trump was talking in terms that the bill doesn't guarantee.
Roland Martin, who's a Democrat, says this, but he's not wrong.
Here he is.
You've been had, you've been took, you've been hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray, run amok.
To watch these white, working class voters, upset and mad, saying, I voted for you, and I'm going, we tried to tell you this is what the main city was going to do.
Now they're faced with the backlash of, now they love the Affordable Care Act, and now Republicans are in a box.
Okay, and he is not wrong that when you make promises to people and you can't fulfill those promises, that undermines trust.
So in 2010, Republicans said that they were going to repeal and replace Obamacare.
They didn't.
In 2012, they said they were going to do it.
In 2014, they said they were going to do it.
In 2016, they said they were going to do it.
And then the plan that they proposed doesn't actually do it.
So, I want to talk about the damage that it does.
When Republicans make promises to the white working class, and to the working class generally, it's not just white working class, that they cannot keep, and whether that makes a difference or not.
And we'll talk about, can Republicans win by telling the truth?
I think that is the big question in all of this, just generally, from the scandals to Trumpcare.
I think the biggest question right now, can Republicans win by telling the truth, or is truth an obstacle to victory?
And that means the truth has to go out the window in favor of some sort of higher truth, which is victory for central principles of conservatism.
That is, I think, the great battle at the heart, at the beating heart of what's going on in the conservative movement right now.
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