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July 17, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
45:29
The Media Say Trump Is The WORST EVER. They’re Wrong. | The Ben Shapiro Show Ep. 341
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On Sunday evening, Game of Thrones Season 7 premiered.
It opened with Arya Stark, the wrong daughter of beheaded hero Ned Stark, taking revenge on the enemies of her family.
This led Neera Tanden, the president of Center for American Progress, to tweet, quote, Arya Stark is the flag for the resistance?
Who's with me?
Tanden is a former policy director for President Obama.
There are two rather large problems with using Arya Stark as a banner for resistance.
First, Arya Stark is an assassin.
Yes, she's a fantastic character.
She's fun to watch.
She also goes around killing leaders.
In fact, spoiler alert, she says midway through season seven she's gonna kill somebody who is in a position of power.
So, if the Democrats are attempting to tamp down the violent rhetoric, they're not doing a very good job of it.
Second, Democrats keep searching for fictional counterparts for their current situation.
First, they cited The Handmaid's Tale as a sort of apocalyptic vision of the Trump era.
Now they're moving on to Game of Thrones.
The only common theme seems to be that if a show is prominent, it must be a metaphor for Trump's America.
But Democrats' entire problem is their failure to live in reality.
They seem to believe the more they retreat to fantasy, the better off they'll be.
But it was their lack of on-the-ground realism that cost them the 2016 election, and their embrace of the enormous fiction of intersectionality that continues to cost them credibility.
Still, Democrats search for a message, and the only message they seem to be able to unify around is that of resistance, even though they can't even explain what they would do if they achieved power.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro show.
All right.
So we have a lot to get to today.
I'm talking about the media's attempt to assault Trump on a bunch of different issues.
They're moving beyond Russia now because they seem kind of annoyed that they have to keep talking Russia, and so now they're trying to hit Trump with all of the old platitudes.
We'll get to that.
We're also going to get to Trump's defense on Russia, which is not that wonderful.
Plus, We'll get to the single greatest thing that the Daily Wire has ever released in the history of its existence, which we'll do in Things I Like, so you'll have to stick around for that.
But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at texture.com.
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Okay, so...
The media are still focused on this Trump Jr.
Russia meeting, which we'll get to in a little while, but they are trying to broaden their attack on Trump now, because as we approach the midterm elections, some Democrats are starting to realize that just shouting Russia at the top of your lungs ain't gonna do it.
Because here's the problem.
Trump was elected in November.
Most people just want the election to be considered over.
Even Democrats are not that interested.
A lot of Democrats are not that interested in re-litigating 2016 forever.
We're just going to keep re-litigating it until the end of time?
I remember back in 2001, there was an attempt by Democrats to re-litigate the election every five minutes, but by the time we hit September of 2001, and it was clear that we needed a president, all that sort of receded into the past.
There will be crises under President Trump's watch, because there are crises under everyone's watch, and I think that even Democrats are starting to recognize that it is a mistake to continue to hype the Russia stuff, unless there is new stuff that is coming out.
So we'll get to what new stuff may or may not be coming out.
But in the meantime, they're coming up with new, more typical democratic attacks on Trump.
So I think that a couple of them pop out today.
One is from Charles Blow.
One of the things that I think people need to understand about the resistance to Trump, the anger at Trump, is that there is scorn for Trump as a human being.
It largely springs from Trump's persona.
It doesn't spring from his policy.
Trump on policy is a lot closer to Democrats than, say, Mitt Romney was in 2012, or even George W. Bush in 2001.
The fact is that Donald Trump is a believer in big government.
He is somebody who is mirroring a lot of Hillary Clinton's policies with regard to, for example, Syria.
His actual detente with Russia looks a lot like Obama's detente with Russia, so it's very weird to see Democrats out there going nuts over him being nice to Russia when Obama was really nice to Russia for eight years and handed them control of Syria, and now they're all upset that Trump seems to be handing control of Syria to Russia.
So, you know, Trump on policy is not that far apart from a lot of the things Democrats want, but he angers them in terms of who he is, right?
There's a lot of intellectual scorn for Trump, and people on the left and people on the right see that as scorn for the common man.
I don't think that's entirely fair.
I think some of it is scorn for the common man.
I think that the left does scorn the common man, the guy who didn't go to an Ivy League school.
I know I went to school with all the people who went to Ivy League schools.
I went to Ivy League schools.
So there is a lot of scorn in that arena for the dum-dums who live in the middle of the country on the part of the left.
But I think there is something else here that is getting at people, and that is that Trump is a—he's such a Bulgarian that it bothers a lot of people who see him as an interloper Trump, in other words, is going through what he has gone through his entire life and his entire career, which is not really great for Trump, because Trump's entire shtick, and this has been true since he was a young man, is that he's been treated as an interloper in the halls of wealth in New York City.
His dad was treated as a guy who was new money, not old money.
He was sort of the brash American who ran into the British circles, almost.
And Trump still sees himself that way, and the media still treat him that way.
And so you get an article from Charles Blow at the New York Times, where he talks about how Donald Trump's language is just appalling.
It's just appalling.
He says, I know there are things of graver consequences in Donald Trump's regime than his diction, but as a person whose vocation concerns him with language, I am simply appalled by Trump's savage mauling of that language.
Listen, I am not super pleased with Trump's syntax.
I think it's ridiculous that Trump doesn't know how to spell on Twitter.
But is that among the top ten problems that I have with President Trump?
No, because at the end of the day, who really cares?
I mean, it might be a mild irritation, but for the left it's more than a mild irritation.
They have cultural differences with Trump.
And those cultural differences are not the cultural differences they have with conservatives.
It's not about Jesus.
It's not about guns, which Trump is not in favor of, really.
At least, you know, now he's friendly with the NRA, but he was never a big gun advocate for most of his career.
He called for gun control.
It's not about all of the typical issues that animate the right and tick off the left.
It's much more about they see Trump as just this boor who somehow ended up in a position of power and has never gotten his comeuppance.
So that's what Charles Blow is saying, but it's not going to play because it sounds elitist.
So, you know, he's pointing out that President Trump uses the word beautiful a lot.
He's used it 1,500 times on Twitter in speeches since he began running for office.
Like, who cares?
Who cares?
If they think they're going to win an election based on this sort of nonsense, that's not going to work.
And so now they've been relegated to using the usual lines of attack they tried to use on President Bush and on Mitt Romney.
And that is, even on John McCain.
And that is that he's trying to assault on women.
Assault on women.
So what is Trump's assault on women?
Trump in the past has actually been very pro Planned Parenthood in terms of a lot of the things that he has said.
Trump has been very kind about a lot of left issues on social issues like on gay marriage.
He's much more to the left than the traditional Republican has been.
That still ticks off the left.
There's an article in the New York Times today from Michelle Goldberg.
called The Playboy President and Women's Health.
And the entire article is about how Trump is trying to take women's birth control away from them.
Now, have you seen President Trump?
Have you seen his wife?
Have you seen his sexual history?
Do you truly believe that President Trump is deeply intent on going into women's bedside stands and stealing their birth control?
The man was on the cover of Playboy magazine.
President Trump could not care less about women's birth control.
But the left wants to transform what is a political difference about the funding for birth control through insurance companies.
They want to transform that into something else.
They want to transform that into he personally hates women, even more than Bush.
You know, Bush was driven by the issues, but Trump, he's just driven by scorn for women.
And so Michelle Goldberg writes at the end of her article, again, it's this contempt for his character, this cumulative attack on women's ability to control their reproductive lives would be infuriating no matter who presided over it.
But there's an extra shudder of degradation in losing reproductive rights at the hands of a lubricious playboy like Mr. Trump.
Unlike longtime anti-abortion activists, Mr. Trump doesn't bother pretending he's acting in women's best interest.
Hence his frank admission during a town hall meeting last year that if abortion were banned, women having abortions would have to be subject to some form of punishment.
There is no veneer in this administration of compassionate conservatism or promoting a culture of life.
There is simply power and convenience.
Mr. Trump doesn't care about women's health or rights, and it's easy to outsource policy to the activists of the religious right who helped elect him.
When you're the president, they let you do it.
Of course, that's a reference to the infamous P-word tape, right?
So this idea is that Trump is a uniquely bad person.
So it's not just that Trump is a Republican and we hate Republicans, it's that he's a uniquely bad person.
Jumping on the train about all of this is Joe Scarborough.
So Scarborough, who spent an enormous amount of time in the primaries promoting President Trump, has now written an op-ed in which he talks about why he's leaving the Republican Party.
And in this op-ed he says, It's a pretty remarkable statement.
First of all, Trump himself is against military adventurism.
It's a pretty remarkable statement.
First of all, Trump himself is against military adventurism.
He's much more of an isolationist than he is a neoconservative.
As far as bloated government, you know, Trump may like bloated government, but he hasn't been able to actually implement any of it.
In fact, the only major accomplishment of his administration, except for Judge Gorsuch, is the paring back of regulations under his secretaries, under the Health and Human Service Secretary and under the EPA Secretary.
It's this idea that Trump is some sort of vast break from Republican precedent in terms of policy is silly.
It keeps coming back to character.
People on the left do not like Donald Trump because of character.
There are a lot of people on the right who don't like Donald Trump because of character.
I don't like Donald Trump's character, but the attempt to suggest that he is of a different kind in policy because of his character is silly.
I think you can make good arguments about Trump's character, whether he is going to be a good president because of his character, whether he is capable of fulfilling the expectations of the American people because of his character, whether he is too knee-jerk, whether he doesn't study the issues, right?
These are all criticisms that I've made of President Trump, but what the left is trying to do is they're trying to say that his character is his policy, and that is not true.
They're trying to suggest that his policy is way out.
His policy is super crazy.
Right?
That's just not the case.
I mean, Scarborough, of all people, should be talking, considering that he spent an enormous amount of time during the primaries pushing Trump in spite of and because of his various heresies on Republican policy.
Remember, Trump did not run as a traditional Republican.
So now, the left is sort of at a loss of what to do with Trump, and so they're trying to go back to the same playbook.
They're trying to pretend that Donald Trump is a traditional Republican, except for worse.
He's not a traditional Republican, and the flaws that Trump has are really character flaws, less than policy flaws.
Like, I don't like a lot of his policy, but to pretend that it's a huge difference from Dwight Eisenhower or George W. Bush, even, is really, really dumb.
It's not true.
So, the left is getting more and more frustrated.
What's amazing about all of this is that if the left were truly smart, if they're truly smart, they'd be buttering him up.
Because the truth is, right now, they're in sort of a weird situation.
They're trying to present Trump as a unique threat to the American Republic.
There are two ways to do that, to say that his character makes him a threat to the American Republic, and to say that his policy makes him a threat to the American Republic.
The truth is neither one is a threat to the American Republic.
I think that his character is a threat to the character of conservatives who decide to shy off his bad behavior.
But I don't think that his politics are a threat to the nature of the republic.
You know, for all the talk about him being a fascist, that has not materialized.
In fact, the Democrats are stuck between a rock and a hard place because on the one hand they want to claim that he's a unique threat, and on the other hand they have to recognize that nothing is actually getting done.
So if he's that unique a threat, then why aren't things getting done?
You know, Al Gore is out there openly saying Trump isn't getting anything done.
So okay, if that's the case, then why are you all so upset, gang?
You've spent half your life in politics, some of it at the highest levels.
Second highest levels.
Second highest levels.
Excuse me, Mr. Vice President, that's right.
What do you make of this young administration so far?
Every day it's another set of tweets and another set of controversies and they're not getting anything done.
His biggest worry was what might be undone if Mr. Trump kept his campaign promise to pull out of the Paris Accord.
He tried more than once to change Mr. Trump's mind, even visiting him at Trump Tower before the inauguration.
Did you find him receptive, Mr. Trump, to your argument?
I found him attentive, and you can misinterpret that for being receptive.
But yes, I did think that there was a real chance that he would come to his senses on this.
But in June, this happened.
The United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord Okay, so Al Gore is saying that, you know, he's a unique threat, but at the same time he's not getting anything done.
And that's, that's sort of, it's sort of a weird situation that Democrats are now in.
So, because nothing is happening, they don't have a point of attack on Trump, and so they're forced to go to the well with these old attacks on, oh, he's trying to take your birth control, or, oh, he hates women, or, oh, he's attempting to destroy healthcare, right?
These are all old attacks, and they're not going to work on President Trump.
Now, what is a problem for President Trump is that his own Congress is deeply unpopular.
So right now, Trump's approval rating in the counties that he won from Obama is at about 50%.
That is not high enough to maintain a congressional majority.
There's about 61% in those counties in the last election cycle.
He's now at about 50%.
That does not look good for President Trump, which means that Congress is going to have to fulfill its— This is sort of the funny thing.
While the Democrats are focused on President Trump because President Trump gives them a unified message, the Republicans in Congress would be a much richer target for them because the fact is that even Trump supporters don't like Congress.
Even Trump's most ardent supporters look at Congress and say these people don't know what they're doing.
Now the irony of the situation is that one of the reasons they don't know what they're doing is because the Trump administration has not given them any guidance.
So Republican incompetence The leading edge of the spear.
I mean, not to give Democrats advice, but if you're going to run in 2018 on a winning platform, the winning platform shouldn't be the Democrats that Republicans are malevolent, per se, because I don't know how well it's going to work.
I mean, Hillary tried that.
The winning platform should be these people are wildly incompetent and you should never trust them with power.
And they should be using the Obamacare debacle as an example of that.
The Republicans keep running directly into the teeth of the Democratic attacks on this and the Democrats don't even notice.
Tom Price, who's the Health and Human Services Secretary, he was on the TV shows on Sunday, I believe this is on CNN, or ABC rather, and here is Tom Price trying to explain and why Trumpcare is going to work.
By the way, Trumpcare, the vote has now been delayed because John McCain has been in the hospital and they're trying to delay it until he gets back.
It's a very, very close vote.
Here is Tom Price trying to explain why it's gonna be a good plan. - What did they have to say about this new idea, this latest installment in the bill to give more power to the states? - Well, what their concerns are obviously, and what our concerns are, is to make certain that every single American has access to the kind of coverage that they want for themselves and for their families.
And the bill has changed significantly so that we believe that there is significant opportunity for that goal to be accomplished.
The governors want flexibility.
They want to make certain that they're able to design their Medicaid program as they see fit for their population.
But they also want to make certain that the resources are there to be able to cover that vulnerable population.
And one of the interesting things that's in this bill that wasn't in previous iterations Is the opportunity to make certain that those folks that actually fell into a gap below 100 percent of the poverty level, but above where a state might allow individuals on the Medicaid system, that hole was not covered before.
This bill provides for coverage for those individuals through the tax credit process.
And that's something that's new.
That also is one of the reasons that we believe we're going to be able to cover more individuals on this bill than are currently covered.
Now, I know that's counterintuitive to folks that have been reading other headlines.
But the goal is to get every single American covered and have access to the kind of coverage that they want.
Okay, it's that last line that is the problem for Republicans.
And this is where Democrats should run, okay?
Republicans keep saying that Trumpcare is going to cover more people.
They are using a Democrat metric.
The metric for healthcare success should not be the number of people covered.
You could cover everyone right now if you just made everyone eligible for Medicaid, but Medicaid doesn't actually increase medical outcomes.
It doesn't make them better.
The fact is the number of people covered is not nearly as important as the outcome of medical care.
What you need is more medical care and more access to medical care, not health insurance that doesn't actually cover the people that you want.
Right, but Republicans are now using Democratic metrics for all of this, and this is the problem.
Because on the one hand, what that means is that you're splitting the Republican base.
On the one hand, you have people like me, who say free markets are the best, and you don't need everyone covered.
People get to make their own decisions about whether they want coverage or not.
That's people like Rand Paul, and I think Rand Paul is exactly correct on this.
Here is the senator from Kentucky.
Whenever it comes up, whenever Senator McCain is in good health and comes back, does Senate Majority Leader McConnell have the votes to pass this revised bill?
You know, I don't think right now he does, and the real problem we have is, you know, we won four elections on repealing Obamacare, but this bill keeps most of the Obamacare taxes, keeps most of the regulations, keeps most of the subsidies, and creates something that Republicans have never been for, and that's a giant insurance bailout super fund.
That's not a Republican idea to give taxpayer money to a private industry that already makes $15 billion in profit.
Okay, so Rand Paul is exactly correct, and on the right we're saying, okay, we need less regulation, less subsidy, but if you make your goal covering everyone through health insurance, no matter the quality of the health insurance, no matter whether they can keep their doctor, no matter whether it makes the life outcomes better, notice, life expectancy in the United States dropped for the first time in decades last year under Obamacare.
So this idea that Obamacare is the cure-all is just ridiculous, but if you use Obamacare's metric as a metric of success, You're bound to lose the right, which doesn't agree with the metric, and you're bound to lose the left in the Republican caucus, which says, "Okay, why don't we just keep Obamacare, and then everybody will be covered, right?
Here's Susan Collins of the left part of the Republican caucus making that case." Do you think that the bill will pass, or do you think there are enough other wavering Republicans that it will not?
There are about eight to ten Republican senators who have serious concerns about this bill.
And so at the end of the day, I don't know whether it will pass.
Okay, so this is the big problem for Republicans.
They have a caucus that is split on their own.
It is easier in American politics today to engage in the politics of opposition than it is to engage in the politics of governance.
If you lied for years and years and years, then it's going to come around to haunt you, and that's what Democrats found out after 2010.
It's what Republicans are finding out now.
Now, before we get into the Democrats going head over heels on the Russia stuff and Trump's defense, first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Zeal.
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Okay, so Meanwhile the Democrats as I say they could be focusing in on the fact that Republicans can't unify around this stuff But if Republicans can't unify around this stuff, it's hard to portray them as dangerous.
So What do you do?
right if you're the Democrats and you can't portray the Republicans as super competent and highly dangerous and You also can't portray them as so incompetent.
They're gonna break the system What do you do?
And the answer is you go to ancillary issues you look for Some sort of conspiracy theory with which to hammer them.
You look for some sort of evil action that you can latch on to.
You paint Trump as an outlier.
Something deeply evil has happened here.
And this is why the Democrats are so obsessed with Russia.
Not only because they want to overturn the election, not only because they have cultural scorn for President Trump, but also because they do not have a point of unity because the Republicans are not offering them a point of unity.
So, Republicans Are not fulfilling their campaign promises.
They're not getting anything done, but they're also not offering them a point to run on.
So inaction is actually the enemy of the Democrats here.
If you're a Democrat, what you want is for Republicans to pass this Trumpcare bill so that you can run against the Trumpcare bill and say that Republicans just ruined your health care.
But that is stalled right now.
So instead, Democrats are now looking into ancillary issues.
So we'll get to all of that in just a second, but for that you have to go over to dailywire.com.
We'll talk about Trump's defense against the Russia charges.
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So how desperate are Democrats to pin something on Trump with regards to the Russia stuff?
They're desperate, as I say again, to review, for a couple reasons.
One, they can't get him on character.
Everybody knows Trump's character at this point.
It is what it is.
Two, they can't get the Republicans on being evil because the Republicans aren't doing anything.
And three, it's hard to get the Republicans on incompetence because, while it's true, it is also not something that spurs people to the polls in any real serious way.
Democrats are instead looking to ancillary issues.
They're trying to find another way to label Republicans evil, even while the Republicans don't really do anything.
So Mark Warner, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, he comes out and he says, you know, we're going to start looking into ancillary issues about Russia, like digital bots.
Yes, really.
We've got more investigation to look into.
I would like to also look into the activities of Cambridge Analytica.
I'd like to look into the activities of the Trump digital campaign.
I will point out this.
Facebook, which basically denied any responsibility around our elections by the time the French elections took place this spring, they actually took down 30,000 fake sites.
We also know that it's been estimated that 8% of all Twitter accounts are fake.
So the whole thing here is to create a miasma of scandal around Trump.
some of these social media platforms is real.
It's out there.
And we need information from the companies as well as we need to look into the activities of some of the Trump digital campaign activities.
Okay, so the whole thing here is to create a miasma of scandal around Trump.
Now, Trump isn't helping with that because the miasma of scandal has attached to him.
And this Trump Jr.
meeting last week, the revelation of it and the fact that Donald Trump Jr.
himself released emails, obviously doesn't help along those lines.
But just to prove the hypocrisy of the Democrats on this stuff, and they are hypocrites, I mean, Teddy Kennedy in 1984 actively attempted to collude with the Russian government, saying that he wanted to work with them in order to take down President Ronald Reagan.
And the Russians basically pledged their support to him.
Teddy Kennedy was a hero until he died in the Democratic Party.
Adam Schiff, who's the Democratic congressperson from out here in California, he says that when Hillary Clinton's people were meeting with Ukraine to get OPPO research on Trump, that it really wasn't that big a deal.
They've also pointed to this issue with the Democratic Party and the Ukrainian embassy.
This comes from a story in Politico that ran in January.
The headline, Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire.
And I want to read from the article.
A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the DNC met with top officials in the Ukrainian embassy in an effort to expose ties between Trump Top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia.
The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in this race, helping force Manafort's resignation and advancing the narrative that the Trump campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine's foe to the east, Russia.
So, let me ask you, I understand Hillary Clinton lost, I understand this effort was not as elaborate as the Russian effort, but was it acceptable or would it have been acceptable for the Democrats to accept help No, it would be appropriate for the Democrats to accept help from the Ukrainian government.
But I think if you look at the Politico article, and we're talking about just a single article here, if you accept all the facts in the article, the scale of what the Russians did is not comparable to anything in that article.
If it were, the comparable analogy would be that the Ukrainian president directed the Ukrainian intelligence agencies to steal, to hack Donald Trump's campaign, steal emails, publish them, direct them to social media.
Okay, again, this is ignoring the issue, right?
I mean, the fact is you're either colluding with a foreign government in affecting the election, or you're not.
Now, I think the clearer line of demarcation is that the Ukrainian government is allied with the United States government, whereas the Russian government is at odds with the American government.
It's hard for Democrats to make that case, considering that they were considering Vladimir Putin an ally until seven minutes ago.
I mean, until the election cycle, Vladimir Putin was their bestest friend.
So Democrats continue to reach with this.
Now, the Trump campaign, well, the Trump administration has a series of defenses they could use for all of this.
They could say, number one, Bob Mueller is already investigating this stuff.
Whatever will come out will come out.
Number two, they could say this has all been overblown.
Everybody is making a fuss over something that really is not that big a deal.
Number three, they could say Democrats are hypocrites, which is true.
It doesn't excuse our behavior, but for Democrats to complain about it is pretty ridiculous.
All of these things are true.
Instead, the Trump team continues to be really bad at this.
So Trump is leading his own defense.
Rule in lawyering.
Never be your own lawyer.
Okay?
If you are ever convicted of a- if you're ever accused of a crime, you should never be your own lawyer.
You always see it in the movies.
I'm gonna represent myself.
Okay?
People who represent themselves lose 100% of the time.
President Trump seems to be thinking That if he defends himself, despite the fact there's an entire infrastructure of people out there willing to defend him, from talk radio to Fox News, I will defend him if I think that he is right.
Despite all of that, he feels the need to defend himself.
And so he goes on the Rampage on Twitter and he starts tweeting about his approval ratings and about fake news distorting democracy.
Here's what he tweeted about his approval ratings.
His approval ratings over the weekend were at 36%.
He said the ABC Washington Post poll, even though almost 40% is not bad at this time, was just about the most inaccurate poll around election time.
There's no need for him to do this.
The reason there's no need for him to do this is because, number one, it is the worst poll for a president at this point in his presidency in the history of polling.
Really, 36% is lower than any president in the history of modern American polling.
And number two, it is not true the ABC Washington Post poll was the worst around election time.
They were actually one of the closest around election time.
They had Hillary 49-46.
She ended up winning 48-46 in the popular vote.
But the reason this is bad is because it undermines what is a legit claim.
Which is that the media have done a very poor job covering the Russia stuff, and they have blown up every single issue into an end-of-the-world issue, right?
Every molehill is a mountain, in the media's view.
That would be a legit criticism.
But because Trump feels the need to punch back on every single report, true or not true, he ends up undermining his own credibility in a battle that he should be able to easily win against the media.
So, when he says stuff like this, right, when he says about fake news, He tweets regarding fake news that it is distorting democracy.
He says, with all of its phony unnamed sources and highly slanted and even fraudulent reporting, fake news is distorting democracy in our country.
That is true.
Okay, what he's saying there is true.
But after just tweeting that a poll that was pretty accurate was not accurate and that his approval ratings are not that bad, it's not, he's not making a strong case for himself.
Now I do think that the inaccuracies of the media are really bad.
I think what's worse is the media pretending to be objective.
So this is a little bit of a subtle difference from some of the things you're hearing.
My friend Dennis Prager tweeted out over the weekend that the media are more of a threat to Western civilization than the Russian government.
And obviously he doesn't mean that they're more of a threat to American citizens.
He means they're more of a threat to the lasting conservatism of the American people.
But, what he said on Fox News was, we need an objective media again.
I don't think there is such a thing as an objective media.
I think what we need is an openly partisan media.
So, what Trump is saying here, which is that they use phony, unnamed sources in highly slanted, even fraudulent reporting, again, you know, Trump doesn't get to complain about this considering how many unnamed sources that are phony he has actually used, including himself.
I mean, he used to use himself as his own press agent and call himself Jim Miller, John Miller.
But, The problem is that this critique is right.
It would be a correct critique if you are honest.
Honest people can make this critique.
People who tend to fib cannot make this critique about the news media.
So that undercuts attack number one, attack line number one by Trump.
Attack line number two is just... I don't know if this was designed to help Trump, but it really hurts him actually.
Jay Sekulow is Trump's lawyer.
And he's on ABC News this week, and he is asked about this Trump Jr.
Russia meeting, and here's what he had to say.
Well, I've wondered why the Secret Service, if this was nefarious, why did the Secret Service allow these people in?
The President had Secret Service protection at that point.
That raised a question with me.
Okay, again, this is a bad line of defense because then the Secret Service comes out and they say, well, he wasn't even under protection at the time, right?
He hadn't even won the primaries yet, so he didn't even have Secret Service at the time.
Second of all, Secret Service doesn't vet meetings with the President.
They vet it for security reasons, but they don't vet it for national security reasons, right?
If you decide that you're going to collude, like, they want to make sure that Trump doesn't get shot or his campaign members don't get shot, but Secret Service's job is not to vet people who meet with the President of the United States.
That's a silly, silly line of defense, and a weak line of defense.
And here's the problem.
The weaker the line of defense for the Trump administration, the more people are going to want to dig.
And then you finally get to defense number three, and I think this is the one that the Republicans ought to avoid, but are going to embrace.
I think that we are moments away from the Republicans embracing this defense full-scale.
Jeanine Pirro, Judge Jeanine on Fox News, she represents the same sort of id that Donald Trump represents in the conservative movement in the Republican Party.
She's sort of the headline version of conservatism.
Again, she'll say things that are inflammatory and outrageous sometimes, but I think that her head is where a large segment of the Republican base is, and here's what she had to say about this Trump Jr.
Russia meeting.
As someone who's run for office five times.
If the devil called me and said he wanted to set up a meeting to give me opposition research on my opponent, I'd be on the first trolley to hell to get it.
And any politician who tells you otherwise is a bald-faced liar.
Okay, so this is the new politics, right?
Donald Trump tweeted the exact same thing this morning.
He tweets, That's politics!
That's politics.
Okay, well, that is, I think, how many people perceive American politics.
But this is one of the problems with pop culture and media generally.
It is true that politicians are corrupt.
It is true that politicians are dirty and play dirty.
It is not true that everybody in the United States who's running for politics would meet with a foreign government to get opposition research on their opponent.
Not when there was a basic expectation of a quid pro quo.
If you're meeting with the Russian government, the idea there's no quid pro quo expected is relatively silly.
But the American people have a perception of politics that it is ultimately dirty.
They think that American politics is house of cards.
Trump is not a government guy.
So it's not as though Trump has spent his entire life dealing with people in government.
You know, whenever Trump talks about his fellows in government, I had the same problem with John McCain about campaign finance reform.
He'd constantly say, we need campaign finance reform because everybody in politics is corrupt.
And I just wanted to ask him one question.
Okay, John, have you ever been bribed by a corporation?
What makes you think you're so much more honest than everybody else in your profession?
And the same thing I would ask of Jeanine Pirro or of Trump, which is, okay, you know, you think you're honest, but why are you more honest than anybody else?
I guess the argument here is that they shouldn't be honest, that nobody should be honest in politics, that we should live down to our worst expectation of politics.
If that's the case, then we are on a fast road here.
We are on a fast road to something quite terrible.
I do think that people revel in the dirty of it.
I think people on our side, both sides, I don't want to say just our side, I think people on both sides revel in the breaking the rules of it, in the hard-nosed of it, as I talked about last week, but I don't think that that's a good thing.
I think that good people try to tailor the means they use to the ends they seek to achieve.
They don't revel in the means just because it's fun to use the means, and I think that's sort of where we're going.
With all this.
Now again, does any of this mean that anything deeply nefarious was done?
No.
I mean, again, I'm not somebody who thinks that it's good that Donald Trump did this, but I'm failing to see the quid pro quo.
I don't see what the pro quo is.
I don't see how Trump has paid off Russia, per se, yet.
I'm still open to evidence, but I haven't seen that.
I don't know exactly even how the collusion was done during the campaign.
As I said last week, there's a lot of talk about collusion, but I don't know what that collusion looks like.
It looks a lot more to me Like the media are trying to seize on talk of collusion and have been for six months.
Now they have a bone they can actually gnaw on, and that's Trump Jr.' 's fault, and that's Trump's fault.
And it may in fact come out that Trump was knowledgeable about this meeting, in which case they shouldn't have been denying things, right?
The cover-up is always worse than the crime.
But I'm skeptical that any of this takes Trump down, and I'm skeptical the American people care all that much other than the general miasma that Trump is corrupt in some bizarre way.
Okay.
Time for some things I like, and then some things that I hate.
So.
Things that I like.
We did this last week.
We all got very enthusiastic about the Game of Thrones season premiere that happened last night, which I thought was slow but had a couple of great things in it.
There were like three great moments, right?
There's one having to do with the Hound, there's the opener, and then there's a good moment with an unexpected character in an unexpected place.
I think those are the three good moments of the premiere.
We got very excited around here, and I got out my violin, and we put this together last week.
The entire staff put all of their work aside to make this ridiculous thing that I'm about to show you.
It is our tribute to Game of Thrones.
Game of Thrones
Yeah, that's real life right there.
It just shows you, I think, what people are interested in.
That video has combined about 1.3 million views in less than a day.
So, well done everybody.
Really, our staff was great.
They put the whole thing together.
That is me.
For those who couldn't see, that is me playing three parts on the violin.
But it has some pretty wild imagery.
You can go over to Facebook later and check it out.
I don't want to give it away if you haven't actually seen it.
Okay, other things that I like.
I actually have some pretty epic things I liked today.
So, other things that I like.
This was pretty great.
Yesterday I had a baseball game.
A Yankees-Red Sox baseball game.
So the Yankees and the Red Sox hate each other if you're not a baseball fan.
Fans hate each other.
I've been to a Yankees-Red Sox game.
It can get really brutal.
I was out in the bleachers one year when people started pouring beer on each other and fighting.
That is not uncommon.
So at this Yankees-Red Sox game, there's a Red Sox fan who's sitting in the front row and he catches a foul ball and here's what he does.
And Yankee fans can't make nice.
This is a wonderful moment.
A Sox fan handing this little lady the baseball.
Watch what happens next.
That is so cute.
Very sweet.
So we can all get along.
Yeah, it's really, really cute.
So this little girl in a Derek Jeter jersey comes down, and this Red Sox fan hands her baseball, and then she goes back to her dad, and then he sends her back down, and she gives the guy a hug.
Really, really cute.
So baseball can bring people together, even though it can also separate people, obviously.
Okay, other things that I like.
This is actually a bit of an old tape, but I just saw it for the first time.
These cops pull over this black guy, and you think that this is going to go like how all these other videos go, which is the cops somehow mistreating the guy.
But it turns out that they know the guy, and what happens next is pretty great.
You've got a child in the car with no child seat.
I don't have a child.
Hey, officer.
How's it going?
I haven't seen you in forever, man.
What's going on?
Well, I just got out of the hospital.
How's it going?
Oh, well.
I'm actually kind of sleepy today, I'll be honest with you.
Yeah, I'm not going to lie to you.
Well, I've got to be honest.
The reason why I stopped you is because you've got a child in the car with no child seat.
I don't have no child seat.
I don't have a child seat.
Are you sure?
Yes, sir.
Are you positive about this?
I'm positive.
What are you saying I do?
I don't see one.
We do have a child in the car with no car seat.
I think that means you're a daddy, buddy.
Now I'm just going to tell you now, Todd is a great name.
That's the name of the officer.
Awesome.
This is awesome.
Open.
Take it out.
What's it say?
Dad, see you on your birthday.
Do on your birthday?
Are you kidding me?
Do on your birthday?
- Yeah, keep going. - I love my appealing dad, aw.
Super cute.
So, you know, there's always this attempt to make cops out to be the worst people in the world in the media.
The only time you ever see cops is when something bad happens.
Obviously, that is not true.
And this is a terrific video, so I'm glad that's out there.
Okay, time for a thing that I hate.
Okay, so I've been friends with Ann Coulter for a very long time.
I mean, I've been friends with Ann since I was like 16 years old, 17 years old.
And she's always been very nice to me.
We've been very friendly.
We've gone out to dinner many times.
I don't know what the hell happened on Delta Airlines, but I think this is totally inappropriate.
So I've been in situations, I was in a situation with American Airlines a couple of years ago, where I was supposed to fly in for a speech, and they canceled my flight.
It was set for like two hours before the speech.
They canceled the flight.
Then I could have gotten on the follow-up and maybe made it to the speech on time.
And they put me on the standby list, and then I was the last person about to get on the plane, and they cancelled the standby list, and they put on a bunch of their own employees.
And then they had the employees fill the seats.
I was ticked, and I tweeted about how ticked I was at American Airlines.
At no point did I ever attack the actual employees who were standing in front of me.
At no point did I take their pictures, or suggest, or put out their names, or suggest that they were the bad guys.
I attacked the airline because it's the stupid airline policy that sucks, right?
It's not the fault of the employees.
These are people who are just going about their daily business.
And whenever you're at the airport and you see somebody screaming at an employee, it's just nasty.
Because the fact is, these are people trying to do their jobs for the most part.
So Anne tweeted out, here's what happened.
Anne booked a seat with extra leg room.
They didn't boot her from the flight, but she got there like five minutes before the flight.
If you get there five minutes before the flight, they will probably give away your seat.
And so they got her on the flight, but they didn't get her in her original seat.
And she said, just when you think it's safe to fly them again, the worst airline in America is still Delta.
Suckiest Delta, move me from my pre-booked seat and give it to some woman, not elderly, child, or sick.
I have pictures, so don't lie, Delta.
And then she continued along these lines, and she tweeted out a picture of the actual woman sitting in her seat, whose fault it is not.
Right, okay, it's fussy.
I think we could all—Delta, eventually, Tweeted back at her.
They said, Again, I'm friends with Ann, but I can't blame Delta here.
I really can't.
I mean, if you're tweeting out photos of other passengers who haven't done anything wrong, or if you're directly attacking the employees, I have a problem with this.
I think that not only is it not nice, it makes for a worse country.
I think it just makes for a worse environment in which we live.
We have to understand and give each other the benefit of the doubt that we're all trying to do a job.
And I don't think that it's the Delta employee.
Like, she's suggesting that it was some sort of anti-conservative bias.
Maybe she just showed up late for a flight and they gave away her $30.
She said that it cost her $10,000 because of all the time it took for her to book stuff.
Okay.
I'm sorry, no.
I'm sorry, no.
Okay, first of all, I'm sure Anne has an assistant.
If she doesn't, she should get one, because if she's still booking her own flights, then she's doing it—she's wasting her time.
But, it's—but...
You know, I think that it's easy for those of us who have some level of fame and prominence to start treating people badly who are in positions that are less well-paid, less famous.
And I just don't, as a conservative and, you know, as a religious person, I'm just not a fan.
I think you can rip the airline up and down.
I don't care if it, like she says, Delta model, how can we make your flight more uncomfortable?
See, that's fine with me.
I don't care.
Like, if you want to rip Delta for doing it, that's fine.
But taking pictures of the people on the flight, which is what she did, And then ripping the staff at Delta, as though it's the staff's fault.
Again, unless she has evidence of that, it's not my cup of tea.
I'm not a big fan.
You see this from right and left.
It's not a right-left issue, right?
I mean, there are people on the left who have done this as well, very famously.
And everybody needs to calm the hell down when it comes to travel.
Okay.
So, we'll be back here tomorrow.
Hopefully the news will be better.
I'd like to see, it's supposed to be Make America Work Again week, so hopefully President Trump will stay on message this week and it won't just be more Russia talk.
But all of that depends on what happens today, so we will see.
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