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April 27, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
21:04
Ep. 290 - Trump's First 100 Days: How Has He Done?
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Two weeks ago, United Airlines got hit with a slew of horrible headlines after airline security forcibly removed a passenger from a flight after he was seated and refused to obey airline orders to vacate the plane.
The man, Dr. David Dow, alleges that security broke his nose and knocked out his teeth, among other injuries.
The story led to a bevy of narratives about supposed anti-Asian discrimination on airlines, as well as general anger at the airline industry.
Well, on Monday, a lawyer named Tom Dimitrio announced on NBC's Today that a female passenger on American Airlines had contacted him about suing the airline.
What happened?
A video shows the woman crying and carrying her baby, as well as another passenger talking to a flight attendant.
The woman claims a flight attendant hit her with a stroller while taking it away from her, nearly hitting her kid, too.
American Airlines, seeing what had happened to United, immediately took action to suspend the flight attendant in question and apologized for, quote, the pain we have caused this passenger and her family and to any other customers affected by the incident.
According to a Reddit commenter who says he saw the incident, quote, The Argentinian lady and her two children were in the mid to back of the plane.
She was somehow able to get her stroller on board and back to near her seat.
Since I was near the front, I cannot know what happened.
If she tried to put the stroller in the overhead bin or what.
The flight attendant told her she could not have the stroller on the plane and he needs to take it.
She refused to let him take it and was to the near point of shouting.
The flight attendant shouted up for security very soon on, escalating the situation more.
The flight attendant and the woman started making their way to the front of the plane.
I forgot who had the stroller at this point.
She had her two kids.
She shouted something about being an Argentinian woman and yada yada.
It was at this point where things escalated a bit more.
The flight attendant and Argentinian woman were at the front of the plane in the crew area next to the front door of the plane.
She was hanging on to the stroller, refusing to let go.
The flight attendant was trying to remove it from the plane.
Both were here at fault in my opinion.
The flight attendant's tone was overly aggressive.
The woman was refusing to let it go and made an aggressive move grabbing the flight attendant which she should not have done.
This angered him.
He responded by jerking the stroller harder and knocking the Argentinian woman in the head and nearly missing her kids.
The flight attendant should not have been so aggressive and should have been aware of the kids." So, here's the problem.
What we now have is an attempt to target one of the most unpopular industries in the country.
Everyone hates the airlines, the same way most Americans hate their insurance company.
Sure, we need the airlines, but we despise them because they control how we fly, they charge us too much, they jack us around, they force us to pay for checked baggage and the like.
We have to deal with pissy flight attendants and idiot TSA agents and airlines that don't seem to care very much about cancelling or delaying our flights.
And so now, individuals see a ripe target.
Here is the truth.
David Dow should have gotten off the plane.
They had the legal right to remove him from the plane.
Should they have changed their process for encouraging people to leave?
Of course!
But as Mike Rowe rightly said, quote, I don't want to fly across the country in a steel tube filled with people who get to decide which rules they will follow and which they will ignore.
I've been on too many flights with too many angry people to worry about the specific circumstances of their outrage or the details of why they took it upon themselves to ignore direct command.
A plane is not a democracy.
The main cabin is no place to organize a sit-in.
The main cabin is a place to follow orders, unquote.
The same holds true for this woman on the American Airlines flight.
I have two kids under the age of four.
We always travel with a double stroller.
We have never attempted to put it on the plane, and if we did so and were asked to check the stroller instead, we would obey the command.
Apparently this woman didn't, then allegedly got rowdy before being clocked with the stroller in stupid fashion by a flight attendant.
How is this the sort of behavior we'd like to promulgate as a society?
We're now incentivizing every person on every plane to argue with every annoyance and then sue based on the reaction from the airline.
Those costs will then be passed on to other consumers.
Enough.
We've had politics dominated by hatred for particular industries for years now.
We've already destroyed the health insurance industry because we hate it but we need it.
Now we'll target the airlines.
Here's an idea.
If you don't like how an airline acts, choose a different airline.
Otherwise, we'll ruin all of the airlines in a fit of pique.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Okay, we have tons to get to today.
We're going to be having on a guest who thinks that cultural appropriation is completely horrible in just a little while.
Plus, I want to go through what Trump promised during his first hundred days and what he's actually done.
We're going to go through this in purely factual fashion, see what he has fulfilled and what he has not fulfilled.
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Okay, so before we launch into the news of the day, I want to talk about a piece of news that's not of the day.
of 102 years ago I want to pay tribute to the Armenian Genocide.
So the Armenian Genocide began 102 years ago, April 24th, 1915.
People don't know that much about the Armenian Genocide because it hasn't had as much publicity as the Holocaust, because it wasn't as mechanized as the Holocaust.
But up to 1.5 million Armenians were murdered by the Turkish Islamist regime.
They're called the Young Turks.
They took the place of the Ottoman Empire.
They were supposed to be reasonable and nationalist, and instead it turned out that they were Islamic extremists, and they decided on the murder of literally hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children who are Armenian in Turkey.
And it was, I mean, the stories, the pictures are just horrific.
I mean, you're talking about mass killings, you're talking about mass starvation, forced death marches.
There's famous News coverage of them putting boats filled with women and children offshore into the sea and then just deliberately sinking them to kill everybody aboard.
Horrific.
The excuse that was used by the regime at the time is that these terrible Armenians who are Christian were going to be allied against the central powers in World War I and they wanted to stop that.
Still, today, the current Islamist dictator of Turkey refuses to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide.
In 2010, Erdogan, who is that dictator, he openly warned he could throw 100,000 Armenian immigrants out of Turkey if they kept talking about the Armenian Genocide because they were undermining the legitimacy of Turkish rule.
There was one guy who took the Armenian Genocide particularly seriously.
That person was Adolf Hitler.
In 1939, when he was dictator of Germany, obviously, he told Nazi officers right before they were about to invade Poland, quote, kill without mercy.
He said, who after all speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?
The Germans were obviously well aware of the annihilation of the Armenians because they were allied with the Turkish Empire, with the Ottoman Empire in World War I.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach has pointed out that Hitler's confidants learned from Turkey's genocidal playbook.
His lead political advisor, Hitler's, was a guy named Max Erwin von Schöbner Richter, who's a young German consular officer in Turkey.
And he had seen all of this happen.
The Germans were well aware of what had happened during the Armenian Genocide.
Again, the bottom line is that most genocides are thrown off as some sort of political, just a political tool, and the world tends to ignore it.
Most of the world ignored the Armenian Genocide.
Most of the world still ignores the Armenian Genocide.
I thought it would be You know, not only worthwhile to pay tribute to it, it's a reminder that when we watch genocides happening across the world against Christians, particularly in the Middle East today, the legacy of this is not over.
When you ignore Islamic extremism, genocide becomes far easier, whether it's genocide against Yazidis in Iraq or whether it's genocide against Christians in Syria.
Bottom line is that Christians are still under attack in the Middle East by the same people who were participating in this a century ago.
Okay, so I now want to talk about Trump's first 100 days.
Trump made a lot of promises about what he's going to do in his first 100 days.
He had an entire program that he suggested was going to be his agreement with America.
It was a 100-day plan to restore prosperity to our economy, security to our communities, and honesty to our government.
You can see an image of what he had tweeted out.
He put out this contract with the American voter that was supposed to be like Newt Gingrich's contract with America.
And it had, I think, 28 separate promises.
And we'll go through those promises and see what he's fulfilled.
Now, let's be real about this.
The 100-day standard is always sort of silly.
It was established by historians in the aftermath of FDR using his first 100 days to cram through whatever he wanted.
So when Trump says that it's silly, he's right.
But it was Trump himself who decided to hold by this and make all these big promises.
Because the big promise underlying everything Trump did in the election cycle was that Donald Trump was going to change the way government worked.
He was going to come in, cut the Gordian Knot.
Everything was going to be quick and easy and fast.
And that's not the way that government works.
Chuck Todd asked Reince Priebus about this because Trump had been asked about the 100 days thing.
And Trump had said, well, I don't know who decided on this.
Somebody decided on this.
Meaning somebody decided on this program.
So it's Bob the intern, apparently, who came up with this contract with the American voter.
But here's Chuck Todd querying Reince Priebus over it, and Reince Priebus trying to run from it.
All of them were supposed to be legislative action that was announced.
Not necessarily the expectation any of it would be passed.
But only one of those legislative priorities has even come close to a vote.
Health care.
Why does he say it's a ridiculous standard and yet promise all this action before day 100?
All right.
And Prebis doesn't have a great answer for that.
Jonathan Karl over at ABC News is, of course, jumping on the 100-day standard to say that Trump has fallen short.
By the standards that he set for himself during the campaign, there is no question that he has fallen dramatically short in the first 100 days.
Just take a look at this.
Back in October, he offered what he called a contract with the American voter.
This is 10 specific promises, 10 pieces of legislation that he promised to introduce and, quote, Fight for their passage within the first 100 days of my administration.
Well, George, only one of those has even been introduced.
Okay, so stop it there.
This is not fully fair.
So if you look at Trump's 100-day promises, they're focusing on the legislative portion of it, right?
There's the 100-day promises again.
So this is the first page.
The second page is the one where he hasn't done so well, right?
So the second page has all these legislative priorities.
He pledges that he's going to introduce these acts.
Middle-class tax relief and simplification?
No.
And the Offshoring Act, which was supposed to be a tariff act, no.
American Energy and Infrastructure Act, no.
School Choice and Education Opportunity Act, no.
Repeal and Replace Obamacare Act, he tried, it failed.
Affordable Child Care and Elder Care Act, no.
End Illegal Immigration Act, no.
Restoring Community Safety Act, no.
Restoring National Security Act, no.
Cleanup Corruption in Washington Act, no.
So that page, that's right.
Those are all his supposed legislative priorities, and this highlights the difference.
I'll show you in a second.
This highlights the difference between where Trump has been effective and where he has not been effective.
He has not been effective at changing how government works, and this is why he is not Reagan.
So Reagan, in his first hundred days, pursued some executive actions, but Reagan's big contribution was to spend his first hundred days on the bully pulpit, ripping Democrats down.
Remember, he had a Democratic majority in the House.
Ripping Democrats down for their failure to pass some sort of tax reform, and he was successful in shifting the debate.
Trump has not really shifted the debate on anything, which is why he's been wildly unsuccessful on the legislative front, even though, unlike Reagan, he actually has a Republican Congress and a Republican Senate.
Here's where he has fulfilled his promises.
That first page.
Let's show that first page again.
Okay, so the first page, he has a bunch of promises here.
So, he pledged he was going to clean up government.
So he said he was going to propose a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress.
No, he didn't do that.
A hiring freeze on federal employees.
Yes.
He lifted it later, but yes.
Third, a requirement that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations would be eliminated.
Yes, he fulfilled that.
A five-year ban on White House and congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave government service.
Yes, he fulfilled that.
A lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government, yes, but sort of undercut by the fact that Mike Flynn, who is his national security advisor, is now registered as a foreign agent.
Sixth, a complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections.
No, he hasn't done that yet.
So that first section here, you can see it here on the left side of your screen, there are six promises that he made and he kept four of them.
Okay, not bad.
I'm protecting American workers.
He announced that he was going to renegotiate NAFTA or withdraw from the deal.
He has announced that.
He said he was going to announce withdrawal from TPP.
Yes.
He said that he was going to direct his Secretary of the Treasury to label China a currency manipulator.
No, and not only that, he said he was never going to do that now because they're not manipulating the currency.
He said he was going to direct the Secretary of Commerce and U.S.
Trade Representative to identify foreign trading abuses.
Yes.
He's going to lift restrictions on generation of shale oil, natural gas, and clean coal.
Yes.
Lift the Keystone Pipeline ban.
Yes.
And cancel billions to the UN climate change programs.
Yes.
So in this section, he has kept 1, 2, 3, there are 7 promises here, and he has kept 6 of them.
Quite good, right?
And then there are his promises on the Constitution.
He said he was going to cancel every unconstitutional executive action memo and order issued by Obama.
No, particularly this is not true with regard to deferred action on childhood arrivals DACA.
Second, he said he was going to select a replacement for Scalia.
Yes, in spades with Judge Gorsuch.
Third, cancel all federal funding to sanctuary cities.
He has said he's going to do this and he's made that threat.
Fourth, begin removing two million criminal illegal immigrants.
Yes, he's pursuing that.
And suspending immigration from terror-prone countries.
He's tried to do that, but obviously he's failed in that because of the courts attempting to block that.
So, what has he done there?
So there were five promises there, and he has kept four of them, essentially.
So, in other words, everything that he said he could do that was kind of the smaller things through executive action, he's done all of that.
When it comes to legislative efforts, he has not done that.
Now, here is the problem with that.
The problem with that is that the big things that presidents do are all legislative.
The president really does big things in a couple of ways.
One is, he shifts the tone and tenor of the political debate.
Barack Obama shifted the entire tone and tenor of the American political debate onto race, onto gender, onto polarization of the American system.
He did that very successfully.
Also, his big accomplishments were legislative, except for DACA, which Trump is not moving off of.
So his big legislative accomplishment, of course, is Obamacare.
He also came up with sequestration, which cut the military dramatically.
All of his big accomplishments were legislative.
This is true for every president.
Executive orders do not do that much.
Executive orders generally, if they're properly used, cannot do that much because the president doesn't have all that much power.
So while everybody is saying that Trump kept a lot of these promises, that's true.
Good for him.
But when it comes to what the president actually does, his role of leadership, Trump is a mixed bag.
He has not done anything on the legislative side.
He's supposed to roll out his tax plan this week.
We'll see how that goes.
Hopefully it goes better than repeal and replace.
He had said he was going to do repeal and replace this week again.
Doesn't look like that's going to happen.
That'll probably get kicked down the road.
Maybe Trump pulls out of this tailspin, but he has not used the bully pulpit in order to promulgate his agenda, and you can see that.
So, for example, Donald Trump is still maintaining that Mexico is going to pay for the wall.
There's no evidence that Mexico is going to pay for this wall.
He said, eventually, but at a later date, so we can get started early, Mexico will be paying in some form for the badly needed border wall.
So, bottom line, he hedges three times in one tweet about one of his key campaign promises.
Eventually, but at a later date, in some form, right?
So it's a lot of hedging about a key campaign promise.
His homeland security chief, you know, Trump said, it's going to be so easy to stop terrorism.
It's not easy to stop terrorism.
Trump never should have made that promise.
Here's his Homeland Security Chief, this is General John Kelly, talking about how, no, we really don't know what we can do here.
There's so many aspects of this terrorist thing.
Obviously, you get the homegrown terrorists.
I don't know how to stop that.
I don't know how to detect that.
Okay, so, again, promise that Trump made that he's not going to be able to fulfill because there's no way to fulfill that promise.
Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, was asked about deporting DREAMers.
Another big Obama, another big Trump initiative, this idea we're going to revoke DACA and deport the DREAMers.
No, not so much.
The President did say, as I said this week to the Associated Press, that the Dreamers should rest easy.
He's not going after the Dreamers.
That's his policy.
He said, is it the policy of the Justice Department?
The Homeland Security has primary jurisdiction there.
Their first and strongest priority, no doubt about it, is the criminal element that we have in our country that have come here illegally.
So they're focusing primarily on that.
And there's no doubt the president has sympathy for young people who are brought here at early ages.
So they can rest easy?
Well, we'll see.
I believe that everyone that enters the country unlawfully is subject to being deported.
However, we've got we don't have the ability to round up.
Bottom line is mixed messages from Jeff Sessions.
Again, this is stuff that should be solved on the legislative level, and Trump has not done what he needs to do on the legislative level yet.
So on the executive level, I think Trump's done a lot of the right things in his first 100 days, but people who are declaring him a wild success after 100 days are not right, and people who are declaring him a wild failure after 100 days are not right.
Bottom line is, I don't think that he has shifted the debate in the same way that Reagan did.
He looks more like Clinton in his first term, right?
So the first 100 days of Clinton was basically a bunch of mishmash.
And even the New York Times said that it was a bunch of mishmash at the time.
And then later he ended up swiveling to the right.
You could very well see Trump do the same thing, swiveling to the left, trying to get Democrats to sign on to his legislative agenda.
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Okay, so the bottom line here is that the thing that Trump says that he is good at, the thing Trump thinks he is good at, which is the PR, is the thing that he's actually worst at.
What he is best at is implementing a bunch of things that are inherent in the power of the presidency.
He needs to get good at pushing his agenda.
If he had discipline, he could be.
I still hope he will be, but I think he is drawn by the bright light And that is not a great thing.
So, you know, Donald Trump said that, you know, Sean Spicer, who has not been a particularly great press secretary, he should stick around.
Why?
Because he's getting ratings.
He actually said this.
He said that Spicer's not going anywhere because he gets ratings.
The purpose of the presidency is not to gain attention.
You're going to have attention if you're president of the United States.
The purpose is to get things done.
Mr. President, it's time to get things done.
Okay, well, as we continue here on the Ben Shapiro Show, we're going to be talking with a person who is a professor of law and anthropology at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, and she has an AB from Harvard.
She suggests that cultural appropriation is the worst thing in the world.
So we're going to talk about cultural appropriation and why I think the entire terminology is really stupid in just a second.
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Alrighty, so we'll continue in just a second.
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