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May 15, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
22:44
Ep. 302 - Did Trump Just Wound Himself, Or Is This All Overblown? | The Ben Shapiro Show
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On Mother's Day, Ivanka Trump took the opportunity to tweet about the so-called wage gap between men and women.
But instead of recognizing that it doesn't actually exist, she blamed it on pregnancy and having children.
Which actually is true, but doesn't speak to innate sexism in the free market.
It speaks instead to the fact that those who spend less time in the workplace earn less money.
She tweeted out a piece in the New York Times that admitted as much, quote, Today, on Mother's Day, we must confront that motherhood is now a greater determinant of pay inequality than gender.
The New York Times piece acknowledges, quote, When men and women finish school and start working, they're paid pretty much equally.
But a gender pay gap soon appears, and it grows significantly over the next two decades.
So what changes?
The answer can be found by looking at when the pay gap widens most sharply.
It's the late 20s to mid 30s, according to two new studies.
In other words, when many women have children.
Unmarried women without children continue to earn closer to what men do.
Naturally, the Times suggests that public policy must be changed in order to force men to work less, or push employers to cut back hours, or use the government to push paid maternity leave, which is exactly what Ivanka Trump has been doing regularly, and which President Trump suggested on Mother's Day, too.
Trump's Mother's Day message stated, quote, I am committed to working with Congress to help mothers and fathers have paid family leave so that child care is accessible and affordable, and to invest in the comprehensive care that women receive at community health centers.
Here's the silliest part of all of this.
In my 2018 presidential budget, we will enable access to the critical health care services women need.
Here's the silliest part of all of this.
If the real gap appears with marriage and children, why would we penalize single women in the marketplace by equalizing all pay regardless of female choice?
And why would we penalize the men in marriages who are helping to support their wives and kids by cutting their pay simply to satisfy the feelings of women who may end up with the same net household pay with or without regulation?
Imagine for a second a husband earns $60,000 a year, and his wife used to earn $50,000, but now, after their first kid, she works part-time and makes $30,000 a year.
Would it really benefit the family to push policies that would result in the husband being paid $45,000 and the wife $45,000, just so she can spend more time at work?
But legislation makes leftists feel good, and Ivanka's a leftist.
It's sort of disquieting that she has so much power over daddy.
I'm the Ben Shapiro Show.
Well, this is the Ben Shapiro Show, and I'm Ben Shapiro.
You know the deal.
All right, so starting off the week on an auspicious note, but before we get started with President Trump's weekend activities and all the fun that is to be had there, and the Democrats going completely over the top, which they are doing, they can't stop themselves, and the media declaring a class one natural disaster, we must first say thank you and the media declaring a class one natural disaster, we must first say thank you to So as I've said before, I'm an information junkie, and as an information junkie, I really appreciate texture.com.
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Okay, so, President Trump had himself a busy little weekend.
President Trump needs to stop having himself busy little weekends.
And the reason I say this is because if you actually want President Trump to succeed, and at this point, regardless of how anyone voted in the last election cycle, he's the President of the United States.
I would like to see him do good things.
When he did good things, I celebrated those good things.
When he nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, I put on a MAGA hat, for goodness sake.
But it is important that he actually be good at his job.
Ann Coulter, Who has been as big a Trump booster as it is possible to be.
I mean, she wrote a book called In Trump We Trust.
Not In God We Trust.
In Trump We Trust.
She actually wrote that book.
Ann Coulter, today, came out and said that this presidency, thus far, is a disaster area.
And it's hard to argue with that after the last week.
Because here, we're gonna get, don't worry, we'll get to the Democrats overreaching because they are.
And how Trump can fix all of this, which he can.
And we'll get to how Republicans ought to treat Trump and all of that.
But, it is important to note, if you want Trump to do better, you need to treat Trump the same way that you treat everyone else in your life.
He needs to be told he is not doing a good job so that he can improve.
If you keep telling him he is doing a wonderful job when he is not doing a wonderful job, he will keep not doing a wonderful job and thinking he's doing a fantastic, fantastic job.
Right now, he's blaming everyone around him, apparently, except for himself.
All of the problems on his table are self-inflicted.
They are self-inflicted.
You know, he's worried about leaks inside his administration.
You know one way to end leaks inside your administration?
Run it like a decently run business.
George W. Bush did not have these kinds of leaks.
Barack Obama did not have these kinds of leaks.
And that's because they were well-liked in their own White House.
They didn't treat their employees as though they were disposable assets.
And beyond that, they actually staffed up their administration.
Like today, the Congressional Budget Office tweeted out something about the Independent Counsel Act, about reinvigorating the Independent Counsel Act.
That's the Congressional Budget Office.
Why would they do that?
They're doing that because somebody who's an Obama holdover is trolling.
You know why there are a bunch of Obama holdovers?
Because Trump hasn't fired all the Obama holdovers.
He hasn't filled any of these positions.
We're more than three months into this administration, and President Trump has not actually filled something like 90% of the vacant positions that have been created.
You basically have in a lot of these departments the head of the department, a deputy, and no one else.
Okay, and that means that the people who are from the Obama administration are still there doing what they're doing.
Trump has to do the normal things that a president is able to do.
Jonah Goldberg made a very good point about this.
There's this excuse-making that happens on the right now.
Well, he won.
Maybe you just don't understand his genius.
Okay, winning an election is not the same thing as being a good president.
We should have learned that from Barack Obama, who is a fantastic campaigner and a really crappy president.
Now Trump's a whole different story.
He's not even doing like the normal things that a president should do and doing them well.
He's not even staffing up.
These are basic, basic things.
And it doesn't help when you go on Twitter and mind-vomit every couple of days or so.
So Friday morning, we spent the entire week, the entire week talking about this Comey firing.
And as I said last week, he's, number one, within his rights to fire Comey.
Number two, should have fired Comey.
Number three, fired Comey in the stupidest possible way.
He fired Comey without any sort of warning.
He did it without any sort of transition in place.
He did it apparently expecting that there wasn't going to be any blowback.
And then there is blowback and he expects the right to be able to defend him.
And so we say, okay, well, you know what?
He is within his rights to do that.
You know, he's not doing it over Russia.
And then he goes on national TV and links the Comey firing to the Russia investigation.
Like a doofus.
Okay, it's so stupid.
He doesn't have to do this.
And then he gets up on Friday, and he says, you know what?
Things aren't going well.
I'm gonna tweet a bunch of random stupid crap.
So here we go.
Here is random stupid crap number one.
He tweets this on Friday morning at 526 a.m.
So clearly the man is not sleeping.
He tweets, James Comey better hope that there are no tapes, to unquote, tapes of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press.
Why?
Why, God, why?
Why?
Just why?
Why would you do this?
What would possess you to do this?
Like, do you want to be good at being the president?
Or, would you like to replicate what happened with Richard Nixon, where a member of Richard Nixon's staff testified in front of Congress that there were tapes in the Oval Office, Congress subpoenaed the tapes, Nixon refused the subpoena.
The Special Prosecutor subpoenaed the tapes.
He fired the Special Prosecutor.
The Attorney General resigned.
The Deputy Attorney General resigned.
And Nixon ends up being impeached.
Does this sound—or resigning—does this sound like a good—like, is this what you want to do?
You really want to talk about tapes?
Last time we talked about tapes, we were talking about Nixon.
Is this, like, the smart way to do this?
First of all, do I think there are actually tapes of the conversations?
No.
I think that Trump says stupid crap like this all the time just to intimidate people.
And it would be nice, honestly, I want to be one of the people who just says about his Twitter feed, let's ignore it.
Let's ignore it.
Okay, fine.
I wrote an entire piece about a national review about why we should just ignore his Twitter feed because it really isn't all that important, right?
Because who cares?
Okay, so he tweets some stupid stuff sometimes.
Except that then Trump selectively insists that we all actually pay attention to his Twitter feed.
If you don't pay attention to his wiretapping tweet from back in February, then he gets mad at you.
And then he says, well, why aren't you paying attention?
In fact, he used that as an excuse to fire Comey.
He said, I'm gonna fire Comey because Comey isn't paying attention to my wiretapping tweet.
So am I supposed to pay attention or am I not?
And I keep hearing, take him seriously but not literally.
But then every time I take him seriously but not literally, he gets angry and wants me to take him literally.
Okay, so that wasn't the only stupid thing he tweeted.
He also decided to be smart to tweet about press briefings.
So he's angry at his own press shop.
Why is he angry at his press shop?
Because he gives them no warning whatsoever.
Chris Stierwalt and Dana Perino.
Dana Perino was the press secretary for Bush.
She says there is no communications team on Earth that can handle what Trump has been doing.
Trump is just going out there and doing stuff, and then like 20 minutes later he expects the communications team to have some sort of grand plan on how to handle that.
And then when they don't, he gets mad at them.
It is not their fault that he's not allowing them to do their job.
So he goes out there and announces the Comey firing with less than an hour notice to his communications team.
They go out there and they craft this entirely implausible thing about how it was the Deputy Attorney General who had recommended the firing, and Trump was just following that recommendation.
And then Trump, of course, goes on national TV and blows it up.
And then the secretaries, the press secretaries, go out there and they have to explain all this, and there's no way for them to explain it.
So you got Sean Spicer literally hiding in the bushes at the White House.
Like between the bushes and insisting that they turn off the cameras and turn off the lights so that there's not tape of him talking.
Just insanity.
So what does he tweet?
He tweets, he's mad at his own press people.
He tweets, as a very active president with lots of things happening it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy.
Really?
So are they lying?
Are they not giving us full information?
And this idea that he's super duper active?
He has passed legislation, less legislation than any president in the first hundred days in modern history.
He is not that active.
He's active on Twitter.
He's golfing a lot.
I'm not seeing tons of things getting done.
He's got some executive orders that are pretty narrow in scope.
Again, I want good things.
Good things, okay?
Many tweets.
Maybe the best thing to do would be to cancel all future press briefings and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy.
First of all, I just want to note, someone needs to teach the man how to use scare quotes.
You don't need scare quotes around tapes.
You don't need scare quotes around press briefings.
But that's nitpicking.
He says, hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy.
This would be called propaganda.
The purpose of having a press briefing is so people can ask questions about your policies.
Why is it that every president who does this Has press briefings.
Even Barack Obama considered apparently ending press briefings in 2013.
And I'm old enough to remember when Republicans thought that was a bad thing.
Now Trump says this, and now we're going to get a week of questions about whether he actually wants to quash press freedoms.
And then he tweets about the witch hunt of the Russia investigation.
So he goes on National TV with Lester Holtz, which we talked about last week.
And he says that he wants the Russia investigation to go forward in the most honest and decent possible manner.
And then he tweets out, when James Clapper himself and virtually everyone else with knowledge of the witch hunt says there is no collusion, when does it end?
That doesn't sound like someone who wants to pursue the investigation very hard, does it?
It sounds like someone who wants to end the investigation.
So, do I actually think that he's firing people to cover up the investigation?
No, as I said last week, this is my working theory from day one.
It has been true then, it is true now, it is all true.
Okay, my working invest—my working theory from the very first day is the reason that Trump fired Comey is because he got mad, and he acted like a toddler, and he wanted him gone.
Okay?
Like, there are a lot of great reasons to get rid of Comey.
They were all true back in January.
He should have fired him back then.
He should have fired him two months ago.
He should have fired him three months ago.
He fired him in the middle of this thing, and then what really happened is that Comey was on TV, and he won't go on TV and say that Trump is innocent, and so Trump fired him.
That's basically what happened here, and then he made up a bunch of excuses as to why that is true.
Again, none of this is good for him.
Okay, I can't blame the Democrats when you are shooting yourself in the face with a shotgun.
He's negotiating with himself like the guy from Blazing Saddles.
He's got the gun to his own head and saying, if you don't stop me, I'm going to shoot.
No, the Democrats want you to do this.
He's doing what Democrats want him to do.
And I know people want to tune in and they want to hear me defend Trump.
I can't defend Trump unless he provides me a line of defense that is credible and decent.
It is his job to provide a line of defense that actually makes sense.
This is just... You don't have... I'm seeing comments now.
Maybe you should run for president because you know what a president should do.
No, I'm not saying I know everything a president should do, but I can certainly tell you what a president should not do.
Okay, like this.
Stuff a president should not do.
It's just not smart.
It's just not smart.
And again, I think that... Who was it?
It was Ramesh Ponnuru over at National Review.
He had a great piece on this, and what he said was, Basically, my theory is correct, that Trump just egotistically fired Comey because he didn't like him, and it has nothing to do with him trying to cover it up.
The problem is the way that he did it makes it look just like a cover-up, which is really, really dumb.
It's really, really, really dumb.
So Trump's response to all of this is, of course, to say that it's just that there are a lot of people who are being critical of him, and he hasn't done anything wrong, nothing is easier than being a critic.
So here is Trump talking about how easy it is to be a critic.
Nothing is easier or more pathetic than being a critic.
Because they're people that can't get the job done.
But the future belongs to the dreamers.
Okay, so he's angry with all the critics, and this is always the easy out is to go after the critics, and we'll go after the critics in just a second, because I think it's important to point out when people are exaggerating the case.
But I also think that it's important to be honest about what Trump is doing right now, and why it is insufficient if he wants to get the job of government done.
I would like to see an actual Obamacare appeal, not the fake Obamacare appeal, like an actual one.
I would like to see tax reform.
I would like to see all sorts of good things from this president, but he can't do it if he's too busy trying to extricate his foot from a bear trap that he set and then jumped on with both feet.
Don't do that.
Just don't do it.
I'm going to explain in a second why Democrats are overreaching and why that actually provides an opportunity for Trump to get out of this in a second.
Because this isn't the hardest thing to actually get out of.
Trump's created this because he has character flaws that are deep and abiding.
They haven't changed since last year.
He didn't become a perfect human being just because he won a victory.
The Democrats have no capacity to simply be critical.
Instead, they have to go way over the top, and so we'll talk about that in just a second.
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Okay, so the Democrats are overreaching, and this provides Trump with an opportunity.
So I just described all the way in which Trump decided to light himself on fire.
The Democrats have decided that they too will light themselves on fire.
Basically, this is turned into the scene from Zoolander, in which everyone is having a gasoline fight and then someone lights a cigarette.
That's basically what this is turned into.
The Democrats have decided to combat Trump's silliness, not by standing back and just letting it happen.
Not by just letting the explosion happen and then building a beautiful statue of the male models shooting gasoline at each other.
Instead, they've decided they want to participate in the gasoline fight, so...
Senator Mark Warner from Virginia, from West Virginia, he comes out and he says that this is all about the cover-up, right?
It's all about covering up for James Comey.
Now before I get to Mark Warner, I just want to point one thing out.
Even the Republicans weren't willing to put anyone on TV to defend what Trump did last week.
There are very few Republicans on the Sunday shows talking about this.
Even the ones who were, like Lindsey Graham, are not friends of President Trump.
In fact, Lindsey Graham's first line, he was on, I think it was ABC, his first line was, I can't believe I agreed to come on this week.
That's not a good sign, okay?
But the Democrats were all too eager to run to a camera, which is really stupid.
What the Democrats should do is they should pipe down.
The Democrats should sit there and they should just say, I don't know what Trump is doing, but it looks kind of suspicious, don't you think?
Just underplay it.
Understatement.
It's a grand thing in politics, but nobody is capable of it because we now live in hysteria land.
So here is Senator Mark Warner from West Virginia talking about how this is really just an attempt to quash Comey talking.
But again, the president and this administration who said there's no there there continues through their actions to indicate that they are afraid of where this investigation may head.
Let's again step back for a brief moment.
This week we saw...
Yates testify that the acting attorney general who was fired, that the administration did not appropriately react to her concerns about General Flynn.
We saw the director of the FBI fired literally two days before he was supposed to testify before my committee.
We then had the president changing his reasoning for why he fired him from saying this was a recommendation The acting Attorney General, or Deputy Attorney General, to the fact that he was going to fire him anyway because of Comey's investigation into Russia.
Conspiracy, conspiracy.
Comey was about to testify and now he's not going to testify.
Except that Comey's going to testify.
In fact, Comey was invited to testify on Tuesday.
He said he didn't want to because they invited him to testify in closed session.
Bad news for Trump.
He wants to testify publicly in open session.
Of course he does.
Because one thing Trump is right about is Comey is a showboat.
He is a grandstander.
He does love the cameras.
I mean, the dude is like, he gets up in the middle of the night, he opens his fridge, the light goes on and he starts talking.
He's just, Comey loves the cameras.
He loves being in front of the cameras.
And so it's not good news for Trump.
But the Democrats are saying this is to silence Comey.
This was to avoid the Russia investigation.
If that was the case, this is the worst conspiracy ever.
It's a horrible conspiracy.
He's terrible at conspir- Now, here's the thing.
That's totally plausible, right?
So, two things are plausible.
One, that it's not a conspiracy, because no one could be this stupid as to run a conspiracy this way.
And two, maybe someone is this stupid to run a conspiracy this way.
They're both totally plausible, or at least partially plausible, but...
My take is that even Trump, and as kooky as Trump has been over the last couple of weeks, even Trump is not really trying to do this.
Again, he's not shutting down the, he's not shutting this down.
Honestly, the best way for Trump to stop all of this talk is by making someone the head of the FBI that everyone trusts.
I mean, somebody who may be a Democrat, right?
Somebody like Merrick Garland, an Obama appointee to the Supreme Court, who wasn't actually given a vote.
Mitch McConnell was saying he should make Merrick Garland the head of that.
Maybe you leave Andrew McCabe.
Andrew McCabe is a Democrat.
You leave someone there who Democrats really can't whine about.
And Democrats are really overstepping.
There are some Democrats who have been saying, Over the past little while, that they're not going to even approve an FBI director until a special investigator is given powers, until a special prosecutor is appointed.
That's idiocy.
That seems to me a wild overreach.
I mean, what if Trump appoints, like, Barack Obama, the head of the FBI?
Are they going to try and stop Barack Obama from being the head of the FBI because they want a special prosecutor?
Who the head of the FBI is going to determine where this goes from here.
You know, with that said, the Democrats continue to overreach and overreach.
Here's Chuck Schumer saying that he now doesn't just want Trump investigated, he wants Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, investigated because Jeff Sessions had recused himself from Trump-Russia and then recommended that Comey be fired.
I have asked the Inspector General, and the request I've made is not only to look into any interference to thwart the investigation, but whether Attorney General Sessions should have participated in the firing of Comey and should participate in FBI director.
You know, Attorney General Sessions has a much higher obligation.
He didn't tell the truth about meeting with the Russians, so he recused himself.
Now he seems to be violating that recusal.
That would seem, on its face, to be part of this.
And look, I called for him to step down when he didn't tell the truth about the Russians, because it's the highest law enforcement officer in the land.
If the actions of the last week make all the more reason that he should not be Democrats are hypocrites, obviously.
They didn't call for Loretta Lynch to resign after she got on a plane with Bill Clinton in the middle of an investigation of Hillary Clinton.
They never called on Eric Holder to resign after he was held in contempt of Congress.
All of this is a wild overreach, and if Trump solves the problem by appointing someone good at the head of the FBI, Democrats can still look stupid, because they're actually out on a limb here, and Trump can actually saw that branch off behind them, and then all his people can say, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, 3D underwater chess, and all the rest of it, and they will actually be sort of right.
He'll have accidented himself into a good situation, Trump can do that.
He can still do that.
So who his FBI director is matters an awful lot here.
Well, we're going to talk a little bit more about this.
We want to talk about the Republican response and what Republicans should do and the media.
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