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July 19, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
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Trumpcare Goes Down. Who's To Blame? | The Ben Shapiro Show Ep. 342
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On Monday, the supposedly bipartisan Women's March tweeted out a happy birthday message to an actual honest-to-goodness terrorist, Assata Shakur.
There's an image of her, and it says it's a drawing of Asada Shakur against a pink and purple background, and above her head are the words, A woman's place is in the struggle.
It says, Happy birthday to the revolutionary Asada Shakur.
Today's sign of resistance in Asada's honor is by Melonious Funk.
The tweet came complete with a picture of Shakur with the slogan, Is in the struggle, pasted at the top.
In May 1973, Shakur was wounded in a shootout with state troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike.
One trooper was killed execution style.
She was convicted of the murder and then sentenced to life in prison.
She'd also participated in a bunch of bank robberies, apparently.
In 1979, she escaped from prison and then finally fled to Cuba, where she's been living.
She's still on the FBI Most Wanted Terrorist list.
There's a $2 million reward on her head.
As David French points out at National Review, All told, from 1970 to 1984, the BLA, the Black Liberation Army, was responsible for four bombings, four hijackings, 32 violent armed confrontations in the U.S., 16 of those involved confrontations with law enforcement officers who were killed.
In other words, by every reasonable contemporary definition of terrorism, Shakur was a violent terrorist who belonged to a violent terrorist organization.
Now, Shakur has become a hero to leftists because she rejects the morality of Western civilization.
She was a member of that Black Liberation Army, a more violent splinter from the Black Panther Party.
In Cuba, she wrote a trite autobiography in which she made claims like this, quote, They call us bandits.
Yet every time most black people pick up our paychecks, we are being robbed.
Every time we walk into a store in our neighborhood, we are being held up.
And every time we pay our rent, the landlord sticks a gun into our ribs.
The rulers of this country and their flunkies have committed some of the most brutal, vicious crimes in history.
They are the bandits, they are the murderers, and they should be treated as such.
This is pretty vile stuff, but it's true by the far left, brought up on Howard Zinn and trained to see America as the enemy.
No wonder Linda Sarsour is welcomed with open arms by the Women's March.
By the way, the Women's March has now written a full explanation of their happy birthday message.
It is not helpful.
They tweeted, Women's March is a non-violent movement.
We have never and will never use violence to achieve our goals.
The far right is threatened by our movement and by our solidarity with other movements.
Our power, your success, scares the far right.
They continue to try to divide us.
Today's attacks on Assata Shakur are the latest example.
Here's a brief refresher on who Assata Shakur is and why we consider her a feminist figure.
Assata Shakur is a civil rights leader who used her leadership position to challenge sexism within the Black Liberation Movement.
Her resistance tactics were different from ours.
That does not mean that we do not respect her anti-sexism work.
I look forward to the Women's March defending Osama Bin Laden on anti-Islamophobia grounds.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
All righty.
So everything is awful.
Yeah!
Everything's pretty terrible.
So we'll talk about why everything is so terrible in just a second, but it's also, in every horror is a little bit of sick, sad hilarity, as there is today.
So we'll get into all of that, but first, On that bright note, I want to thank our sponsors over at Bull & Branch.
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Okay, so the big news of the day is of course that Trumpcare is dead in the Senate.
So Trumpcare was this crappy Obamacare replacement bill that was really Obamacare 2.0.
It did a couple of good things.
It restructured Medicaid.
So instead of it being just a need-based program where the federal government signs an open-ended check to a bunch of different states, it actually was a grant-based program where they were going to give block grants to the states.
It didn't cut Medicaid.
It cut the rate of growth in Medicaid fundings.
So if Obamacare had Medicaid funding going like this, then Trumpcare had Obamacare funding for Medicaid going like that, right?
Leveling off.
After 2020, that was one of the good aspects of it.
The other good aspect of it was it cut a few of the taxes.
It didn't really do much to relieve the Obamacare regulations, and this was the problem.
Obamacare is the regulations.
Obamacare is forcing the insurance companies to offer a bunch of things on their plan.
Now, Mike Lee and Ted Cruz had come up with an amendment that would have allowed insurance companies to actually provide plans outside of the Obamacare regulations, but when Mitch McConnell put it back in the bill, the provision did not include that.
It said that you could get out of some of the regulations, but then you were still subject to the Obamacare marketplace exchanges, which means that it artificially jacks up the prices for young, healthy people who want to buy skimpier versions of health insurance.
Yesterday, Mike Lee and Jerry Moran, who is the senator from Kansas, they both came out and they said that they are not going to back the bill.
So, Moran explained, we should not put our stamp of approval on bad policy.
Furthermore, if we leave the federal government in control of everyday healthcare decisions, it is more likely that our healthcare system will devolve into single-payer, So that meant that there were four senators now who are not going to vote to advance the House bill with the Senate changes.
So that meant that there were four senators now who are not going to vote to advance the House bill with the Senate changes.
That would be Rand Paul, who's all along said this is not a free market version of a bill.
I'm not voting for it.
Susan Collins from Maine who says it's not Obamacare, so I'm not voting for it.
She's basically a Democrat.
And then you have Jerry Moran and Mike Lee who said they're not gonna vote for it.
But lest anyone think that these four are really the only obstacle, the fact is that there were supposedly eight to ten other senators who were really tentative on it.
And that's because the thing had a 20% approval rating.
It was basically keeping a lot of the worst aspects of Obamacare and getting rid of the funding mechanism, which was all the taxes under Obamacare, and Increasing subsidies in certain areas.
So, that was... It wasn't a great plan.
It had a lot of holes in it.
Avik Roy, who loved the plan, he liked it because of the Medicaid reform.
But you can do Medicaid reform through other means.
You don't have to do Medicaid reform as part of the healthcare reform bill.
They're not quite the same thing.
So this bill is dead.
So yesterday started on a bizarre note, okay?
This was supposed to be Made in America week for the Trump White House.
And President Trump leads off yesterday by sitting in a fire truck, which, of course, led to 1,000 terrible headlines for him.
Listen, I understand what photo ops are, folks, but having the vice president and the presidents of the United States standing around and then getting in a fire truck...
We've already had Trump in a different kind of truck.
Now we have Trump driving a fire truck.
Because this is what Presidents do.
Also my three and a half year old daughter.
I literally took a fire truck to my daughter's preschool and she got in the driver's seat.
The President of the United States is doing the same thing.
Doing the things the President must do.
Now, listen, he's not the only person on Earth.
And then there's Mike Pence just standing there like a doofus.
Like, again...
He's not the only president to do stupid photo ops, but this is a really dumb photo op.
It's a particularly dumb photo op when he's in a fire truck, at the wheel of the fire truck, and literally a mile away, his Trumpcare bill is on fire.
That actually is not a good look.
He then came out yesterday, and John McCain, one of the things that helped kill this was John McCain was probably going to vote in favor of the Trumpcare bill, or at least that was the rumor, and then he got sick and had to have a surgery, and so Trump yesterday, he was touting John McCain and saying that he needed his vote.
We hope John McCain gets better very soon, because we miss him.
He's a crusty voice in Washington.
Plus, we need his vote.
Okay, that was true, but it wasn't enough.
Okay, so Mike Lee comes out and he explains why exactly he didn't vote for this thing, and he said, this is not a full repeal of Obamacare.
We promised we were going to fully repeal Obamacare, and this isn't it.
I have made very clear from the outset of this discussion that what the American people asked for What they expected when they elected Republicans to the House, to the Senate, and to the White House was a full repeal of Obamacare.
That's what we ought to be doing.
Now, I'm not saying it's either perfection or nothing, but I am saying you've got to show me what this really does.
To undo Obamacare's deadly consequences for the forgotten man and the forgotten woman of America.
I don't see that in this bill.
What I do see is that we've walked away steadily from all kinds of promises.
This bill no longer repeals all of Obamacare's taxes.
I think that's troubling.
This bill no longer relieves people of some of the most significant burdens, regulatorily speaking, from Obamacare that have made the cost of healthcare go sky high.
And we can do better, but the American people have to demand it.
Okay, so I agree with everything that you heard Mike Lee just say.
So the question is, who is to blame for all of this?
Because now Trumpcare has gone down.
We're going to explain what's coming next after Trumpcare has gone down, because now Senator McConnell says that he wants to bring a full repeal bill.
To the floor of the Senate.
We'll explain whether that happens or not.
But who is to blame for all of this?
So, you're seeing people like President Trump blame Senate conservatives.
He'll say, a few senators really stopped this thing.
He said that.
Laura Ingraham came out today and she says, well, I guess that Trump is going to have to work with the Democrats now.
No.
No.
No!
No!
Everyone's stupid.
Okay, so.
Here's who's to blame for this.
Number one, Senate moderates who lied when they said they were going to support Obamacare repeal.
And they demonstrated that they lied when they said this, okay?
As I say, Mitch McConnell says that now he's going to bring to the floor some sort of repeal bill.
He's going to use the House bill that was passed as basically the vehicle for a full repeal, and the repeal would go into effect in two years.
So it would basically be a ticking time bomb, and then Republicans would have two years to get their act together and come up with some correctives for when the time bomb goes off after the elections, right?
So it's actually a relatively smart play by McConnell, but it also holds a bunch of Republicans' feet to the fire Trying to demonstrate who exactly was willing to vote for repeal and who is not.
Already, within 15 minutes of him announcing this, already this morning, there were three Republicans who said they would not vote for simple repeal.
Remember, for seven years, we have heard nothing from the Republican Party, but we need to repeal Obamacare.
Not repeal and replace.
Repeal and replace was a formulation pursued by Trump, okay?
It was a formulation pursued by moderate Republicans, but they all said they were going to repeal.
And the proof is in the pudding, okay?
Rob Portman today, the senator from Ohio, he voted for a simple repeal bill in 2015 when Barack Obama was president.
Today, Mitch McConnell said, we want to pass a simple repeal bill, the exact same repeal bill we voted for in 2015, and Senator Rob Portman, who is just a weak-T senator from Ohio, here's what he had to say about it.
So I'll have to look and see what the so-called repeal bill entails.
But if it is a bill that simply repeals, I believe that will add to more uncertainty and the potential for, you know, Ohioans to pay even higher premiums, higher deductibles.
So we'll have to see.
Obviously we would look for a CBO analysis of that to see.
What it involves in terms of not just premiums and deductibles but coverage.
So, you know, I'll take a look at it.
I'm concerned about something that would simply repeal and its impact on costs and choices in healthcare.
Okay, so there you have it.
He says that he is not going to vote for a simple repeal, even though he did so in 2015, showing that Republicans are damn liars, okay?
They are liars.
They say this kind of stuff and they don't mean it one iota, or at least many of them don't.
And when they do mean it, like Mike Lee, they get ripped up and down by a bunch of establishment lackeys and hacks who say that it's Mike Lee's fault that Obamacare's still on the books.
Basically, here was the deal the GOP made.
They said, hey, let's repeal Obamacare.
And everybody went, yeah, that sounds awesome.
Then they said, how about if we don't repeal Obamacare, but we say we did?
And then conservatives went, no, let's not do that.
And then the GOP turned around, they said, it's conservatives' fault that Obamacare is staying.
See?
We told you, it's all their fault.
They're unrealistic.
Okay, Rob Portman voted in 2015 that he would vote for repeal.
He said today that he probably will not.
Shelley Moore Capito, who voted for exactly the same bill in 2015, said today, In other words, repeal and replace was just an excuse for keep Obamacare.
come to Washington to hurt people.
For months, I have expressed reservations about the direction of the bill to repeal and replace Obamacare.
I cannot vote to repeal Obamacare without a replacement plan that addresses my concerns and the needs of West Virginians.
In other words, repeal and replace was just an excuse for keep Obamacare.
That's what we had suspected all along.
Mitch McConnell is complicit in this.
He said, while he was doing this bill, that even the Medicaid reforms that everybody really loved, he said that those Medicaid reforms would never materialize.
That's what he told the moderates.
It was not enough to get Susan Collins on board anyway.
Okay, so all of these people are totally full of it, which means that the new Republican program is basically, let's just complain about Democrats, but when we have power, we won't do anything.
Here's Mitch McConnell lamenting the Democrats who are saying that they're happy that this thing went down in flames.
I imagine many Democrats were celebrating last night.
I hope they consider what they are celebrating.
The American people are hurting.
They need relief.
And it's regretful that our Democratic colleagues decided early on that they did not want to engage with us seriously in the process to deliver that relief.
Okay, so again, you know, he can say all he wants here, but he's the guy in charge.
He's the guy in charge.
And this is on Senator McConnell for not getting it together.
So, does he have a fractious Republican caucus?
Of course he has a fractious Republican caucus.
Does he have a bunch of people on the left who don't want to vote for Obamacare repeal?
Yes.
Does he have a bunch of people on the right who don't want to vote for anything soft?
Yes.
But it is his job to get those things together.
If he can't, then he shouldn't be in charge of the Senate.
End of story.
Okay, there is someone else to blame in all of this too.
And I know that we're never allowed to blame President Trump for anything.
I know that we have to play footsie around President Trump.
We have to treat him like he's a small child and he has to be guarded from the vicissitudes of life.
The fact is, President Trump botched this.
Okay, he botched this in three separate ways.
He botched it repeatedly.
Now, I want to note that you'll just notice all over the- I'm gonna be honest with you today, okay?
It's difficult to be honest to people who- Listen, we all want Trump to succeed.
I want Trump to succeed as a conservative.
I want him to do conservative things.
Today, if Trump were to push for repeal and get repeal, I would be in the front row cheering.
I put on a damn MAGA hat when he picked Judge Gorsuch.
So this is not about ire at President Trump for anything except for he's not doing his job.
Okay, and I know everybody has to go out of their way to praise Trump, Because Trump's ego requires the praise all the time.
But the fact is that praising Trump isn't getting the job done.
Okay, Mike Pence said Trump is really engaged in the process.
No, he's not.
He was in a fire truck while this thing was going down in flames.
Okay, there are three different ways that Trump screwed this thing up.
Okay, way number one.
During the election cycle, he said over and over one bajillion times that he wanted to repeal Obamacare.
He then added no one would go uncovered.
You cannot say those two things simultaneously.
That meant that when he was elected, he did not have a clear mandate to repeal Obamacare.
So that was mistake number one.
He spent his entire election cycle saying Obamacare has to go, but I'd like to replace it with something that gives more coverage.
In other words, Obamacare is not single-payer enough.
That's actually what he was saying during the election cycle.
Then, after he gets in office, he has an opportunity.
He has a 100% approval rating among Republicans, right?
Everybody in the Senate is afraid of him.
What if he had come out day one and said, Obamacare repeal, that's it.
Okay, we'll figure out the replacement later.
We got to get this done fast before time runs out.
Obamacare repeal now.
Okay, President Ted Cruz, President Rubio, I think, but President Cruz certainly would have done that, right?
He would have exerted pressure, right?
That's what Trump would have done.
He didn't do that.
Instead, he sat back, he let Mitch McConnell take the reins, he let Paul Ryan take the reins, because Trump was not engaged, because Trump doesn't care about this, and because Trump doesn't even know his own policy, and because Trump doesn't even know what's in the bill.
If you ask Trump what's in this bill, he would not be able to tell you, which is why today, President Trump offered, in 12 hours, three different strategies for what should happen after the death of this bill.
He tweeted, Republicans should just repeal failing Obamacare now and work on a new health care plan that will start from a clean slate.
Dems will join in.
No, they won't.
This is delusional.
Democrats are not going to work with President Trump.
His second proposal was, blame Republicans.
He said, we were let down by all of the Democrats and a few Republicans.
Most Republicans were loyal, terrific, and worked really hard.
We will return.
As I have always said, let Obamacare fail and then come together and do a great health care plan.
Stay tuned.
Literally within hours of him saying, repeal, and then figure it out with Democrats, he's now saying, don't repeal, let it fail, and then figure it out with Democrats.
Okay, all of this confusion does not allow you to exert pressure on your own members of Congress.
The president has a job here.
The president's job here is actually pretty clear.
If you're in Congress, let me start from the congressional perspective.
If you're in Congress, you're running for Senate.
You have two things you have to do to win a Senate seat.
First, you have to win a primary, and then you have to win a general.
Winning a general generally requires you not to do anything controversial.
If you do something controversial, you give material to your opponent.
So if you're a senator, you have an actual stake in not doing things.
Because then your opponent can't claim that you're doing anything really terrible, right?
If you vote for a bill with 20% approval, as this bill had, and then Democrats crap all over you, then you could lose a general election.
Right, so your interest is in doing nothing.
So, what keeps you voting for unpopular bills and sticking in line with the party?
Pressure from the party, right?
The threat of defunding.
The threat of primaries.
President Trump has only threatened a primary one Republican senator since the election.
Jeff Flake of Arizona.
Okay, that has nothing to do with Obamacare.
It has to do with he doesn't like... Senator Flake.
Right?
He's not exerting pressure.
He's not doing what the White House has to do.
What if Trump were on the phone with all of these wavering senators, day in and day out, saying, listen, I will primary you.
I will come to your state, and I will undercut support for you.
I will remove funding.
I will let you flail out there.
I will rip you by name, publicly, if you do this.
But that's not what Trump was doing.
Trump was busy playing firetruck, and he was busy tweeting things.
Okay, so that is screw-up number three, right?
So screw-up number one was his pitch.
Screw-up number two was he didn't actually embrace Obamacare repeal in the first place when he became president.
And screw-up number three is that he has completely abdicated responsibility for this, even while people are praising him for his engagement.
He has not been engaged.
If he were engaged, Then maybe it changes the math.
So again, it's not all on Trump.
But to pretend that Trump is not involved at all in this is really silly, okay?
It's Trumpcare.
It's his signature piece of legislation.
Obama was heavily involved in pushing his signature piece of legislation.
I don't think that we should expect anything less from President Trump.
It just doesn't make a lot of sense to me in any case.
But the media, of course, are in full Trump defense mode, at least on the right, because it's more important to please Trump than it is to actually push good policy, which is one of my key criticisms here, okay?
For fellow conservatives, Trump can be all the things you want him to be.
You can love him dearly.
You can hope that he does really well.
He needs to fulfill what you said he was going to fulfill and what he said to you he was going to fulfill.
But watch Fox & Friends, right?
Fox & Friends is basically the Trump show.
And here is them going after the senators who wouldn't vote for this original bill.
You have Rand Paul, extreme conservative slash libertarian, Ted Cruz.
I'm going to get my hands dirty and make this work somehow.
And you've got moderates like Senator Portman, listen to his governor.
And you have Senator Collins, who said, I got some huge blowback when I went back.
So these people are being true to their school, just not true to their party.
And maybe not true to their country.
The president said, before he knew that these two, he had these two defectors, reported according to Politico, he goes, if the Senate Republicans don't get this thing done, they'll look like dopes.
Do they look like dopes?
He's right.
It's not a question of being true to your party or true to your country.
It's a question of being true to your word.
They should not have elevated the issue for eight years among Republicans saying, first thing we'll do is repeal and replace if they weren't capable of doing it.
Okay, again, all of this, they're going to toss all of this at the feet of McConnell and Ryan.
They deserve a heavy dose of blame, both of them.
The Congress deserves a heavy dose of blame.
Trump does not get off scot-free.
He is the president of the United States.
He's the one with the bully pulpit.
He's the one with 82% approval rating among Republicans today.
Despite his low approval ratings generally, Republicans still love the guy.
He has leverage.
He didn't use that leverage.
It is that simple.
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Okay, so let's get back to what exactly happens from here.
So, as I say, the first proposal was, let's just repeal Obamacare wholesale.
And a bunch of moderate senators said, no, we're not going to do that.
And then the proposal is, okay, we'll let Obamacare fail and then we'll come back to the table.
The problem with this is that they need the tax increase, they need the revenue that was saved through Obamacare cuts in order to pass tax reform.
So it's not just that Obamacare repeal went down, it's that tax reform is now in danger.
Remember, everything has to be passed with a 51 vote reconciliation rule.
That means the CBO has to score everything as revenue neutral, meaning that you can't lose money on it.
You can't create more debt, more deficit, in order to pass a bill.
What that means is that all of the savings they were going to have from the Obamacare repeal, they were originally going to apply to tax reform.
If they don't get the repeal, they don't get the tax reform, and the entire legislative agenda is sunk.
Plus, the issue isn't going away.
Obamacare continues to devolve into disaster, and now that Republicans have put their grubby mitts on it, it's going to be very difficult for them to remove their stink from it.
Right?
It looks like they tried to fix it and they failed.
And so now Democrats are going to say, listen, they tried to fix it and failed.
They stink.
Put us in charge.
And they're going to have a point.
Especially after Republicans tried to push a Democrat-like program.
All of this is a bollocks, and it demonstrates.
In politics, if you do not campaign on a program, and if you're not clever enough to campaign on other things and then implement a program with the full weight of your authority, you are going to be in serious political trouble, plus you're not going to get anything done.
And so the question's going to become here.
Can you pressure your Republican representatives and the President to do the right thing?
And so I'm going to do something I never do on this program, okay?
Here are the phone numbers for Senators Portman, Capito, and Collins.
These are their Senate office phone numbers.
I want people to call and flood their offices, okay?
Senator Rob Portman today, the Senator from Ohio, who says he will not vote for peer repeal, his number is 202-224-3353.
That is his Senate office phone number.
I never do this.
That is his Senate office phone number.
I never do this.
202-224-3353.
Senator Shelley Moore Capito from West Virginia.
Her number is 202-224-6472.
202-224-6472.
And Senator Susan Collins, for whatever good it will do you, is 202-224-2523.
They all deserve to have their secretaries have a miserable day on the phones because they spent seven years lying to you.
Seven full years lying to you.
And Trump better figure something out quick here, because he's the president, okay?
It's his agenda that's on the line.
And maybe it doesn't matter.
Maybe we've all become satisfied with tweeting CNN memes and all that, and it's fun.
But, you know, if you actually want to get something done, it's going to actually have to get done at a certain point here.
Okay.
As we continue, we're going to move over to Daily Wire right now, but I still want to talk about a bunch of things, including whether the polls actually matter to President Trump.
Is he immune to polling?
A little bit more Russia fallout, plus things I like, things I hate, and we'll deconstruct the culture.
But for that, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com.
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Alrighty, so, the question, there are two questions here.
One is, what do we care about?
And the two, and question number two is, is there going to be electoral fallout?
So, the what do we care about question is something that I've now been asking for months, okay?
Do we care more about the we piss off the left routine, or do we care more about pushing policy?
Now there are certain people who say that the pissing off the left routine is part of the pushing policy routine.
I'd be warmer to that argument if we were actually pushing policy, but clearly that didn't work.
So the question now is not what do we care about, because I think that we care about what we care about.
What is going to get done is what's going to get done.
The bigger question right now is, is there going to be electoral fallout?
Now, it doesn't matter if there's electoral fallout if we don't pass anything.
I'm not sure that there is.
But right now, the polls are not good for President Trump.
But there is an open question about the polls, which is, do they even matter?
Do the polls even matter with regard to President Trump?
Now, I'm at the point where there are certain polls that I generally trust, and there are certain polls that I do not.
Do I think that Trump is more popular than he is unpopular?
No.
Do I think that some of the polls that are more ridiculous are true?
No.
So, for example, there was a poll from Public Policy Polling yesterday that said only 45% of Republicans think that Donald Trump Jr.
met with the Russians.
Okay, Donald Trump Jr.
admitted to meeting with the Russians.
So he met with the Russians.
Okay, this is not under dispute.
But everybody on the left said, well this just demonstrates how all of the Republicans believe stupid things.
No.
What that question was questioning, and what people were answering was not, did Donald Trump Jr.
meet with the Russians, is do you care if Donald Trump Jr.
met with the Russians?
And only 45% of Republicans said yes.
Okay, Republicans are smart enough to read the signals from the polls.
So, when someone from ABC News calls up and says, we have a poll question for you, Republicans aren't just hearing the poll question, they are hearing the subtext of the poll question, and they are answering the subtext.
So if they're asked, do you think that Donald Trump Jr.
did something wrong on the Russia stuff?
What they are hearing is, do you think that Donald Trump colluded with the Russian government?
And so Republicans will say no.
Republicans are answering the questions they think are being asked, And in reality are actually being asked by the media.
So I think that a lot of the people who are being polled on the right side of the aisle have gotten too smart for the pollsters.
In other words, when polls, when pollsters call them up, they are giving them answers that are designed to go right to the subtext.
So instead of them saying, yes, Donald Trump Jr.
met with the Russians, but I don't think it matters.
Instead, they say he didn't meet with the Russians at all because screw you, you know, go to hell.
I think that there's a lot of that in the polling now.
That is not true with approval ratings.
I don't think there are a lot of Republicans today who are saying, you know, I love President Trump, but I'm gonna lie to the pollsters and say that I hate President Trump.
I don't think there's a lot of that.
I think there's more defiance than there is, you know, an attempt to purposefully screw up the polls.
But I'm not sure how much it matters because we haven't seen a lot of head-to-head polls between Trump and anybody else.
So today I saw a head-to-head poll between Trump and Mark Zuckerberg that showed him at like 40% and Zuckerberg at 40%.
That means Trump wins re-election, right?
The fact is that he was running head-to-neck with Hillary and then he won.
Any Democrat who wins is going to have to be blowing him out in polls at this time.
I'd be curious to see like a Joe Biden-Trump matchup at this point and see how that would go for him.
But some of the polling data for him is not great, right?
38% of Republicans say his conduct has been unpresidential rather than fitting and proper, but they don't really care.
Word associations with Trump tweets.
68% of people say that Trump's tweets are inappropriate.
65% say they're insulting.
52% say dangerous.
41% say interesting, 36% say effective.
I think that Trump's floor is about 35%.
35, 36%.
It's a pretty good floor.
The floor is a lot stronger than George W. Bush's floor was in 2004, 2005, 2006.
His floor in 2006 was like 20%, 15%.
And that is specifically due to the reaction against the left and the feeling the left is out to get Trump.
Sheryl Atkinson says Trump is basically kryptonite to smear.
It's very difficult to get him.
I think that this is essentially correct.
Explain in your book why you say Trump may be kryptonite to the smear.
I call him the anti-smear candidate because every traditional smear tactic used against him, very effective tactics against other people, kind of bounced off of him.
You know, the smear was just no good to him.
In fact, he was able to grab it and co-opt it and turn it around in most every case.
And I argue that if he had apologized in summer of 2015 when the first attack that I noticed was after John McCain called some of his followers crazies and Trump counterattacked by saying McCain wasn't a war hero in Vietnam.
And they were called the media wanted him to get out of the race and apologize I started airing more of him thinking the public would hate him if they saw more of him, but the public liked him I think if he had apologized then he would never have made it But he did the opposite of what is intuitive to politicians But turned out to be the right thing for him to do for his followers So I don't think that his base is going to drop out anytime soon.
The question is, how much of his base is going to turn out to vote, and is it enough for him to win re-election?
It's a little early to talk about re-election.
Not every day is a battle for re-election for President Trump.
But if he, let's say he passes, not much.
Can he still win?
The answer pretty clearly is yes.
He can still win.
And so, you know, as long as his base sticks with him, I don't think his base is going to drop away when they don't get policy wins.
I think that people who think that a bunch of people are going to drop away because he's not doing anything, I don't think that's right.
Because what Trump was actually elected to do is exactly what he's doing, yell at people.
Trump was elected to be the avatar of our anger.
And he is doing that, successfully.
And if there are policy failures, we're going to place them where we think the policy experts are.
Trump never purported to be a policy expert.
It's going to fall on McConnell and Ryan.
So I think that's totally deserved.
No, I think the president has a role, and this is the problem with electing someone who you expect their job is only going to be to be angry at things and yell at things.
Do I think that Trump's bottom is going to fall out here?
Is he going to go down into the 20s?
No, he's not.
He's already at rock bottom.
And 35-36% is not a bad place to be.
Now, it'll be interesting to see if he swivels to the left in the aftermath of the Trumpcare failure and tries to get some infrastructure stuff done with Democrats, tries to pass more big government stuff, and tries to bring in a different crowd.
That is one strategy for getting to 50.
He's going to need to get closer to 50% if he wants to win re-election.
Ironically, one of the best things that might have happened to him in this entire cycle is Mike Lee killing this Trumpcare bill.
Because imagine if the Trumpcare bill actually passed, and now Trump owns what comes next in the healthcare system.
Well, Trump, I think Trump knows this by the way, which is why he's not fully fulminating over the failure of Trumpcare.
I think Trump knows it would have been politically poisonous for him to pass something this unpopular and then sign it, and he'd have that hanging around his neck for 2020.
Mike Lee might have just saved Trump's presidency by killing this bill.
Unfortunately, It also, you know, the Republican failure to kill Obamacare also demonstrates what lackeys they are.
So you could easily see a situation in which Trump wins re-election after Democrats win the House in 2018, try to impeach him, and the reaction is so strong that he wins re-election, but you could see Republicans not being able to get anything done.
You know, and maybe all we got out of this was Gorsuch, and we'll find out if that's enough.
Okay, so with all of that said, the Russia fallout It is amazing that the Democrats are really grasping at straws here, because they don't need to.
The overreach is so great from the Trump administration that the Democrats don't need to overreach, but everyone is incompetent at everything.
So, for example, there's a Democratic representative, Mike Quigley.
He makes one of the most bizarre statements I have ever heard about this Russia, Trump-Russia stuff.
Listen to this statement.
I think that there was coordination.
I think you're starting to see public evidence of that coordination.
Not just the meeting with Trump Jr., but others as well.
You know, Roger Stone suggesting that he had a relationship with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
And that he knew that Mr. Podesta was next in the barrel.
But actually the Trump campaign's digital operation?
Look, I don't want to get into specifics in terms of a digital operation or any specifics that are not in the public domain at this point in time.
I think you're seeing a clear pattern of people in the Trump campaign coordinating with Russians.
And I think what we're learning with the Trump Jr.
meeting is when you meet with any Russians, you're meeting with Russian intelligence and therefore President Putin.
Okay, so the idea that if you meet with any Russian ever, you're suddenly meeting with Vladimir Putin is totally insane, and this is why people are responding with ire to all of this.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration's actual defense on Trump-Russia is not very good, right?
I mean, here's Sean Spicer yesterday talking about—this is literally yesterday, okay?
Talking about the Trump Jr.
meeting with the Russians.
Here's what he had to say.
That is quite often for people who are given information during the heat of a campaign to ask what that is.
That's what simply he did.
The President's made it clear through his tweet.
And there was nothing, as far as we know, that would lead anyone to believe that there was anything except for a discussion about adoption of the Majinsky Act.
Okay, there was, first of all, it's called the Magnitsky Act, but there was anything except for adoptions.
How about, like, the entire email exchange that says it's not about adoptions?
How about that?
Like, that might lead you to believe that.
But again, the Democrats are so crazy that they're willing to grasp at any straw here.
And this is what is driving support for Trump.
Again, it's a lot of reaction and not a lot of policy, and so we're going to have to ask ourselves, do we demand from President Trump that he give us policy, or is reactionary stuff enough?
Maybe it is enough, maybe it is enough, but I'm not sure that it's enough for me.
I don't think it should be enough for conservatives because, you know, there's a whole group of people who spend their days reacting against the left.
I am one of those people.
The president's job should be partly to do that, but it should also be to push policy that's actually good.
Okay, time for some things I like, things I hate, and then we'll deconstruct a little bit of culture.
Things that I like.
I just began... Oh, so before I do that, you know, I want to first say thank you to our sponsors over at the U.S.
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Okay, time for some things I like.
So...
There's a book called Dreamland by Sam Quinones.
I heard about this on the commentary podcast.
I've just started.
It is really good.
I think it won the Pulitzer.
It's all about the heroin epidemic, the opioid epidemic that you've heard so much about.
It traces the epidemic, where it came from, why it's affecting small towns in a different way than it's affecting big cities.
Addiction is a very different thing in many cases than, you know, typical like cocaine addiction or other hard drug addiction.
The reason for this is because most opioids are originally prescribed by a doctor, right?
You go into the doctor, you want a painkiller, they give you a hydrocodone, and next thing you know you're looking for an oxycontin, and the next thing you know you can't get that so you're looking at black tar heroin.
This happens a lot.
It happens a lot.
We are a country that feels that pain is something that we should be able to do away with, And so we overprescribe when it comes to opioids.
Pharmaceutical companies have an interest in us overprescribing when it comes to opioids.
And then it is very difficult to get off of them.
I know this because my grandmother back in the 1970s actually experienced opioid addiction.
They put her on a painkiller.
She became addicted to it.
She, thank God, she went through cold turkey withdrawal, which was absolutely brutal.
My dad had to help guide her through it when he was like 13 years old, which is crazy.
But she was able to get off of it.
But opioid The opioid epidemic is one that actually can be dealt with in ways that some of the other epidemics cannot be because sometimes you might be able to stop it at the source in terms of prescriptions.
Forget about heroin dealing and legalization of drugs.
The prescription of drugs is over-prescribed and doctors have to be very careful and you as a patient should be very careful before you start accepting prescription dosages of opioids because they are highly, highly addictive.
Okay, other things that I like.
So, for those who missed it, over at Evergreen State College There was this insane story where a professor named Brett Weinstein refused to not go to work on the, quote, Week Without Whites, or Day Without Whites, and he was forced to flee the college after he refused to participate, right?
Okay, Weinstein is a real leftist, and he spoke in front of the Board of Trustees about what exactly happened to him.
Pretty incredible.
Do you know that the college descended into literal anarchy and that for days the campus was not under the control of the state.
It was under the control of protesters.
That there were assaults, there were batteries, there was pressure not to report crimes to the police.
People were, by the legal definition, I believe, kidnapped and imprisoned.
That included faculty members and administrators.
Others were hunted on the campus.
That lawless bands roamed the campus unimpeded.
Police were physically and intentionally blocked by protesters.
Police were cruelly, systematically, and personally taunted.
They were humiliated and forced to stand down by the president.
Students that held different opinions were, by the protesters' own analysis, stalked, harassed, and doxed, meaning that their names, pictures, and addresses and phone numbers were distributed online.
Do you know that concessions made under intimidation and threat during the protest are now being enacted by the college?
That includes mandatory bias training for all faculty.
This has come about by an agreement between the faculty... I mean, good for this guy, but Weinstein, remember, is a leftist.
Okay, Weinstein is a hardcore leftist, and here he is testifying like a right-winger because the left is so insane.
This is why the hard left is eventually going to drive everybody into Trump's arms.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
Let's do it.
Okay, thing I hate number one, when people who are not cool try to be cool.
So, one of the things that I appreciate about myself, because I'm awesome, is that I don't try to be cool.
Okay, I don't try to be cool because I am not cool.
I am super nerdy.
I am a giant dork.
Okay, the fact is, I know I am not cool, and therefore I do not try to be hip and with it and with the kids because that's stupid, because I think a lot of the things the kids do are stupid.
So, this apparently does not hold true for our congresspeople.
The Speaker of the House yesterday came out and said he loves emojis.
Is he a teenage girl?
No.
Just no.
Have you ever seen the shirt where it shows the evolution of man?
It's got the amoebas and it's got the monkeys and then it goes all the way up to man.
Well, I have a whole thing about the evolution of language that basically we went from grunting at each other to hieroglyphics to short phrases to full language Now we are going back to short phrases through text messages and then back to hieroglyphics through emojis.
I have a deep and abiding hatred for overuse of emojis.
And yet here's Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, talking about why he loves emojis.
We text and we talk.
Every night I call home and we talk.
Because they don't think of me as an emoji guy, I go crazy on emojis.
I mean, I do like seven or eight of these things.
I'll throw those out there.
And my kids and my wife, I am just not the emoji type person, so they think, so that's why I just, I overkill on the emojis.
And the happy stock guitar music is the part that really gets me.
And then it says, happy world emoji day.
No!
No!
Go do your stupid job, you stupid people, and stop it with the stupid emojis.
My goodness.
Okay, and other things that I hate.
Caitlyn Jenner, whose sole qualification for running for the Senate is apparently that Caitlyn Jenner is a dude who thinks that he is a lady and the rest of the world is going to humor him in this sad delusion, says that he should run for Senate in California.
Now listen, if he runs for Senate in California as a Republican, I will vote for him.
You know, he's still a dude, but I'll vote for him because he's not a Democrat.
Fine.
I mean, this state is crazy enough.
I mean, Arnold Schwarzenegger was our freaking governor, and now we have a corpse walking around as our governor.
Jerry Brown, an actual living corpse, is walking around as the governor.
Oh, I don't know where I am.
I've been governor since, like, 1972.
like 1972.
But oh, oh my heart.
Governor of California.
So if Caitlyn Jenner runs for Senate, I don't know, I'll vote for him in a primary, but in a general election, if forced to do so, I will do so.
Here's Caitlyn Jenner saying that he will run for the Senate because why the hell not?
Everyone should.
We got Kid Rock in Michigan and Caitlyn Jenner in California.
Arkham Asylum is now the United States Senate.
Al Franken is an actual senator from Minnesota.
And President Trump is the president.
I don't know what's going on.
Again, we entered the alternative timeline where Biff was able to actually bet on 1955 World Series baseball games.
And now he married Marty's mother.
Okay, here is Caitlyn Jenner.
Caitlin, there's a rumor.
There's a rumor that you want to run for the United States Senate in California.
Did you hear that rumor, John?
I heard it.
No way.
How did it get all the way back to you?
All the way from California to New York.
All the way from California.
I have considered it.
I like the political side of it.
If there's one thing, I work very closely with a group called the American Unity Fund, that their sole purpose, their mission statement is to get the Republican Party to do a better job when it comes to all LGBT issues.
That's kind of my issue.
Obviously, I'm more on the T's portion of the LGBT, and I want people to understand that.
But the political side of it has always been very intriguing to me.
Over the next six months or so, I gotta find out where I can do a better job.
Can I do a better job from the outside, kind of working the perimeter of the political scene, being open to, you know, talk to anybody?
Or are you better off from the inside?
And we are in the process of determining that.
And yeah, but I would look for a senatorial run.
Um, no.
Okay, so just no.
Again, I understand that nobody has to have any qualifications these days, like being able to read a piece of legislation or, you know, have positions, and that fame is a sole qualifier, but this is not a door that I think is great that it's been opened.
All right, whatever.
All right, so.
Let's deconstruct a culture for one second.
Okay, so.
The news of the day is that, according to BuzzFeed reporter Jim DeRogatis, three sets of parents are claiming their daughters have been brainwashed and they're being held against their will in a cult by R&B star Robert R. Kelly.
Three former members of the singer's inner circle back up such accounts, reveal even more disturbing details of actions allegedly perpetrated by the singer, with a litany of sex-related criminal accusations launched against him, including child porn charges.
This is according to Amanda Prestigiacomo over at Daily Wire, they say that young women are reportedly being held by Kelly at properties he owns in Atlanta and Chicago.
The reports allege the girls are initially promised help with their music careers before Kelly lures them into an abusive sexual relationship.
The singer reportedly videotapes their sexual encounters, forces the girls to call him daddy, and wear only baggy attire to hide their figures, permits them to communicate via cell phone with only him, and routinely verbally and physically abuses the females, punishing them for ridiculous infractions such as laughing at male cab drivers' jokes.
So this story made the rounds, but it didn't turn into a front-page story.
Can you imagine if this had been a country star who had done this?
I have a feeling that there would be a lot more ire if it were, like, Toby Keith who had done this.
Because it would actually confirm a lot of the left media bias with regard to right-wing people, right?
That everybody who's actually sexist and brutal to women and keeping them in the back room and using them as sex— The Handmaid's Tale, which is what this sounds like, right?
The Handmaid's Tale wouldn't be—it has to be coming from the right.
But R. Kelly is a rapper.
Now what's hilarious about this is that if you actually listen to a lot of rap songs, which we've done in our Deconstructing the Culture segments before, the idea of treating women as garbage is not particularly rare in rap culture.
It's not a particularly respectful medium toward women and their autonomy.
So I'm not sure that we should be super shocked by anything R. Kelly is doing.
It's also not unique to rap culture, right?
In Hollywood, the casting couch has been a thing forever.
The idea that directors use their sexual leverage over willing starlets in order to get in bed with them and then sometimes abuse them, right?
I mean, that sort of thing has been going on in Hollywood for years.
Two things worth noting here.
One is that left cultures, which is Hollywood and the rap culture, left cultures that Supposedly are all for equality when it comes to their actual activity very often or not and number two The quest for fame in our culture has become so egregious and so negative that people are putting themselves into dangerous situations that they wouldn't otherwise because they want fame.
Okay, fame is not all that it is cracked up to be because the fact is that even once you are famous, what you actually need is a place to be safe and away from the fame.
So, I think that it is sad that we as a culture have decided to value fame over genuine value as a human being.
That is happening everywhere from politics to pop culture, and I don't think it's going to change anytime soon.
Okay, so we will be back tomorrow, and when we do come back, we will have updates on Trumpcare.
Hopefully President Trump will have an alternative plan he wants to pursue, so that I can say nice things about him tomorrow.
That would be great.
I am Ben Shapiro.
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