All Episodes
Previous Next
April 13, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
23:18
Ep. 285 - Is Trump Growing Into The Office?
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
On Tuesday, some dude named Christian Golian wrote a column for the New York Post that became the internet outrage du jour.
The column, titled, Why I Won't Date Hot Women Anymore, made the case that outrageously beautiful women are shallow and vapid, and that the same is true for men, and also implied that non-supermodels who are merely beautiful are a better pick.
The column begins with the story of Dan Rochkind, a private equity douchebag.
He says, quote, When it came to dating in New York as a 30-something executive in private equity, Dan Rochkind had no problem snagging the city's most beautiful women.
I could have had anyone I wanted, says Rochkin, now 40 and an Upper West Sider with a muscular build and a full head of hair.
By the way, dude's kind of weird looking.
He says, I met some really nice people, but realistically, I went for the hottest girl you could find.
He spent the better part of his 30s going on up to three dates a week courting 20-something blonde models, but eventually realized that dating the prettiest young things had its drawbacks.
He found them flighty, selfish, and vapid.
Beautiful women who get a fair amount of attention get full of themselves, he says.
Eventually, I was dreading getting dinner with them because they couldn't carry a conversation.
So, how did Rochkins, who clearly prioritized physical beauty over intelligence, kindness, and decency, solve this little problem?
He stopped dating supermodels.
Quote, looking to avoid such a fate, Rochkins started dating a woman who isn't a bikini model, Carly Spindle, in January 2015.
The two are now happily engaged.
The two met after Spindle's mother, matchmaker Janice Spindle, scouted Rochkins at a gym.
I gave him my card and I said I have the perfect girl for him, recalls Janice, founder of Serious Matchmaking based in Midtown.
Successful men who are in shape have the pickings when it comes to dating, but eventually they want a woman of substance.
There are a few problems here.
First off, Spindle is extremely good looking.
Perhaps the problem here isn't level of beauty, but the fact that women who generally go into bikini modeling may not, on average, have the same intellectual aspirations as women who become doctors.
In other words, the supposed brains-beauty disconnect may not actually be a brains-beauty disconnect at all, but rather a bikini model brains disconnect.
People who spend their entire lives getting ready to get mostly naked on a beach somewhere may not be people who are concerned with reading up on the latest economic developments in the Wall Street Journal.
But according to Goliath, nobody should date beautiful people at all if they want a stable relationship.
Quote, According to new research, Rochkin's idea about sexy bikini babes are correct.
A multi-part study from Harvard University, University of Laverne, and Santa Clara University researchers found that beautiful people are more likely to be involved in unstable relationships.
In one part, the researchers looked at the top 20 actresses on IMDb and found that they tend to have rocky marriages.
In another, women were asked to judge the attractiveness of 238 men based on their high school yearbook photos from 30 years ago.
The men who were judged to be the best-looking had higher rates of divorce.
This is ridiculous.
Both of these studies are flawed.
Maybe the problem with actresses isn't that they're beautiful, it's that they are actresses.
And maybe the good-looking guys in high school were treated like gods and just turned into Rotchkind.
The answer to shallowness isn't more shallowness, actually.
The reaction to bad dating experiences with beautiful people isn't dating non-beautiful people, necessarily.
It's to hold physical beauty as one portion of the dating calculus, but not the whole equation.
My wife is gorgeous, but she's particularly gorgeous to me because she's a beautiful person, not just because she has a beautiful body.
She has terrific values, a great sense of humor, ambition, and drive.
She is brilliant and fun, a terrific mother, and a profoundly good human being.
I was looking, specifically, for all of those things when I was dating.
We've been married for nearly a decade, and when we're both old and wrinkly, I'll still be in love with her.
She'll still be beautiful to me, even when our youth fades.
Now, to be fair, Rochkin seems to have discovered that.
He now recognizes that, yes, beauty has a large physical component, but there's beauty in personality, brains, and values.
That's why people stay married, even after they get old and wrinkly, rather than upgrading for the newer model.
Here's Rochkin, quote, She is a softer beauty, someone you can take home and cuddle with, and she's very elegant, Rochkin says.
And she's 5'2", so she can't be a runway model, but I think she's really beautiful and is prettier than anyone I've dated.
Sadly, Rochkind's douchiness isn't going away anytime soon.
He says, there's something to be said about sowing your wild oats and getting them out of your system, says Rochkind, who will marry Carly in June at a Tuscan romantic ceremony at the Wulffer Estate Vineyard in the Hamptons, but he doesn't regret his past.
You don't want to be the first to leave the party, but you don't want to leave the party too late either, he says.
Carly came at exactly the right time.
In other words, use beautiful but shallow women, then dump them by the side of the road later when you're getting older and ready to settle down.
In both the looks and character department, Rochkind is obviously no catch.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Alrighty, so, I don't know why people are talking to me from behind the camera, right, as the sounder happens, but there are some women in the office who are obviously interested in this topic, so we'll have to have that discussion after the show.
Not right now, guys, come on.
Okay, so, before we get into the news of the day, and there is lots of news, Trump is flipping on a bunch of issues, and we'll talk about whether that is good or bad, and what exactly That reflects about Trump.
Is this the new presidency or is this just more ideological incoherence?
We'll talk about all of that.
We'll also talk about the Sean Spicer thing because everybody's going nuts because Sean Spicer said something really dumb about the Holocaust yesterday.
Let me just say very briefly, Barack Obama helped forward an actual Holocaust.
In both Syria and then also in Iran, an anti-Jewish regime that wants to murder every Jew on the planet, and he helped give them nuclear weapons.
The media were complicit in that, but they're really pissed because Sean Spicer said something really dumb about the Holocaust.
But we'll talk about all that in just a minute.
First, I want to say thank you to our advertisers over at Wink.
So...
If you are one of the people who read that column about the dude who doesn't want to date beautiful women anymore and it just makes you want to drink, then trywink.com is the place for you.
If you are going over to somebody's house for dinner and you don't know anything about wine, if you're like me, and wine you just think is fermented grape juice, and you leave some ketamine in the fridge and that turns into wine, and then you bring it over to a friend's house and they say, what in the world are you doing?
Then you need to go over to trywink.com, W-I-N-C dot com slash Ben, because they will tell you what kind of wine is good, what it pairs with, And the way that this works is you go on their website and you take a survey as to what tastes you like, what tastes you like together.
And then they recommend a bottle of wine for you.
Their bottles of wine are really affordable, like $10 a piece.
And they will give you $20 off plus complimentary shipping at trywink.com.
Folks around the office have tried the wine.
Apparently they got into the wine stash this morning, which is why they're talking to me during the commercials.
But in any case, trywink.com.com is the place to go.
The wine is apparently really, really good.
And again, they will help you pick the best bottle of wine.
If you don't know anything about wine like me, then this is the best place to find out what – they'll tell you what wine you need to bring so you don't look like a doofus.
And the wine is really, really good and affordable.
Again, try wink.com.
W-I-N-C dot com.
Slash spend $20 off.
Plus, complimentary shipping.
Okay, so.
A lot going on in the last two days.
Apparently, I leave for two days, and Donald Trump turns into George W. Bush, which is weird.
So, he's flipped on an inordinate number of issues in the last two days.
Yesterday, he flipped on about six of them.
And we're gonna go through some of the issues upon which he flips.
Now, some of these flips are good.
And so the question that we have to ask is, is this Trump maturing in office?
Is this reality slapping Trump in the face and saying, you know, a lot of your campaign rhetoric was really nonsensical, and now you're going to have to buckle down because the reality is that the Russians are a nefarious force in the world, and the reality is that North Korea is a dangerous place, and that not every problem is a simple problem that a businessman can solve just by wishing it so.
Is it that?
Is Trump actually becoming more mature?
Or is he just responding to opinion polls?
Is he just responding to events?
Is he just trusting Ivanka and Jared?
And are we going to get kind of an incoherent presidency that bounces from issue to issue?
And we don't know the answer to that yet, but let's look at some of the flips.
Because some of them are actually quite good.
And I'm pleased with them as a conservative.
So, for example, yesterday, here is what Trump said about NATO.
I said it was obsolete.
It's no longer obsolete.
It's my hope that NATO will take on an increased role in supporting our Iraqi partners in their battle against ISIS.
Okay, and just to remind you, throughout the entire campaign, throughout the entire campaign, he said NATO was obsolete, that NATO basically was done.
Here's what he had to say during the campaign.
NATO is obsolete.
It was 67 years, or it's over 60 years old.
Okay, so NATO was obsolete.
Okay, NATO was not obsolete.
It's not true.
Now, people in the Trump administration are trying to play this like Trump changed NATO and therefore it's not obsolete.
Absolute nonsense.
The only NATO action of the last 20 years was an invocation after 9-11 on behalf of the United States for NATO forces to go into Afghanistan.
So, the idea that it was obsolete and it was not directed at terror is obviously not true.
Good for Trump for at least acknowledging that.
That's a good shift in position.
It does demonstrate that those of us who were criticizing Trump during the campaign for saying this sort of stupidity And saying that it encouraged Vladimir Putin's aggressiveness, that Trump is now beginning to recognize the truth of that, or at least he's going to flip on that.
So that's a good flip.
Okay, here's another good flip.
Yesterday, Trump said that China is not a currency manipulator.
Okay, now China is not a currency manipulator.
They stopped several years ago manipulating their currency.
And as I've said many times, even if China inflates their currency, that doesn't actually do anything overall to the American economy.
This is why the Weimar Republic didn't just inflate itself into prosperity.
This is why Venezuela didn't inflate itself into prosperity.
This is why Zimbabwe hasn't been able to inflate itself into prosperity.
There's this weird idea in international trade that if we inflate our currency that somehow we're going to be benefiting ourselves because suddenly our products become cheaper on the international market, right?
If we inflate our currency, then the British pound is worth more American dollars, and they can buy more American products, and therefore it helps our export industry.
The problem is that you inflate our currency, you also make our savings worthless, and you make all the products that we want to buy more expensive.
So you actually don't help your economy overall when you inflate your currency.
This is why a strong dollar is generally weaker, is generally better than a weak dollar.
So, Trump had said throughout the entire campaign that China was stealing our jobs by inflating currency.
Not true.
And now, yesterday, he came out and he said, well, not anymore.
If you recall, his website actually said during the campaign, quote, we must stand up to China's blackmail and reject corporate America's manipulation of our politician.
The U.S.
Treasury's designation of China as a currency manipulator will force China to the negotiating table and open the door to a fair and far better trading relationship and just A month ago, a couple months ago, he said, did China ask us if it was okay to devalue our currency, to devalue their currency, making it hard for our companies to compete?
Yesterday in a Wall Street Journal interview, he said he was reversing his position because China has not manipulated their currency for months and pushing the issue could hurt U.S.-China relations.
He said, I think our dollar is getting too strong.
And partially that's my fault because people have confidence in me.
Basically, I'm too awesome.
Okay, the reality is the dollar is strong right now because a lot of other countries are having economic trouble and America's a good investment.
And that's not just about Trump.
The dollar's been strong on the international market for years.
It's not just Trump.
But good that Trump flips on this because it would have been real awkward Then they start fighting again.
Then Saddam Hussein throws a little gas.
Everyone goes crazy.
Oh, he's using gas.
They go back, forth.
flips that Trump is engaged in.
So here's a flashback about Saddam Hussein.
If you recall, Trump didn't care five minutes ago when evil Middle Eastern dictators gassed their own people.
Here's what Trump said about it.
Then they start fighting again.
Then Saddam Hussein throws a little gas.
Everyone goes crazy.
Oh, it's using gas.
They go back forth.
It's the same.
OK, so it's not a big deal when Saddam threw a little gas.
And here is Donald Trump on Bashar Assad yesterday with regard to Bashar Assad using gas on his There can't be a worse site, and it shouldn't be allowed.
That's a butcher.
That's a butcher.
So I felt we had to do something about it.
I have absolutely no doubt we did the right thing.
Okay, so again, it's good that Trump is now recognizing the truth that it is bad for dictators to use gas on their own people, and the sort of casual way in which he was saying that it doesn't matter if you gas your own people was really silly to begin with, and people bought into that, and this is what I hate about sort of the way our politics are done, is that he campaigns on the basis of a bunch of silly things that he eventually reverses because, as president, he realizes that they're silly.
Here's another one.
A month ago, on Bill O'Reilly's program, he said about Vladimir Putin that Vladimir Putin isn't that bad, that Russia's not really that big a problem, the U.S.
has a lot of killers.
You remember this.
He said this on Bill O'Reilly's program.
I do respect him.
Do you?
Why?
Well, I respect a lot of people, but that doesn't mean I'm going to get along with them.
Putin's a killer.
A lot of killers.
We get a lot of killers.
Why, you think our country's so innocent?
You think our country's so innocent?
I don't know of any government leaders that are killers in Iraq.
Well, take a look at what we've done, too.
We've made a lot of mistakes.
I've been against the war in Iraq from the beginning.
Yeah, mistakes are different, Dan.
We've made a lot of mistakes, okay, but a lot of people were killed.
Okay, and then, here is Donald Trump again, yesterday, with regard to Russia relations.
It would be wonderful, as we were discussing just a little while ago, If NATO and our country could get along with Russia.
Right now we're not getting along with Russia at all.
We may be at an all-time low in terms of relationship with Russia.
This is built for a long period of time.
But we're going to see what happens.
Putin is the leader of Russia.
Russia is a strong country.
We're a very, very strong country.
We're going to see how that all works out.
And then Trump tweeted this morning that Russia and U.S.
relations would work themselves out because everybody would get together and realize what's in their best interest.
Again, that's a little bit of wishful thinking on the part of Trump.
Are all these things evidence that Trump is growing into the job or is it just evidence that he's responding to events?
Based on the information that's being given to him, and could he be flipped on these things?
Another example of Trump flipping.
Yesterday, you recall, all during the election cycle, he kept saying that he wanted to be unpredictable.
He didn't want to tell people in advance of military operations that were going to be taking place.
And then, of course, he told the Russians in advance that we're going to be firing cruise missiles at this base.
He should.
He should have told the Russians that.
We don't want to escalate into a hot war based on us not telling the Russians what's going on.
But here is Trump, back during the campaign, saying he wants to be unpredictable.
Bill, I'm going to do what's right.
I want to be unpredictable.
I'm not going to tell you right now what I'm going to do.
Right, and he's kept saying that about foreign policy.
And then yesterday, he was asked about what's he going to do in Syria, and then he just spills out his plan on what he's going to do in Syria.
We're not going into Syria.
Because, you know, there were some questions.
Nikki Haley is doing a great job.
Rex is doing a fantastic job, our Secretary of State.
And General McMaster, fantastic.
But if you add it all up, and if they take every little word, they'll say, oh, they're different.
Just so you understand, we're not going into Syria.
But when I see people using horrible, horrible chemical weapons, which they agreed not to use under the Obama administration, but they violated it.
Okay, and so, again, the point here is not just to say that he flips on things, because a lot of politicians flip on things.
The point here is to say that he seems to be flipping in a more practical direction on a lot of these things.
Now, there are areas where he's flipping in a non-practical direction.
So he's now said that he's in favor of the Export-Import Bank, which is just a corporatist nonsense thing.
He's flipping on some of his tax policies, which I don't think is a good thing.
But, when it comes to foreign policy, he's flipping into a much more realistic position with regard to Russia.
He realizes now that Russia's a nefarious force in the world, He's flipping into a more realistic position on North Korea.
People were laughing at this yesterday, but I actually didn't see what was so crazy about it.
He was talking apparently with the president of China, Xi Jinping, and he apparently said that...
that that ji had told him about what was going on with north korea and he realized that it wasn't as simple as just telling the chinese to get rid of kim jong-un well people are laughing at that like shouldn't have known that already yeah i should have known that already but he learns the machine learns right that's a good thing the fact that he is now realizing that new information is changing his opinion that's a good thing i I don't think that's a bad thing.
The problem here is that he doesn't have any steady principles.
So, normally what you'd want from a president is somebody who has a steady set of principles upon which he can rely, and then the information that he's given changes how he reacts based on those principles.
The problem with Trump is he doesn't actually have a steady base of principles, and so we don't actually know what his principles are.
So when he gets new information, it doesn't just shift his approach, it shifts his entire worldview.
His worldview is shifting day by day.
Five minutes ago, it was horrible to bomb a sovereign country if they were using gas on their own people.
Now, it's imperative that we bomb a sovereign country if they use gas on their own people.
Five minutes ago, it was terrible that NATO was sucking up oxygen.
Now it's great that NATO's out there fighting the Russians.
Five minutes ago, Vladimir Putin was a wonderful guy we were going to make a deal with, and now Vladimir Putin's a nefarious force in the world.
Again, It would have been better if we had had all those positions up front, because then a lot of people wouldn't feel cheated.
And I want to talk about whether people who were Trump's biggest supporters ought to feel cheated in just a second.
But first, I want to say thank you to our friends over at Tracker.com.
So as I have said before, you know, TheTracker.com is where you go, T-R-A-C-K-R dot com, promo code Ben, you get a free tracker bravo.
What the tracker does is you attach it to your phone, you attach it to your keys, you put it in your wallet, And then you can use an app on your phone to track down exactly where your keys and your wallet are.
As I've said before, this helps with my marriage.
This is one of the pet peeves that both my wife has and me and I have with her, and that is we lose stuff on an incredibly frequent basis.
And the tracker has solved that problem because now we both have the app on our phone.
And if we lose our wallet or our keys and we're trying to rush out the door, we just go to the app and we set it up and then we search for our phone and it immediately comes up.
And by the way, if you lose your phone itself, then you can have a setting on there.
You attach one to your keys.
The setting on the phone will actually be overridden.
So if your phone is on silent, how often does this happen?
Your phone is on silent and you lose your phone.
And now you're looking around and you're trying to call it and it doesn't matter.
Well, what the tracker does is it actually rings forward to the phone, and that means that you are going to be able to locate your phone even if you've put it on silent, which is an awesome, awesome thing.
TheTracker.com promo code.
Ben, it's only like a coin-sized device.
You can see it on your screen right here.
It'll save you tons of time and tons of aggravation, and it's the little things that drive you crazy.
It isn't the big things in life that make you completely nutty.
It's the little things like losing your keys in your wallet that make you totally insane.
TheTracker.com prevents that.
So go to TheTracker.com and use that promo code.
Then you get a free Tracker Bravo with any purchase.
The reason that it's important to have principles and not just flip your principles based on the events of the day is you never know.
If you don't know what the basic principles are, if you don't have a generalized worldview, you don't know which piece of information is actually going to hit home.
Is it the piece of information that putting American troops on the ground is going to be damaging to your popularity rating?
Or is it the piece of information where you're watching TV and there are a bunch of dead Syrian kids on the TV?
Which piece of information hits home?
Now, if you have a worldview, we can basically predict, as a people, how you're going to react to a given piece of information.
Because the information will either confirm your worldview or reject your worldview.
But when you don't know what exactly Trump is basing his positions on, it makes things really difficult.
And this is what's happening in the infight inside the administration between Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller on the one side, and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump on the other.
Trump, as I've said before, is running this administration like it's a family business.
That's not a great shock.
He runs his family business like a family business.
Now he's running the White House like a family business.
Jared Kushner, who has all of the same qualifications as my three-year-old daughter to be in charge of China policy, is now in charge of China policy, Middle East policy, heroin policy.
He doesn't have expertise on any of this, but he's loyal to Trump, and so Trump likes him.
On the other hand, you've got Steve Bannon.
Steve Bannon represents a nationalist-populist movement that thinks that big government is basically okay, but we have to protect our borders and we have to be more isolationist on foreign policy.
That's sort of the nationalist-populist movement.
There's more crossover, I think, between the nationalist-populist movement and conservative policy than there is between Ivanka and Jared and conservative policy, because both of them are career Democrats.
And so what you've got right now is Steve Bannon, who is an admittedly bad guy who does not actually believe a lot of conservative things.
And then you've got Jared and Ivanka on the other side, who don't believe any conservative things, but are nicer people.
And so there are no good options for conservatives.
You're sort of hoping that Trump bumbles his way into just delegating power to all of the people he's appointed.
Like Nikki Haley is doing a good job.
Rex Tillerson is doing a surprisingly good job.
I'm shocked at how How Rex Tillerson has been hawkish on Russia.
I did not expect to see that coming.
And so all that's good.
Trump needs to delegate all of that, not to Jared and Ivanka, but to the people that he has appointed to the positions who are actually qualified for those positions.
Otherwise, the more Trump meddles, the more you just wonder what piece of information is going to flip his mind today.
Because I don't think that what we're seeing is a full growth of Trump into the job.
I think what we're seeing is that Trump is responding and reacting because that's what Trump does.
I don't think he's changed his personality.
I just think that he's reacting to events that now impact him in a way they didn't.
It's easy to say when you're a candidate, okay, so somebody gasses a few children.
It's different when everybody in the world is saying, you're the leader of the free world, what are you going to do?
A bunch of children just got gassed.
Things change pretty radically.
But it does leave up in the air.
What if a new piece of information emerges that flips Trump back?
Right?
What happens if he decides that it's more important to make a deal with the Russians than to speak the truth about what Russia is doing?
So, for example, Russia's Sergei Lavrov, yesterday he came out and said there's no evidence that Assad used chemical weapons.
The chance that this investigation reveals the government's implication in chemical attacks, it's so hypothetical.
We do not want to speculate.
We do not want to speculate.
We've seen how speculation – So he's saying that we have no information, that it was necessarily Assad.
Assad is saying the same thing.
He's saying that he thinks that it was the deep state that helped plant this, and they're the ones who are attacking the United States and Trump.
He's actually trying to avoid Assad is trying to avoid pissing off Trump.
Here's what he actually said.
This is just breaking right now.
He said, I was very cautious in saying any opinion regarding him before he became president and after.
I always say, let's see what he's going to do.
We wouldn't comment on the statements.
So actually, this is the first proof that it's not about the president in the United States.
It's about the regime and the deep state or the deep regime in the United States is still the same.
It doesn't change.
The president is only one of the performers on their theater.
If he wants to be a leader, he cannot.
Because as some say, he wanted to be a leader.
Trump wanted to be a leader, but every president there, if he wants to be a real leader, later he's going to eat his word, swallow his pride, and make a 180 degree U-turn, otherwise he would pay the price politically.
That's Assad parroting messages that are coming out of the Russian regime.
Is that going to impact Trump?
We don't know, because we don't know Trump's worldview.
Hopefully over time, his worldview will develop.
You know, every president enters office saying they're basically going to be an isolationist.
Very few end up that way.
We will see what his worldview actually ends up being or whether it's justified by Jared Ivanka or Bannon or whomever.
It's a lot of confusion right now, and Trump is not doing anything to tamp down that confusion.
All I can say is that a lot of the flips he's making right now I think are good in terms of policy, but there are some that are still bad.
He's a mixed bag.
He will always be a mixed bag so long as he doesn't have a worldview.
Okay, so now you're going to have to go over to Daily Wire to check out the rest of the We're going to talk about the reactions from the right and why there are so many who are part of Trump's hardcore base who are very upset about Syria because they think that Trump had a worldview that he obviously doesn't.
And so we'll talk about what that means for Trump and the future of his presidency.
You have to go over to dailywire.com and check that out.
$8 a month over at Daily Wire.
We're also going to be talking about the Sean Spicer situation and the media going nuts over Sean Spicer and the Holocaust.
$8 a month.
If you get an annual subscription today, you get a free copy of The Arroyo, which is a terrific fictional movie set on the border by our very own Jeremy Boring, all about the issues that plague the ranchers who live on the border, their land being used as a thoroughfare for drugs and prostitution.
▲
Export Selection