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July 1, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
25:23
Our Politics Needs A Bloody Face-Lift | Ep. 331
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On Friday, President Trump, struggling to work with Senate Republicans to pass Obamacare reform, suggested a possible solution.
Maybe, just maybe, Republicans should repeal Obamacare and then replace it piecemeal.
He tweeted, quote, Naturally, conservatives, like some people in this room, have been promoting this policy since literally before the 2016 campaign.
For, like, seven years.
And Trump and the Republicans refused to follow that policy prescription because they believed a simple repeal wouldn't be a good campaign slogan.
They wanted the cop out of being able to tell Americans they had a super double secret plan to replace Obamacare.
It turns out there was no such plan.
And that the Republican caucus is fractious and bickering, and that it unites big spending moderates with conservative free marketers, and that it's kind of difficult to replace Obamacare, much more so than to repeal it outright.
But only now, after months of talk about how Republicans want to destroy Medicaid and throw poor people off cliffs and stab grandma in the chest, does Trump come to this eminently obvious solution.
One of the great ironies, of course, is that Trump says this directly after meeting with Senator Rand Paul.
You'll recall that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell actually wanted to first repeal Obamacare wholesale and then replace it.
But it was a guy named Rand Paul who told him not to do so and told Trump that to do so would be a mistake.
Now Paul has flipped.
He tweeted, quote, This follows hard-on pressure from conservative senators Tom Cotton and Ben Sasse, who said they would push to separate repeal and replace into two pieces.
on replacing right away.
This follows hard-on pressure from conservative Senators Tom Cotton and Ben Sasse, who said they would push to separate, repeal, and replace into two pieces.
Well, better late than never.
But Republicans are running out of time.
They made a promise to the American people.
Now it's time to keep that promise.
And it looks like maybe President Trump is finally on board.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Oh my gosh, there is so much going on in the world, and so much of it is caused by silliness on Twitter and MSNBC.
The big story of the day, of course, is that over on MSNBC, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough are in it with President Trump.
And they're in it because yesterday, Mika Brzezinski attacked Trump on the air, and here is what she had to say about Trump.
This is clip three.
Fake covers of Time Magazine.
He was so needy, he had not been on Time yet, that he made his own, okay?
Oh my God.
This is your boss.
This is your boss.
He put this on display at at least five of his clubs.
It was first flagged by a reporter.
He noticed the- Trump is hitting on all fronts, even TV!
Several exclamation points on the headlines, something Time Magazine doesn't do.
The Make Believe cover is dated March 1st, 2009 and highlights Trump's reality show, The Apprentice.
Time Magazine has since asked Trump to remove the phony cover.
Phony!
A phony, fake, pathetic, made-up cover of Time Magazine!
That's your boss!
In an email to the Post, the White House couldn't comment on whether the President knew it wasn't a real cover.
Okay, so she called him needy and then she talked about his tiny hands and all this kind of stuff.
And so Trump fired back yesterday with that tweet about how Mika had a bloody facelift and wanted to meet with him and he said, no, I won't meet with her.
Her face is all bloody.
It's a weird, bloody face, facelift, facelift, bloody.
Okay, so Trump obviously, like, come on.
What is going on?
What is going on?
What alternative universe did we stumble into?
Every night I go to bed and I think, the world can't get any stupider.
And then every morning I wake up and I think, well, things were so much smarter last night.
I mean, this is so dumb.
And then it got dumber.
So Trump did this routine yesterday where he tweets out about a bloody facelift.
So he's the president of the United States.
For God's sake, man, grow a second layer of skin.
For the love of God, get a shell.
Because this is ridiculous.
I mean, if the worst that happens to you is Mika Brzezinski says something unkind about the size of your hands on national TV, get the hell over it.
And Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, I mean, yes, they're TV clowns.
I mean, why is this any surprise so this morning?
This becomes a very serious issue yesterday.
A very, very serious issue.
We must take it super seriously.
We can't laugh about it.
It's very serious.
The president is a sexist.
It's worse than Watergate.
It's worse than Bill Clinton stooping an intern in the Oval Office.
It is worse than FDR locking up all the Japanese folks in internment camps.
It is worse than all of those things combined, the president said about Mika Brzezinski's bloody face.
So, listen, do I think it's appropriate?
No.
Do I think that it's degrading to the country?
Yes.
Do I think it's degrading to the office of the presidency?
But I think we've been degraded for a while.
I think Trump is the culmination of a grand pattern toward the degradation of our civil society.
In any case, everybody in the media just goes insane.
So, Mika and Joe, who are now married, I guess, they decide that they are going to skip their vacation and show back up this morning, because after all, as I said yesterday, the only people who benefit in this Trump-Mika Brzezinski-Joe Scarborough battle are the people who I just spoke about.
Right, and I guess us, because it's amusing.
But, aside from that, the only people who benefit are the media, who like to cover this, and Trump, who likes to hit the media for his own side to go, Yay!
Yeah!
Okay, so, in any case.
They come out this morning and they say that the president is terrible and awful and then they tell a story.
And the story is now making the rounds because they make a relatively serious accusation about the president of the United States using the power of his office to attempt to push them to change their coverage of him by essentially blackmailing them.
Here's the story that they tell.
We got a call that, hey, the National Enquirer is going to run a negative story against you guys.
And it was, you know, Donald is friends with, the President is friends with the guy that runs the National Enquirer.
And they said, if you call the President up, and you apologize for your coverage, Then he will pick up the phone and basically spike the story.
I had, I will just say, three people at the very top of the administration calling me.
And the response was like, are you kidding me?
I don't know what they have.
Run a story?
I'm not going to do it.
The calls kept coming, and kept coming, and they were like, call.
You need to call.
Please call.
Come on, Joe, just pick up the phone and call him.
It's blackmail.
And let me explain what they were threatening.
They were calling my children.
They were calling close friends.
You're talking about the National Enquirer.
And they were pinning the story on my ex-husband, who would absolutely never do that, so I knew immediately it was a lie, and that they had nothing.
And these calls persisted for quite some time, and then Joe had the conversations that he had with the White House, where they said, oh, this could go away.
Okay, so this is a pretty heavy accusation that they're making right now, right?
They're accusing the President of the United States and his top aides of threatening them with a bad National Enquirer story, unless they apologize to the President of the United States for being mean to him.
Now, is the story plausible?
Sure, the story's plausible.
I mean, why wouldn't it be plausible?
Really?
I mean, the President of the United States, when he was just candidate Trump, was very, very close to the National Enquirer, talked about how she won a Pulitzer, repeated their headlines about Rafael Cruz murdering JFK and all this nonsense, and then said, oh, well, I didn't have anything to do with that.
I have nothing to do with that.
Okay.
I didn't believe it then.
I don't believe now that he has no relationship with the National Enquirer, but the National Enquirer, of course, denied all of this.
The Daily Beast is reporting that Jared Kushner is one of the people who called up Joe Scarborough and urged him to apologize to President Trump.
Okay, but here is the bigger question.
Okay, and this actually is a bigger question because Trump using, you know, being a blunt instrument of self-destruction is not anything remotely shocking, right?
If he actually did this, and it's an if, because Scarborough and Mika are alleging this, and he's saying he has texts to prove it.
I assume that we'll see those texts sometime in the near future.
Trump is saying that that's not what happened, that actually Scarborough called Trump and urged him to kill the National Enquirer story.
Scarborough says, I have phone records showing that the calls went the other way.
Okay, whatever.
All of this is not shocking in any real way because all of the actors are acting just as you would expect them to act.
I mean, President Trump is not only a bull in a china shop, he threatens people.
He does.
I mean, this is not like a big shock.
It's not.
And it's a bad thing.
It's a bad thing.
But I have another question, and this is one more about the media.
Why didn't Micah and Joe, Micah and Joe, reveal this when it happened?
So they said that they told NBC News Higher Ups.
This happened apparently in April, early May.
It is now, last I checked, late June.
What happened in the last two months?
Why didn't they reveal this at the time?
Pretty devastating accusation, right?
I mean, at the time, you come out and you say, this morning I got a call from the White House.
There's a National Enquirer story that's about to run.
It's a hit piece on me and Mika.
And the President of the United States called me up and said that he wanted a personal apology from me or the National Enquirer was going to run the story.
You don't think that's newsworthy?
You don't think that's newsworthy?
Why wouldn't you reveal that?
And this demonstrates, the point that I'm making is this demonstrates the tacit game that is being played by the media and by Trump, by the White House and by the media, and it was true during Obama, it's true now.
There's a tacit game that's being played to raise everybody's ratings and to keep attention on the media, and the last thing they want to do is destroy the game.
What we are watching right now is a giant kabuki theater.
What we are watching right now is WWE.
If this were a legit fight, Joe Scarborough and Mika would have come out immediately and revealed this story.
If the White House threatened me with coverage, do you think I would hold that back?
Or do you think I would report that?
I would report that the day of, right?
The day of.
Before the phone call was over, I would be texting other media outlets.
I mean, are you crazy?
Why wouldn't I report that?
That is the most newsworthy thing Mika and Joe have ever done.
It's a lot more newsworthy than a coverage of Trump.
But you can see the Kabuki theater because now they have to come back and try and claim that this is all a giant shock to them.
They have to claim that this is all just a big surprise to them.
So here are Mika and Joe this morning saying, well, you know, we never expected this from President Trump.
Really?
You want to talk about fake news?
You never expected this from him?
Never?
Expected this from Donald J. Trump, the most public figure in probably American history?
That guy?
The one who's famous for firing people and bullying people and being a general jackass?
You never expected this kind of behavior from him?
Like, after last year when he insulted Heidi Cruz's looks via Twitter?
After last year when he said that Carly Fiorina's face was the reason not to vote for her?
Really?
That's the fake news.
The fake news is that Trump... Well, Trump changed.
Trump changed.
Again, all excuse making because this is all just a game.
It's all just a game.
Here they are.
The guy that's in the White House now is not the guy we knew two years ago.
Not even close.
The guy that's in the White House now is not even close because the Donald Trump we knew, for the better part of 10, 12 years, was always in on the joke.
Yeah.
He'd like, he'd go, here's Trump water, and then he'd wink at you.
Yeah.
Right?
And here's this.
Hey, look, look at it.
And it always winked, kind of like, they love that.
Yeah.
Yeah, look, look, they love that.
You know, it's like, they just come here, they love seeing my name, it makes them feel like they're part of something.
He was always in on the joke.
Without getting into great detail, I will just say that somebody at the top of his campaign last summer said to me, we're all really worried about his emotional state.
But this is our analysis.
No, this isn't our analysis.
I'm telling you what somebody said.
This guy is not even the same person he was a year ago.
Oh, he's totally radically changed.
Are you out of your mind?
He's totally radically changed?
Really?
Come on!
What does all this say?
What it really says is, again, there's a game being played where the media have an interest in playing up the drama, and Trump has an interest in playing up the drama, and a lot of the drama is overwrought and fake.
Mika says mean things about Trump.
Trump says mean things about Mika.
All of it is wildly inappropriate from the office of the presidency.
It's inappropriate for the media to attack the president's teeny hands for no reason.
It's just vindictive and stupid.
All of it is just a monster of the fact that after all this is over, I promise you, within three months, Mika and Joe will be at the White House hanging out with Trump and doing an interview where they're all making love, okay?
That's what's gonna happen, I promise.
Within the next few months, all of this will have blown over, and Trump will do an apology to them, and it'll be a quasi-apology, and they'll apologize to him, and they'll all make up, and it'll be all sweet and nice, at least on the surface, okay?
Maybe down deep they hate each other, but it's all just stupid stuff.
And Trump is not helping himself with it, and the media are not helping themselves.
They're helping themselves in the rating, but they are not helping themselves when it comes to their credibility.
Their credibility continues to fail.
Now, speaking of their failing credibility, you know, Trump continues to attack CNN.
So while he's now attacking MSNBC, he's also attacking CNN.
So he's going after CNN.
He has been for a couple weeks.
Yesterday, he was speaking.
It's Energy Week, lest you forget.
It is Energy Week.
I like when they declare it a particular week, and then the week has nothing to do with what they said it was going to be about.
Energy Week is apparently bloody facelift.
All of American politics, I think, at this point, we can all agree, needs a bloody facelift.
A bloody, bloody facelift, okay?
So here is President Trump talking about CNN and its fake news.
Many of us remember the long gas lines and the constant claims that the world was running out of oil and natural gas.
Americans were told that our nation could only solve this energy crisis by imposing draconian restrictions on energy production.
But we now know that was all a big, beautiful myth.
It was fake.
Don't we love that term?
Fake.
What we've learned about fake over the last little while.
Fake news.
CNN.
Fake.
Okay, so this is like a little Pavlovian response, and now the smile and the wink at the camera.
Okay, again, this is being broadcast on CNN.
The whole game is pretty transparent.
But, you know, what's even more transparent is that none of this has to do with bettering our politics in any serious way.
So, James O'Keefe has been doing a really interesting series of videos where he went sort of undercover with CNN, and he's got a bunch of CNN people on tape saying things.
Here's the stuff I think that O'Keefe is covering that is worthwhile, and here's the stuff I think that is just the wink and nod at the conservative audience, ooh, here is some red meat, eat it, right?
Okay, so the stuff that matters is the first producer he talked to, this Joe Bonifield guy, said openly that the top of the network was saying to cover the Russia stuff even though there was no substance to it for ratings.
That is a substantive critique of CNN.
That is an important thing.
That right there is breaking news from James O'Keefe that actually matters, right?
That's the stuff that I care about, which is CNN actually, like, what we see on TV is a lie, and they're doing it for ratings.
That's actual news.
What is not actual news is the various random thoughts in private of random associate producers.
So, O'Keefe broke another tape last night.
CNN, it's an impartial right?
associate producer of CNN on tape, saying some nasty things about the American voter and about Kellyanne Conway, and here's what it looked like.
CNN, it's an impartial, right?
Do they?
What's the view of Trump in, like, the kind of media circle?
On the inside, we all recognize he is a clown, that he is hilariously unqualified for this, that he's really bad at this, and that he does not have America's best interests.
We recognize he's just crazy.
I mean, here's the deal.
This is a man who's not actually Republican.
He's not actually Republican.
He just adopted that because that was the party he thought he could win in.
He doesn't believe anything that these people believe.
90% of us are on board with just the fact that he's crazy.
What do you mean, 90% are on board what?
With her?
he doesn't care about gay marriage.
He doesn't even really care about the budget.
The man's upping the budget even though he promised to reign it in.
You mean he'd be pro-gay manager?
I don't think he gives 90% of us are on board with just the fact that he's crazy.
What do you mean?
90% are on board what?
With her?
I wouldn't say with her, but just acknowledge the fact that he's 90% of my direct code.
Okay, so this part right here, stop it there for a second.
So, when he says all this stuff, this is the newsworthy stuff, where he says everybody at CNN agrees that Trump is crazy.
Okay, that's newsworthy because now he's talking about the inspirity of CNN.
He's talking about how everyone at CNN who pretends to be objective is actually not objective.
They think that Trump is crazy.
Okay.
All of that is newsworthy and all of that is true.
I mean, it's not not that Trump is crazy, but that they think this.
We all knew this, right?
Is that any great shock to any of us?
No, it's not a shock that people at CNN think this.
In fact, some of them come out and say it openly on air while purporting to be objective.
So that's not a shock.
The part that I object to about this tape a little bit is the part that's coming up.
And that is, this associate producer then starts giving his private views about various matters sundry.
And I think that we're stepping into a little bit of dangerous territory here, and I'll explain why.
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Okay, so on to the rest of this interview.
One of the things that I've seen from the right, and this is happening in defense of Trump, is this attempt to say that when Trump tweets nasty things out about Mika Brzezinski, I don't want to be rude here.
I'll be careful how I put it.
You're at least some percentage Irish-Scottish.
Would it be fair to question the intellect of the American voter?
play the clip and then I'll explain why I think that trying to cover this as news is mistaken and foolish and uh and and pretty silly question the I don't want to be rude here I'll be careful how I put it you're at least some percentage Irish Scottish but it'd be fair to question the intellect of the American voter oh no you're stupid I hate to answer it now and of course the thing that pisses the White House White House all season because we actually had uh that awful and Kellyanne
Conway, you know, the blonde.
Who's sorry?
Kellyanne Conway.
What's she look like?
Is she the one with the... She looks like she would do a show.
Okay, so the people on the right are saying, well, you know, you've got this associate producer, Jimmy Carr of CNN, saying that she looks like she got hit with a shovel.
First of all, there are a thousand associate producers at CNN, but, you know, people are saying, oh, look at this.
This is just as bad as Trump.
It's just terrible.
It's just the worst thing, and it's just as bad as Trump.
So the same right that has excused Trump on the bloody facelift stuff, and on the Fiorina's face stuff, and on the Heidi Cruz's ugly stuff, they say this associate producer at CNN, how dare he?
How dare he?
Here is my problem with this, and even what he says about the American voter.
I've said, I think, on the show before that I think a lot of voters are dumb.
We voted for Obama twice.
The American public voted for Obama twice, and then gave us as nominees Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
I'm not going to go with the all-knowing wisdom of the American voter.
I think that we are wise about our own interests.
I'm not sure that we are wise about politics or the Constitution, which is why the country has been consistently drifting left for the last 80 years.
You know, everybody, oh my god, he said the voters are stupid.
Okay, come on, come on, you've said the voters are stupid.
Be real.
You've said it.
You said, look at all these other people, they're so dumb.
Okay, like, come on, everybody has said that.
And then, this guy says that, uh, Kellyanne Conway looks like she got hit with a shovel.
So.
Is this something he should have said?
No, it's not something he should have said.
But I'm getting concerned about the tendency, both right and left, to suggest that private speech is exactly the same as public speech.
That if you say something privately to your friend, that's exactly the same as the President of the United States, the most powerful man on planet Earth, going on Twitter and saying it.
Uh, no.
No.
Okay?
There are only three types of people who say exactly the same thing in public that they say in private.
Okay?
Saints, because they say great things, wonderful things in private, and then they say wonderful things in public.
Okay, evil people who say evil things in private, and then they don't care that they're evil, and so they say evil things publicly.
And fools, right, who will just say whatever comes to mind.
And it doesn't matter if they're public, doesn't matter if they're private, they're exactly the same in public as in private.
The rest of us, we say things to our friends that we don't want publicly exposed, we say things to our spouses we don't want publicly exposed.
One of the aspects of freedom, one of the basic aspects of freedom is this distinction between public and private.
We used to recognize this.
Totalitarian countries basically said there should be no distinction.
What you say in public and what you say in private should be exactly the same.
So we will tape you, we'll put the Stasi on you, we'll make sure that you never say anything privately because maybe, maybe you're thinking that when you go out and act publicly.
In a free society, how we treat each other publicly is how we judge one another.
So if I think privately, God, I really don't feel like giving charity, but then I sign a $100 check to a charity, My private thoughts are of no consequence to the society around me.
Okay?
Only my actions.
Only my actions.
Or, if I say privately to somebody, God, I really, really can't stand that Barack Obama.
Right?
He's just awful.
And then I go out publicly and I say, you know, he's not my favorite president, I don't like his policies.
Is that the end of the world?
No, it's not the end of the world.
Okay?
And this whole idea that we're supposed to invade everybody's pri- Like, especially people who were pro-Trump.
I think I was pretty consistent on this.
I said this about Donald Sterling, who is, I think, a complete douchebag, but Donald Sterling was caught on tape by his then-girlfriend, Vy Stiviano, saying that he didn't want Magic Johnson coming to Lakers games because he's black or something.
And then he lost the entire Clippers team, and I said, or he didn't want them coming to Clippers games.
And I said, I think that he's a horrific person, But I don't like the idea that we are going to deprive people of their careers and resources based on private conversations that they have because we all say things to each other privately that we don't want to expose publicly.
And if you disagree with me, then I suggest you take all of your emails and you dump them publicly.
I suggest you tape all of your private conversations and dump them publicly.
The distinction between private and public is very important because we practice out in private what it is appropriate to say in public.
So yes, it matters more.
It matters more that the president tweets nasty things out than it does that Jimmy Carr, a CNN associate producer, said in a private conversation at a coffee house that Kellyanne Conway looks like she was hit in the face with a shovel.
Yes, it matters more.
Because the president is the president, and this guy's a random dude.
And second, because the president deliberately said it publicly.
I guarantee you, if you put Jimmy Carr on camera publicly, you put him on CNN and asked him, what do you think of Kellyanne Conway's looks, he wouldn't say anything like this.
We all say things privately that we wouldn't say publicly because we know that it is not appropriate to say things publicly.
And that's a good thing.
That's not a lack of honesty.
That's what allows us to live with each other.
If we said all the things publicly that we said about each other privately, we would never be able to live with each other.
This is called tact.
This is why some of us have it.
It's a useful thing.
And undermining that on behalf of a guy who just says whatever comes to mind, I don't think Trump is evil.
I just think that he's a fool when it comes to him saying private thoughts publicly.
I don't think he's a saint, as some of his followers seem to think.
And I don't think that he's evil, as some of his detractors seem to think.
I think that he's foolish about how he uses his rhetoric and language.
Yeah, just because he does that doesn't mean that we should undermine this difference between private and public.
We practice in private what we say in public.
And yes, we should be better about what we say in private, too.
But that is not the same thing as what we say in public, and if we make these the same thing, we are going to destroy a civil society in which we all can live.
Okay, so, as we continue here on the show, we are going to talk about the mailbag, and we are going to talk about The Democrats, of course, losing their minds over all of this in totally hypocritical, ridiculous fashion because they are going over the top on all of this and it's really stupid.
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